Dunkirk (d.p. Hoyte van Hoytema) [117 points / 20 votes]
Second place:
Phantom Thread (no d.p. credited) [123 points / 17 votes]
And the winner is...
Blade Runner 2049 (d.p. Roger Deakins) [168 points / 24 votes]
"To absolutely no one’s surprise, Roger Deakins’ work on Blade Runner 2049 provided viewers with the year’s most intricate visual landscape, tapestried with the kind of sumptuous eye candy that renders volume moot. Consistently impressive in Deakins’ work is the way in which he calibrates his substantial flair in service to a vision, his compositions feeling organic to each successive film’s particular aesthetic rather than overpowering it with the distracting pomposity of lesser DPs. Particularly fresh in Blade Runner 2049 is the fun Deakins has in shooting human bodies, accentuating the fragile transience of life, amidst the vastness of futuristic megalopolises (populated or ghosted). Early, interior apartment scenes suggest an intimacy and warmth of color, the grandeur of humanity glimpsed through these small interactions. In contrast is the impersonalism and muted tones of the corporatized concrete jungle outside, a force that on screen seems to only consume and exsanguinate.
"Most impressive throughout, however, is Deakins’ use of light, an ever-strength of his that here surpasses even his achievement in lensing. Playing with 2049’s themes of the past’s impression on the present, Deakins memorably contrasts the neon-tinged sci-fi artificiality of the film’s majority setting with the dust and dusky ruination of its final third. The former often finds Ryan Gosling’s K ambling along crowded streets bathed in a pink and sea blue glow, while the latter largely situates K and Rick inside a distinctly modern high-rise, backdropped by glass windows overlooking an extensive yet desolate cityscape. Deakins likewise visually establishes other core settings with similarly impressive idiosyncrasies; much of Jared Leto’s screentime, here playing the opportunistic technologist and capitalist Niander Wallace, is shot with walls awash in golden waves of rippling light, mirroring the deceptive surface calm of its foregrounded character. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that in a nearly three-hour film riffing on a beloved sci-fi classic and directed by the notably heady Denis Villeneuve, the most profoundly intelligent work on display comes courtesy of Deakins and his uncanny ability to consistently and impossibly improve on his past work." ~ Luke Gorham
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