Hopefully the 10 stills selected here will plunge you deeper into the endlessly spacious movies they’re taken from.

The movies are still big it’s the screens that got small. Because a few of the movies on this list ( First Cow, Bacurau, The Vast of Night, Vitalina Varela) played at festivals in 2019, I can recall being overwhelmed by some of their moments or compositions if it seems like this list privileges a lot of small-scale scenes, that’s a byproduct of my own in-home viewership as much as specific filmmaking choices (although I am, by nature, a sucker for subtlety). No, this isn’t an attempt to litigate whether Small Axe-or Twin Peaks: The Return, or whatever-should be filed under movies or television, but an acknowledgement that for the first time, I saw a vast majority of new releases-pretty much everything except Tenet-on my television or laptop, and as a result, some brilliant images (and the movies they were attached to) loomed smaller in my mind’s eye than those experienced on the big screen. When I picked the best shots of 2019, I quoted Martin Scorsese’s line that cinema “was a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out.” That wisdom will always apply, but in a pandemic year when it was hard to keep my mind from wandering beyond even the most beautifully composed frames, it wasn’t always clear what “cinema” even was.

Movie best cinematography shots