Every movie news site (even the dearly-departed mothership), when it covers a upcoming movie, tends to focus on “Who will be in the movie?” or “Where were the stars spotted?” or something like that, but not the most important question of all; “Who’s shooting the damn movie?”. As always, I must be the one to answer that question, with this handy guide of what our brightest and most talented cinematographers are shooting or will shoot. 

Adam Arkapaw

Adam Arkapaw (DoP of Animal Kingdom and the first seasons of Top of the Lake and True Detective) will not have had a very good 2016, between shooting Justin Kurzel’s Assassin’s Creed (he worked with Kurzel in happier days on Snowtown and Macbeth) and Derek Cianfrance’s The Light Between Oceans. He doesn’t have a project scheduled for next year, but he will be hard at work nonetheless, hopefully on a winner this time. His next film is Casey Affleck’s Light of My Life, Affleck’s second directorial effort, about a man and his daughter trapped in the woods.

Christian Berger

Christian Berger has been one of Michael Haneke’s go-to DoPs since Haneke’s second film, and if he hasn’t ventured too far away from Haneke over the years, the results when he does seem to mark that as a good choice (his last film was Angelina Jolie’s By the Sea, after all). While his name isn’t listed on IMDb as the cinematographer for Haneke’s latest, Happy End, the presence of his regular camera crew in the site credits suggest that he will be shooting it. The film is centered around a bourgeoisie European family with Europe’s migrant crisis as a backdrop, and stars Haneke players Isabelle Huppert and Jean-Louis Trintignant.

Bruno Delbonnel

There’s only been radio silence from Delbonnel (Oscar-nominee for Amelie, Inside Llewyn Davis, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and A Very Long Engagement) since his appearance in the very first part of this series, with his latest work, Tim Burton’s Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (having shot Burton’s Dark Shadows and Big Eyes), coming and going this fall. But now Delbonnel is back, and in a big way. In the last entry, I bemoaned Seamus McGarvey’s packed schedule preventing him from working with his longtime collaborator Joe Wright on Wright’s latest film. Well, Delbonnel has taken McGarvey’s place on Wright’s Darkest Hour, a drama about Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman)’s actions in the early days of World War II, costarring Ben Mendelsohn as King George VI and John Hurt as Neville Chamberlain.

Larry Fong

Larry Fong has become something of a premier DoP for divisive big-budget blockbuster filmmakers. He’s the regular cinematographer for Zack Snyder (tellingly, the one Snyder movie since Dawn of the Dead that Fong didn’t shoot, Man of Steel, looks like garbage for the most part) and worked with J.J. Abrams on Super 8 (and nine episodes of Lost). For his next two films, he’ll hopefully be making some blockbusters that are more widely-loved this time. His latest film is next year’s Kong: Skull Island, which, if nothing else, looks like it takes copious visual cues from Apocalypse Now, and fucking yes please. Also next year, he’ll begin production on Shane Black’s The Predator, in which it will presumably be Christmas on the Predator planet.

Mike Gioulakis and James Laxton

Here we have two cinematographers who have broken out in the last few years. James Laxton burst onto the scene this year with his stunning work on Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (less so with his work on Kevin Smith’s Yoga Hosers, though), while Mike Gioulakis first came to people’s attention with David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (Laxton shot Mitchell’s first film, The Myth of the American Sleepover) and is coming back to attention with M. Night Shyamalan’s Split (I guess if you want a formally-rigorous horror DoP, Gioulakis is your guy). I put them together because their next project seems them joining forces. They worked on Timothy McNeil’s Anything together last year, with Laxton serving as DoP and Gioulakis working as a camera operator. This film, alas, is the one where Matt Bomer plays a transgender woman, so hopefully they team up on something a little less problematic (and I mean that word sincerely here, for once) next time.

Rodrigo Prieto

After winning raves for his work on Martin Scorsese’s Silence (and being universally deemed not the worst thing about Morten Tyldum’s Passengers), Prieto is continuing his collaboration with Scorsese in the future. He’s already shot The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, the pilot of Vinyl, and the short film The Audition (which he and Scorsese also appear in) for him, and now they’ll be working together on another long-gestating Scorsese project, The Irishman, about a mob hitman (Robert De Niro) who may have played a part in the death of Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino). The film is also set to star Bobby Cannavale and Scorsese’s other best buddy, Harvey Keitel (IMDb sez Joe Pesci is in it too, but Pesci does not seem to agree with that). Distressingly, it sounds like De Niro will be CGI’d back into youth during a good portion of the movie, but I’m sure Prieto’s lighting of that possible CGI abomination will be superb.

John Toll

Toll still doesn’t have any film projects lined up (the one I pegged him for earlier, The Predator, has obviously been taken now), but he’s been keeping very busy nonetheless. I previously said that Toll would be shooting season 2 of the Wachowskis’ Netflix series Sense8, and having now watched the show’s Christmas special (the rest of the season premieres in March), I can confirm that. But even better than him shooting it (and making it look gorgeous, as expected) is the special also announcing him as an executive producer on the show! That promotion probably makes up for the indignity of the whole Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk debacle.

Dariusz Wolski

Dariusz Wolski, the regular DoP of Ridley Scott and the man behind the camera on the first four Pirates of the Caribbean movies, has a busy schedule ahead of him. He’s working again with Scott on the Prometheus sequel Alien: Covenant and worked with Animal Kingdom and The Rover‘s David Michod on his made-for-Netflix Stanley McChrystal satire War Machine (featuring Brad Pitt as McChrystal, Tilda Swinton, and Ben Kingsley). But his most recent project is the one I’m most interested in, and it’s Soldado, the Sicario prequel that everybody totally demanded. I do like Wolski’s work, but he’s no Deakins, and the prospect of this existing (even with a script from the original’s writer, Taylor Sheridan) worries me. At the very least, let’s hope it goes better than the last time Deakins didn’t return to a follow-up to one of his recent films.

AD CORNER

This is a new section of this series where I look at commercials shot by big-time cinematographers, work that is often ignored due to the lack of credits in the ads. I’ll start with the aforementioned Bruno Delbonnel, who shot Wes Anderson’s Christmas-themed “Come Together” ad for H&M.

Next, I’ll cover commercials from DoPs whose next projects beyond what I’ve already covered here remain a mystery. First, there’s Matthew Libatique, whose work on James Ponsoldt’s The Circle and Darren Aronofsky’s Mother will be seen this year. But you’ve likely already seen some of his work this year on TV, thanks to the suddenly ubiquitous AT&T ad “Everywhere“.

There’s also Hoyte van Hoytema, who has Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk out this year. That will be a likely Oscar contender, but probably more prestigious is him getting to shoot an ad for the holiday rental company HomeAway, one narrated by none other than Nick Offerman.