“Film is a visual medium” is a claim that, while not entirely correct, certainly has more than enough evidence to back it up. So many films are filled with so many beautiful images that every art gallery on the planet could be filled with individual frames from them. Thanks to the tireless work of cinematographers, art directors, set and costume designers, and whole departments of other dedicated artists, moviegoers have been blessed with decades of beautiful movies. That’s been true since the dawn of cinema and doubly so for the last fifty years of it.
Every year from 1975 forward has featured dozens of films filled with gorgeous visuals. It’s enough that each year could fill out its own top ten list, which makes limiting five decades’ worth of visual splendor to ten entries a downright ugly prospect. Beauty is, after all, in the eye of the beholder, but any beholder would have to admit that these ten films from the last fifty years are all absolutely stunning.
10
‘Raging Bull’ (1980)
Few directors are as adept at shooting violence as Martin Scorsese, and his most beautiful bout of brutality is undoubtedly the gritty boxing biopic Raging Bull. Shot by Michael Chapman, who also served as the director of photography on Taxi Driver, the film is striking from its very first images, where Robert De Niro, as Jake LaMotta, shadow boxes in an empty ring in slow motion. From there, the movie only continues to astound with its stark black and white cinematography, which both encapsulates the era in which the film is set and allows the film to stand out from its contemporaries.
The fight sequences are the film’s visual stand-outs, eschewing realism for operatic savagery that makes the inherent violence of its central sport all the more visceral. The explosive blood-letting is both revolting and beguiling in equal measure, and the film balances those expressionistic sequences with the grainy naturalism of the emotionally punishing domestic scenes between LaMotta and his family members. For a film of such unrelenting human ugliness, it is undeniably beautiful to look at.
9
‘The Last Emperor’ (1987)
“Sweeping” is a term often used to describe the visuals of epic films, and it feels especially fitting for the large-scale Oscar-winning drama The Last Emperor. From the expansive exteriors featuring literally thousands of extras to the luxurious interiors indicative of the immeasurable wealth of the rulers of Imperial China. Historical epics lend themselves to expansive visual landscapes where production designers, costumers and cinematographers can take the brakes off, and Bernardo Bertolucci‘s sumptuous film offers exactly that opportunity.
Coming from director of photography Vittorio Storaro, who knows from giant visual epics such as Apocalypse Now and Reds, the film’s dramatization of the life of the titular Chinese emperor, Puyi, is accentuated by the bold use of color and design. The early years when Puyi held immeasurable power are denoted by warm, vibrant colors and lavish scenery, whereas his later years after abdicating his throne, where he experienced political imprisonment, are shot in muted and cold tones. It’s sharp visual storytelling that rightfully won the film a bevy of Academy Awards.
8
‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ (2023)
Animated films sometimes get short shrift when it comes to discussions of cinematic beauty, and that can be especially true for computer-generated animation. While many will happily admit that a number of animated films are stunning to look at, there tends to be a barrier placed around them that has extended down through everything from their awards recognition to their visual splendor. For CG animation, the foolish criticism seems to be that anything put together on a computer couldn’t possibly be art.
Standing in stark defiance of this notion are breathtaking movies like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, WALL-E, How to Train Your Dragon, and above all, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Expanding on the visual world established in the first film, which emulated a comic book come to life, this multiverse-jumping sequel gives each gorgeously realized world and character its own distinct style. From watercolors of Gwen Stacy’s world to the punk-rock album cover aesthetic of, appropriately, Spider-Punk, the film is a collage of styles and animations that form one big beautiful work of true art.
7
‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ (2009)
Standing shoulder to shoulder with CGI splendor is the handmade craftwork of stop-motion. These painstakingly created films come alive with the passion and patience of the designers and animators behind them, and just about every single one qualifies as visually stunning. Whether it’s the work of studios like Laika (Coraline) or Aardman (Wallace & Gromit) or singular experiments like The Nightmare Before Christmas, these movies transport their audiences into fully realized miniature worlds.
If there’s one stop-motion movie that takes the visual cake, for no other reason than its singular style makes any single frame immediately recognizable, it’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. The film’s use of low-fi elements, such as cotton balls for stacks of smoke, leans into the handmade feel of the animation style while also simultaneously capturing the moods of both Roald Dahl, whose book served as the basis for the film, and idiosyncratic director Wes Anderson. It’s an autumnal joy with orange in every single frame that should make it a yearly viewing experience for everyone.
6
‘The Tale of Princess Kaguya’ (2013)
When it comes to traditional hand-drawn animation, there are simply too many visually sumptuous examples to list. Whether it’s Disney films like The Lion King or other modern masterpieces enhanced with digital technology like Klaus or The Iron Giant, the last fifty years have offered no shortage of wondrous animation. When it comes to abject beauty on the big screen, few studios have as unblemished a track record as Studio Ghibli, and while it’s tempting to recognize classics like Howl’s Moving Castle or Spirited Away, few films are as uniquely styled as The Tale of Princess Kaguya.
While all the studios’ output is known for its traditional techniques utilizing rich colors to bring their whimsical worlds to life, Kaguya employs a different style inspired by sumi-e watercolor paintings with minimalist details to elicit maximum emotion in its retelling of Japanese folklore. The animation was so labor-intensive that the film became the most expensive Japanese production at the time, but the fruits of that labor are all on screen in one of the most luxuriously calming animated films ever made.
5
‘Dune: Part Two’ (2024)
Science fiction has provided an ample canvas for visual storytellers to tell striking narratives across. From Ridley Scott‘s back-to-back beauties Alien and Blade Runner to the latter film’s gorgeous sequel, the last five decades have brought audiences a galaxy’s worth of films with out-of-this-world visuals. The most recent entry into this star-gazing catalog comes in the form of Denis Villeneuve‘s epic second part of his Dune reboot. Reunited with the same technical team that delivered the epic desert visuals of the first installment, the filmmaker delivered a follow-up that is one unbelievable sequence after another.
The wide-open vistas of the planet Arrakis return, with cinematographer Greig Fraser utilizing natural light to sterling effect. Those vistas are coupled with stark visual choices in sequences such as the iconic black-and-white gladiatorial combat that introduces Austin Butler‘s Feyd Rautha, which was accomplished with infrared filters. The bag of tricks utilized by the technical team is seemingly bottomless in bringing Frank Herbert‘s sci-fi epic to life with high-tech fidelity and tangible atmosphere.
4
‘Hero’ (2002)
Color may be the most immediate marker of strong visuals that a viewer’s eyes perceive, and there are few films where color plays as big a role as the martial arts epic Hero. With a narrative split into distinct sections, each with a distinct color scheme, the film is as clean an example there is of color-coded storytelling. Akin to Rashomon, the film relies on an unreliable narrator as Jet Li‘s nameless assassin presents the emperor with his version of events in his battles with other assassins.
A collaboration between director Zhang Yimou and cinematographer Christopher Doyle, both insisted that the colors weren’t meant to symbolize anything and were merely chosen to aesthetically divide the film. Regardless of their intent or the viewer’s interpretations of the colors and their meaning, the visual result is still stunning to watch, making Hero arguably the most beautiful martial arts epic ever made.
3
‘The Tree of Life’ (2011)
Terence Malick‘s expansive and experimental coming-of-age drama The Tree of Life ponders the meaning of life through the microcosm of one man’s memories of his childhood, but also the macrocosm of the entire universe itself, including its creation and humanity’s eventual end. It’s a wildly ambitious narrative matched by its visuals. The human element of the story is lensed by Oscar-winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, whose use of natural light and a variety of film formats helps capture the big moments of small lives. The free-roaming camera, a feature of much of Malick’s work, in addition to a loose narrative structure constructed mostly in the editing room, allows the audience to float phantom-like to observe the characters.
In addition to the human characters, the film also features large-scale effects work depicting cosmic events and the evolution of life on Earth. Many of these effects came courtesy of consultation with legendary visual effects artist Douglas Trumbull, who came out of a self-imposed decades-long retirement from Hollywood to assist Malick in achieving his vision for the film, eschewing many of the more modern visual effects techniques for more tactile options. The resulting effects, coupled with the intimate visuals, make The Tree of Life beautifully intimate and epic in equal turns.
2
‘Barry Lyndon’ (1975)
The adage “every frame a painting” isn’t just the title of an acclaimed YouTube video essay series, but also an apt descriptor for the visuals of Stanley Kubrick‘s oft-overlooked historical drama Barry Lyndon. The film, which catalogs the trials and tribulations of its titular Irish lead as he rises through the ranks of English aristocracy, pioneered a number of technical achievements in regard to its cinematography and composition.
As with all of Kubrick’s films, which each brought about revolutions in filmmaking techniques and technology, Barry Lyndon does so with its visuals. Shot by John Alcott, the film used specially modified lenses that were originally developed for NASA in order to accurately capture the minimalist techniques used to mimic natural lighting, including the use of candlelight as the sole source in some scenes. Scenes were also staged in wide static shots meant to emulate 18th-century paintings, particularly those of William Hogarth. It’s a visual aesthetic that was groundbreaking at the time and has never truly been replicated since.
1
‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’ (2007)
If there is one cinematographer of the last fifty years whose name has become synonymous with stunning visuals, it’s Roger Deakins. Collaborating with filmmakers such as the Coen Brothers, Sam Mendes and Denis Villeneuve on films of unparalleled visuals, like O Brother Where Art Thou?, 1917 and Blade Runner 2049, no other director of photography has a resume that reads quite like Deakins. His unassailable visual masterpiece, however, must be the Andrew Dominik-directed The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
A laconic revisionist Western dramatizing the relationship between the two men of the title, Deakins shot the bleak film with a dulled color palette to better reflect its harsh time and characters. He also implemented the use of specific lenses to give certain scenes and transitions a blurring effect on the edges of the frame to mimic the vignetting of old photographs. All of these techniques and more lend a dream-like quality to what is a lyrical Western. It’s an astonishing visual work that should have rightly earned Deakins his first Academy Award, but the cinematographer had the misfortune of neutralizing his nomination by virtue of competing with his own work in No Country for Old Men.
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