Ida

I will always always always have a thing for great looking movies.

I have my own basis for how good the cinematography of a movie is: if you can choose any random moment in a movie, can you turn that snapshot into a desktop wallpaper? Ida passes this test probably more than any other movie I've seen that was made in 2014. The closest one would be Jonathan Glazer's Under The Skin.

I rank cinematography very highly when making my opinion on how I see a certain movie, maybe more than most. Ida does its job as simply as possible. The camera is perfectly static throughout the movie, never following through movement of the characters or adjusting to keep them in the picture. In fact, there are scenes where their faces are halfway cut out, sometimes left out of the shot altogether. A conscious choice, certainly, but I'm not going to pretend that I know the reasoning behind the director's thinking. The only fact there is how amazingly gorgeous each shot ends up being.

The director is also a master at setting up each shot to be a fulfilling as possible. There are ojects in the foreground, middleground, and the background that help set up the scale and perspective of each character. Very Citizen Kane in that aspect.

If you're into the technical aspect of cinema, here's one that's done its job just about as well as it could: Ida, by Pawel Pawlikowski.