Maryse Alberti

You say you’ve been having a busy year so far. Please, Maryse Alberti (who’s shot the likes of Velvet Goldmine, The Wrestler, Crumb, and Happiness) laughs at that. She shot three(!!!) movies that are coming out this year. The one coming soonest to a theater near you is also the one you are likely not going to see unless you have a literal gun to your head. That would be M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit, a horror-comedy about killer(?) grandparents. This continues Shyamalan’s continued excellence (it’s just about the only thing he’s continued to be good at) at hiring top-notch DoPs, even if he gives them nothing to do, and that sounds like the case here, considering the trailer suggests that he’s gotten Alberti to shoot a found-footage movie (maybe he chose her for her prolific career shooting documentaries). Much more promising than that is Ryan Coogler’s Creed, whose trailer kicked all kinds of ass. Obviously, the prospect of Michael B. Jordan (who can hopefully put that Fantastic Four nonsense behind him), Tessa Thompson, and an actually invested Sylvester Stallone acting together is the main selling point, but the trailer’s glimpses of Alberti’s work show some wonderful widescreen compositions and a clean, precise style. I would transition from this to Alberti’s third and final 2015 project, Freeheld, by saying that we’ve gone from crap to awesomeness and back to crap, but comparing this, the story of a lesbian couple (Julianne Moore and Ellen Page) fighting to get benefits after one of them is diagnosed with cancer, to a late-period M. Night Shyamalan movie is absurdly, unnecessarily harsh, even if this seems like it was Moore’s Oscar-bait back-up in case Still Alice didn’t walk away with Oscar gold. I guess Alberti will make it look alright.

Stuart Dryburgh

The cinematographer of The Piano, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, An Angel at My Table, and most recently Blackhat, Dryburgh has two projects coming up. Before I announce the first of those projects, I’ll say that he’s also shot Aeon Flux, I Don’t Know How She Does It, and Runaway Bride, so you won’t get too surprised when I say that he’s shooting the sequel to nobody’s favorite movie of 2010, Alice in Wonderland, entitled Alice Through the Looking Glass. If it’s anything like its predecessors, it will mostly be shot against green-screens and it will be fucking awful, so don’t walk into it expecting Dryburgh to really bring much of his own style to it. Actually, it’s better if you don’t walk in at all. He may get to flex his cinematographic muscles during the second of those projects, which is Zhang Yimou’s thriller The Great Wall, which I would have assumed was an epic tale of the Great Wall of China’s construction, but is apparently about a “mystery” around its construction, with Matt Damon and Willem Dafoe in the lead roles. I’m sure it’ll still look better than Alice Through the Looking Glass, though.

Robert Elswit

Robert Elswit’s work was seen on the big screen this year with Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, and last year with the miracle duo of Nightcrawler and Inherent Vice. He only has one movie on the horizon (presumably until Paul Thomas Anderson gives him the call), and it’s Stephen Gaghan (Traffic)’s Gold, a drama about a 1993 mining strike starring Matthew McConaughey. This is Elswit’s second film for Gaghan, after 2005’s Syriana.

Greig Fraser

Greig Fraser is pretty much Annapurna Pictures’ in-house cinematographer at this point, as he’s shot Killing Them Softly, Zero Dark Thirty, and Foxcatcher for them. He only has one movie on the pipeline, but it’s not produced by Annapurna, and it’s a big one. He’ll be shooting Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the first in the line of Star Wars spin-offs and such that will come out in the years to come. Director Gareth Edwards had previously gotten Seamus McGarvey (more on him later) to do great work on Godzilla, so here’s hoping Fraser gets to stretch his muscles on this (the fact that they’re shooting it on Ultra Panavision 70, the ultra-wide 70mm format that they’re using to shoot The Hateful Eight, is encouraging in that regard).

Mihai Malaimare Jr.

The cinematographer of The Master, A Walk Among the Tombstones, and Francis Ford Coppola’s last three films, Malaimare has a busy schedule ahead of him, with no less than five (five!!) movies in varying stages of production. The first is Sleepless Night, a remake of a French film about a police officer who goes undercover at a nightclub to find his missing son. As is required of all films now, Scoot McNairy has a supporting role. He’s also shot a TV movie for FX called Pariah, featuring Regina King, Bill Burr, and Lou Diamond Phillips. Then there’s Nina, the long-delayed/threatened Nina Simone biopic with Zoe Saldana as Simone. Saldana has said in recent interviews that she only took the part after every actress who looked the part better turned it down, which is encouraging, and she hinted at behind-the-scenes drama as the reason that the movie has stayed on the shelf since it was completed in 2012, which is even more encouraging. As far as movies that may actually get released go, he also has November Criminals, a drama about a teenager (presumably played by Ansel Elgort, and presumably supported by Chloe Grace Moretz) investigating a murder, and Home (not to be confused with the DreamWorks film of the same name), a thriller where a former mental patient is sent to a house he believes to be haunted. Unbelievably, Scoot McNairy does not make an appearance in either.

Seamus McGarvey

McGarvey (The Avengers, Atonement, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Godzilla) may be eager to make people forget that he shot Fifty Shades of Grey this year, so he has another movie coming out this year to push it out of people’s minds for something newer. That new project is Joe Wright’s Pan, a Peter Pan origin story which was completely necessary and not a cynical cash-grab by the studio and paycheck job to fund more Keira Knightley movies for the director. Interestingly (or not), for that film, he’s credited as a co-cinematographer with the also-talented John Mathieson (Gladiator, The Man From U.N.C.L.E.), so see if you can spot who shot what when you see the movie for some reason. But the project after that, The Accountant, is all McGarvey’s, baby. Gavin O’Connor (Miracle, Warrior)’s latest, it stars Ben Affleck as the titular accountant who also a penchant for assassinations. It was supposed to be released in January of next year, but was pushed back to October to give Affleck room to write/direct/star in a new Batman movie. Speaking of being pushed back for a Batman movie…

Robert Richardson

He of wonderful hair, three-time Oscar winner Richardson has two films coming up. Given where I’m writing this for , I’m not sure I even need to clarify what the first one is, but just to be safe, it’s Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, which continues Richardson and Tarantino’s ongoing collaboration from Kill Bill on (with the only outlier being Death Proof). It was shot on the aforementioned Ultra Panavision 70 format, with an aspect ratio of 2.75:1. The prospect of Richardson shooting wide arrays of snow was great enough, this isn’t so much icing on the cake as making another cake and putting it on top of the other cake. Also, do you wonder when that “getting pushed back for a Batman movie” thing will come back? It’s coming back now, as Richardson will be shooting another Ben Affleck film getting rearranged in the schedule (it’s been moved to 2017), called Live by Night, which will be directed by Affleck (who will also star) and is based on the Dennis Lehane novel of the same name. This continues Affleck’s uninterrupted streak of hiring great cinematographers (a new one each time) to shoot his movies, with Richardson joining the club which includes Rodrigo Prieto, the aforementioned Robert Elswit, and John Toll. Speaking of John Toll…

John Toll

John Toll’s most recent work has been with the Wachowskis, namely Jupiter Ascending, which has some of the purtiest colors that are likely to make it on screen this year, and their Netflix series Sense8, which you absolutely have the right to shame me for not watching. He switches things up a little (at least until he probably shoots season 2 of Sense8) by working with Ang Lee on his next project, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, a dark comedy about a unit of soldiers who, following an intense battle, are sent on a victory tour to appear at halftime during the Thanksgiving Dallas Cowboys game, only to discover that they have to go back to Iraq afterwards. Sounds epic, right? Well, maybe it’ll sound more epic when I say that it’s being shot at 120 frames per second. I’m not sure what those extra frames will add to the movie, but I imagine that’s going to be one fine-looking football stadium.

Bradford Young

Bradford Young is one of our very finest new cinematographers (I’ve called him the new Gordon Willis in the past, and I shall do so again), and, as it should be, his schedule is packed. While he shot it before he shot the 2014 miracle duo of Selma and A Most Violent Year, Edward Zwick’s Pawn Sacrifice isn’t getting released until this fall, when audiences are in the best mood to enjoy gorgeously-lit footage of Tobey Maguire-as-Bobby Fischer playing chess and yelling about Jews (I bet it’s because a Jewish guy refused to call him Tugboat Maguire). Young also shot an HBO documentary about Nora Ephron (…random) called Everything is Copy that should appear on your televisual screens at one point or another. After that, he’s working with Denis Villeneuve, a man who knows who to hire to make his movies look good, on the sci-fi drama Story of Your Life, which looks at the arrival of aliens from the perspective of a linguist (the ever-wonderful Amy Adams) trying to crack their language. And then it’s back to shooting documentaries, in this case something called American Jazz Musician, which is getting a 2016 release in Sweden, so you know where to look for it.