The Brutalist won the 2025 Academy Award for Cinematography, but the five-film field offered strikingly different approaches to image-making. My ranking puts The Brutalist first for the way its deliberate framing and varied film formats support a portrait of ambition and displacement, followed by Nosferatu, Dune: Part Two, Maria, and Emilia Pérez. The Academy’s official results list all five nominees and identify their cinematographers: Lol Crawley, Jarin Blaschke, Greig Fraser, Ed Lachman, and Paul Guilhaume, respectively. See the Academy’s 2025 results.
This is a critical ranking, not a claim that cinematography can be measured on a single scale. I weigh how framing, movement, light, color, texture, and capture format serve each film’s story and performances. Production details below are attributed to ARRI, whose account has a commercial interest in its cameras and rental services; those details illuminate the work but do not determine the order.
1. The Brutalist — Lol Crawley
The winner is also my top choice. ARRI says The Brutalist was shot primarily in VistaVision, with 35 mm and 16 mm also used, and released in 70 mm. The variety of formats gives the production a distinctive material foundation, while the film’s architecture and expanses of space invite compositions that feel measured rather than merely decorative.
ARRI highlights long takes, precise framing, and atmospheric lighting. Together, those choices make the images feel patient and controlled, fitting a story concerned with the costs of building a life and a legacy. The format mix is not a scorecard in itself; what matters is how the camera’s formal restraint complements the film’s scale and its characters’ vulnerability. ARRI’s production account describes the formats and visual approach.
#1 Best Overall
2. Nosferatu — Jarin Blaschke
For atmosphere shaped by light and darkness, Nosferatu is the field’s strongest rival. ARRI reports that it was shot primarily on film with vintage lenses, in 35 mm and a 1.66:1 aspect ratio. Its account emphasizes stark contrast and shadow play—an approach that makes the image itself part of the film’s unease, rather than simply a window onto its setting.
The narrower frame and textured capture suit a gothic story built around concealment and dread. I place it just below The Brutalist because the latter’s formal choices strike me as more varied across the whole work; Nosferatu, however, makes a particularly coherent case for a unified visual mood. These production and style notes are ARRI’s descriptions, not a neutral technical verdict. ARRI’s account of the film provides the details.
Rank #2
3. Dune: Part Two — Greig Fraser
Dune: Part Two builds its visual scale around large-sensor digital capture. ARRI reports that Greig Fraser combined ALEXA 65 and ALEXA Mini LF cameras, using spherical capture with the IMAX version in mind. Fraser explained the choice in an ARRI-published interview excerpt: “We decided to keep the fundamental through-line of large-sensor ALEXA cameras, but to combine ALEXA 65 with ALEXA Mini LF and shoot the whole thing spherical.”
The approach gives the film a consistent visual foundation while allowing a vast fictional world to feel legible on a large screen. Its images are not impressive only because of their scale: the camera’s relationship to landscape and spectacle helps make the world feel inhabited. I rank it third because the other two films above make their visual strategies feel more inseparable from the particular textures and moods of their stories. ARRI’s report and its interview excerpt with Fraser document the camera approach.
Rank #3
4. Maria — Ed Lachman
ARRI describes Maria as a period portrait of Maria Callas shaped by tight framing, soft natural lighting, and a period visual approach. That combination suggests a cinematography built around proximity: the frame can keep attention on a performer’s face and presence, while softer light supports a sense of intimacy rather than spectacle.
That restraint is a meaningful contrast with the more expansive images of Dune: Part Two and the dramatic shadow work of Nosferatu. I place Maria fourth because the available production description establishes its visual direction but offers less detail for comparing its specific camera and lighting decisions with the nominees above it. The description is ARRI’s. Read ARRI’s production account.
5. Emilia Pérez — Paul Guilhaume
Emilia Pérez completes the five-nominee field. The Academy confirms Paul Guilhaume’s nomination, and Dolby indexes a “Making of Emilia Pérez” nominee interview. The listing itself does not establish detailed claims about the film’s framing, lighting, color, or capture format, so there is not a sound basis here for inventing a technical rationale or treating a specific production choice as fact.
Its fifth-place position is therefore the most tentative in this ranking: it reflects the limits of the substantiated comparisons available here, not proof that the film’s cinematography is objectively inferior. The Academy’s results and Dolby’s interview reference can be consulted at the 2025 Academy Awards page and Dolby’s nominee-interview listing.
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What the five approaches show
The nominees span distinct methods rather than one shared ideal: Crawley’s reported mix of film formats and carefully composed long takes; Blaschke’s film capture, vintage lenses, and shadow-centered look; Fraser’s large-sensor digital cameras and spherical capture; Lachman’s close framing and soft natural light; and Guilhaume’s nomination, for which the cited interview listing does not provide comparable production specifics.
ARRI reports that four of the five nominees used ARRI cameras and that three received ARRI Rental services. That is useful context about equipment and service use, but it is a company’s own report and does not establish why any film earned a nomination. ARRI’s account provides those figures. The Academy’s award result and this ranking answer different questions: The Brutalist officially won, while the order above is an editorial judgment about how each film’s images serve its own aims.
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