Best of 2013: Cinematography

The last of the technical categories! Only four more categories to go until we can put this year behind us.

Best Cinematography

• Emanuel Lubezki for Gravity, for taking this technology to bolder and more excitingly resourceful places than his effects-driven predecessors in the Oscar-equivalent category ever have, finding a rich distillation of light, space, lensing and action-specific mobility all within its green-screen confines.

• Bruno Delbonnel for Inside Llewyn Davis, for devising a frigid yet crystalline palette that serves key themes, settings and moods while demonstrating a remarkable sensitivity to faces and silhouettes, and for bouncing so deceptively off of the Coens' visual conceptions.

• Bradford Young for Mother of George, because beyond the fact that he's one of the few DPs working who can favorably light darker-complected actors, he's also tremendously adept at enriching emotions, tones and dramatic textures, finding vivid and engrossing observational angles to set the scene with.

• Benoit Debie for Spring Breakers, for integrating a hypnotic gallery of mobile lensing and neon, sun-kissed and sterile sources of light to relay a mystical yet deftly investigative glance into the spring break ethos, if only for its first 40-50 minutes alone.

• Emanuel Lubezki for To the Wonder, for sustaining Malick's familiar kinship with capturing crunchy, gold-leafed landscapes and ecstatic angles of natural light and allowing both to serve as a microcosm for the film's living and dying relationship at its core.

Honorable Mentions were tough to boil down in such a strong year, but I hated having to exclude the fabulous streetlight gleam of Bastards; the dreamy excess of The Bling Ring; the unflinching detail of 12 Years a Slave's camera; even more gliding beatification from Bradford Young with Ain't Them Bodies Saints; and the awe-inspiring mechanics behind

Leviathan's almost-literally-down-in-the-gears visual sculpting. These five would have made a worthy lineup all on their own, so consider them my extreme honorable mentions.

From a cinemtography perspective, I also liked (in alphabetical order): All is Lost, The Grandmaster, Her, Only God Forgives, Post Tenebras Lux, Prisoners, and The Selfish Giant. And no, I was not impressed by Nebraska's cinematography.