Roger Deakins - vo.rs

Denis Villeneuve: The Widescreen Unease

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Denis Villeneuve makes enormous films that feel like someone holding their breath. This is the paradox at the centre of his work, and it is why he ended up with the keys to Blade Runner and Dune while flashier directors were left arguing on Twitter. He takes the largest canvas the industry can print — 65mm, IMAX, budgets with a lot of zeroes — and uses it to render a very small, very human sensation: the moment before the bad thing, stretched until the room goes quiet. Nobody working at his scale is as comfortable with silence, and nobody makes silence feel as much like a threat.

No Country for Old Men: The Coens Kill the Thriller's Comforts

Thu, 01 May 2025 11:00:00 +0000

A man out hunting antelope in the West Texas scrub finds the aftermath of a drug deal — corpses, trucks, a case holding two million dollars. He takes the money. He knows better; he takes it anyway. That is the setup of No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers’ 2007 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, and it is the setup of a thousand thrillers before it. What the Coens do with it is systematically remove every comfort the genre exists to provide, until the chase film is left standing in the desert with nothing to hold on to. The picture won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, which is a small miracle given how deliberately it refuses to satisfy.

Prisoners: Villeneuve's Faith, Torture, and the Maze

Tue, 18 Mar 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Two families share Thanksgiving dinner in a grey Pennsylvania town. The two youngest daughters go outside to play and do not come back. Within twenty minutes Prisoners has activated the single most reliable panic button in cinema — a child gone, a parent helpless — and then it does the thing that separates it from the disposable abduction thrillers it superficially resembles: it refuses to let the panic burn off. Denis Villeneuve’s 2013 English-language debut runs two and a half hours and spends every one of them tightening. It is the most sustained piece of dread a major studio released that decade, and it is also a genuinely serious film about what fear licenses a decent person to do.

Blade Runner 2049: The Sequel That Earned Its Silence

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 10:00:00 +0000

A sequel to Blade Runner was, for thirty-five years, the sort of idea that made cinephiles wince before it made them curious. The original had already fractured into seven arguable versions; its whole authority came from restraint, mood and a question it refused to answer. The obvious way to make more money from it was to explain it, expand it, and stuff it with action. That Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 Blade Runner 2049 did almost the opposite is the first small miracle. That it did so while running nearly three hours, opening slow and staying slow, is the second.