2025 best cinematography nominees

I came into Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu knowing relatively little of the lore behind the story; I’ve read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but had never seen any adaptation of it, not even the 1922 silent film of which this is a remake. It’s about as spot-on a gothic horror film as I’ve seen … maybe ever, really, with sound effects that will curdle your soul and a strong-as-always performance from Nicholas Hoult as the tragic real estate agent Thomas Hutter. (You can stream it free on Peacock or rent it on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Eggers’s screenplay adheres closely to the 1922 story, which changed several substantial elements of the Stoker novel, altering some major plot events and making the story darker and more violent while removing much of the sexual subtext in favor of more physical horror. Hutter is a young, ambitious real estate agent whose wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) has a psychic connection to the monster Nosferatu, who poses as the Romanian Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) and demands that Hutter visit him to sign the contract for Orlok to purchase an estate in Wisburg, where the Hutters live. Thomas has no idea of the grip the vampire has on his wife, other than that she has intensely realistic dreams and a history of sleepwalking and seizures, but he is terrified by Orlok and realizes that he’s some sort of undead or otherwise unnatural creature during his brief stay at the castle. Upon his return home, he finds that bubonic plague is spreading through Wisburg, along with a huge number of rats, but the occultist Prof. Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) sees that this is not a medical disease but a spiritual one and leads the effort to find Orlok and kill him once and for all to save Ellen and the surviving townspeople.

The story is somewhat beside the point in Nosferatu and even in Dracula, as neither even has a real protagonist; the main character is the vampire, and he’s off screen (or page) for large portions of both works. He is everpresent, often working through his acolyte Knock (Simon McBurney) or just spreading fear because we know he’s coming for Ellen and know of the destruction he’ll wreak when he arrives. It’s all atmosphere, amplified by the way Eggers always shows Orlok in shadow, or from the back, so that we very rarely see him clearly until his final scenes in the film, when we see just what a deformed monster he has become; we hear Orlok much more than we see him, with Skarsgård speaking in a slow, guttural, overenunciated accent that sounds like he’s moonlighting (pun intended) from his job as the lead singer for a melodic death metal band from Gothenburg.

Most of the best scenes in the film don’t involve Skarsgård at all, though; he’s scarier when we don’t know when he’s coming or what he’s up to. McBurney is just as horrific, because he is utterly insane; we know what the vampire is doing, but Knock is unpredictable and his violence is all the more shocking for it. (He’s the equivalent to Renfield from Stoker’s novel, but here Knock is Hutter’s boss and appears at first to be a mild-mannered real estate man, more like an accountant or a barrister than the asylum inmate that Renfield is when he first appears in the book.) Rose-Depp’s main function in the movie is to appear terrified, which she does well, as she’s the only character who understands all along what the true nature of the threat is. For most of the film nobody believes her, including her best friend Anna (Emma Corrin, underutilized here), except for Dr. Von Franz, the man everyone else thinks is a crank, further underscoring Ellen’s terror – she knows he’s coming, she knows she is inextricably bound to him, and everyone thinks she’s a hysterical woman.

Nosferatu sounds great, by which I mean it sounds absolutely awful, especially if you watch it with headphones. You may never want to eat again after hearing this movie. I would imagine sales of black pudding plummeted after this film hit theatres. Some of this is obvious – you wouldn’t expect any less from a scene where a vampire feeds on a victim – but even when Hutter is eating dinner at Orlok’s castle, every bite or sip feels like a menace. It’s a crime that this film, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, didn’t get anything for sound; three of the five nominees in that category went to musicals or films about music, which seems to exclude films that rely on other forms of sound, which Nosferatu did more than almost any other movie in 2024.

Hoult is excellent here, as he is in pretty much everything, although even his character isn’t that well-developed, and the acting as a whole is probably the one weak point of the film. Ellen is a damsel in distress who only develops any sort of agency at the very end of the film, so Rose-Depp doesn’t have a lot to do, and spends most of her time on screen looking terrorized (with reason) but not doing much else. Dafoe seems like an obvious choice for a mad scientist, but that works against him here – he is so obviously Willem Dafoe, and is the only actor who doesn’t really do a proper accent for his character, that he isn’t terribly convincing as a character whose main job is to convince everyone, us included, that he isn’t mad. It’s also not a film that depends on the performances to work its dark magic, as Eggers creates such a bleak, foreboding atmosphere, and then layers increasing degrees of shocking violence on top of it, that it works extremely well throughout without getting as much from its actors as it might have. I’ve got one more major 2024 release to see, but this is easily in my top 5 from last year.

Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a vast, sweeping character study rich with detail and allegory, powered by a tremendous (and Oscar-winning) performance by Adrien Brody as the title character, memorable and meticulous scenery, and one of the strongest scores of the year. It’s also far too often a slog, running three and a half hours, with too much inconsistency in the pacing and the level of specificity from scene to scene. (You can rent it now on iTunes, Amazon, etc.)

Brody plays László Tóth, a Bauhaus-trained architect in Hungary before World War II who is sent to the concentration camp in Buchenwald by the Nazis, while his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and his niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) are sent to Dachau. Tóth survives the camp and immigrates the United States, where he works in his cousin Attila’s furniture store, although Attila’s Catholic wife clearly doesn’t approve. Attila lands a major renovation project for Harry Van Buren (Joe Alwyn) as a surprise for his father, the wealthy Carnegie-esque Harrison Van Buren (Guy Pearce), putting Tóth in charge. Tóth’s designs transform the library space, but Van Buren is enraged that his son made these plans without him, firing the contractors and refusing to pay. Attila kicks László out, which leads to him working as a manual laborer and living in a charity workhouse, while his previous use of morphine has devolved into a heroin addiction. Tóth’s design for the library ends up earning so much praise that Van Buren tracks him down and hires him for a major new project … and that’s all before the intermission, before Erszébet and Zsófia make it to the United States, before the stresses of the project and the exacting (and conflicting) standards of the two men begin to clash.

The Brutalist is a biopic of a fictional character, much like 2022’s Tár, that feels so specific that it’s easy to forget that Lázsló Tóth never existed. Brody is as good as ever – and I’d argue he’s always good, even in small roles like in Grand Budapest Hotel or Midnight in Paris – as the complex, tortured genius, who has some of the expected art-over-commerce philosophy, but also carries the weight of the trauma of his time in Buchenwald, his long separation from his wife, and his flight to a culture that is deeply foreign to him and that faces him with both its xenophobia and its antisemitism. Even in some of the film’s least believable scenes, his portrayal never wavers in the least, and he carries huge portions of the overlong script by himself.

The padding in The Brutalist is all around the edges, rather than entire scenes that needed to go (although the first scene of the Tóths in bed after their reunion probably could have been left on the cutting room floor). There’s a brief shot of László and some workers carrying a model of the community center he’s building for Van Buren up a flight of stairs into the mansion, probably lasting ten or fifteen seconds; the scene adds nothing, and there are tiny moments like that throughout the film that add up to make the film feel too long. Corbet, who directed and co-wrote the film, has a pace-of-play problem. It’s like he hired James Murphy as his editor.

Jones is somewhat lost here in a bad haircut and overdone accent, although the real problem is that her character barely exists outside of László’s orbit until her very last scene, when she acquires a force and gravity we haven’t seen before, underscored by the character’s infirmity and Jones’s own petite stature. (She’s nearly a foot shorter than Brody.) The movie isn’t about her, of course, but her absence is a huge shadow cast over the first half of the film, with László grieving the possibility of her death and then finding out she’s alive but can’t emigrate legally to join him, making the incomplete development of her character in the second half more obvious.

That’s generally a problem with the plot as a whole: the first half is itself a whole movie, and the second half isn’t. It’s the shell of a movie, but tries to pack in too much while giving it a similar level of detail, and that makes for irregular pacing and some portions that were just outright boring. There are also two sexual assault scenes, one entirely implied, one on-screen but shot from a distance, and neither is handled well – the first one is just dropped entirely, and the second has absolutely nothing to foreshadow it, making it seem like either a clumsy attempt at metaphor or just a very cheap plot contrivance to set up the denouement. After thinking about it what broader points Corbet and his co-writer Mona Fastvold might have been trying to make, I’m leaning towards the metaphor argument: A huge theme in The Brutalist is how inhospitable Tóth finds the United States, a country that, then and now, has held great hostility towards people from just about any other country, and has a very long and shameful history of antisemitism that still exists today. The assault is an act of degradation and dehumanization, emphasized by his assailant’s taunts during the attack. I don’t think the scene fits in the least in the film, but that’s the best I’ve been able to make sense of it.

The Brutalist is a proper epic, an ambitious film that tries to do more than almost any film I’ve seen in the last few years; the closest parallel I could think of was 2018’s Never Look Away, another long film covering a huge portion of an artist’s life, although even that one doesn’t try to tackle the giant themes Corbet and Fastvold cover here. Brody’s performance is remarkable – and I didn’t even mention how great some of his suits are, which would be useful information for me if I weren’t half his size – and the film looks like it should have cost as much as a Marvel movie. I’m holding it to a higher standard primarily because it’s over 200 minutes long, and if you’re going to ask that of your audience, you need to earn their attention repeatedly. I’m not entirely sure The Brutalist does that; even so, it’s a film to laud in the hopes it inspires more big swings just like it.

The Brutalist earned ten nominations at this year’s Oscars and won three, for Brody as Best Actor, for Lol Crawley for Best Cinematography, and for Daniel Blumberg for Best Original Score, deserving of all three of them. (I’ll note that 1) Tim Grierson pointed out to me that Blumberg was briefly the lead singer & guitarist for a British band called Yuck, and 2) the strongest competitors for those last two awards weren’t nominated, Nickel Boys for Cinematography and Challengers for Original Score.) Pearce is strong as Van Buren and certainly has enough to do that he was worthy of a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but Jones’s character isn’t that well-written and her performance within it is one of the film’s weak points; I would have much preferred to see her Best Supporting Actress nomination go to Julianne Moore for The Room Next Door. I have The Brutalist in my top ten for the year, with probably just one more worthy film to go (I’m Still Here), but I wouldn’t have picked it over Anora for Best Picture.

Nosferatu.

The Brutalist.

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