2025 in Film – Below The Line

by Chris Stewart 12.2025

Here, to shine a small light on just a few, are some noteworthy craftspeople behind the movies of 2025:

Cinematography

Linus Sandgren's sparklingly sentimental work has made him the go-to for directors telling romantic stories. His Oscar winning La La Land remains his calling card, showing a facility for both natural light and exquisite artifice. This year he was Noah Baumbach's choice to capture George Clooney in the wistful, bittersweet Hollywood of Jay Kelly. Next up? Emerald Fennel's Wuthering Heights and taking over for DP Greg Fraser on Dune: Messiah. 

Brandon Trost, a younger DP, has done plenty of comedy before The Naked Gun (Seth Rogen vehicles in particular) but also shot Mariel Heller's Can You Ever Forgive Me and Rob Zombie's The Lords of Salem. 

Brit Barry Ackroyd shot Kathryn Bigelow's A House of Dynamite, bringing both his dramatic (he's a Ken Loach regular) and thriller realism (he shot Paul Greengrass's United 93, Green Zone, and was nominated for Bigelow's The Hurt Locker). Autumn Durald came out of music videos and stand-up specials. She's worked on several Ryan Coogler projects, and likely to receive her first Oscar nod for Sinners.

Costume Design

Colleen Atwood is a living legend, one of the most awarded in her field. If you need the absolute best in costume design (this side of Sandy Powell), she's who you get. Best known for her decades-long collaborations with Tim Burton, and the creation of several of his signature styles, she's also worked with Rob Marshall, Michael Mann, and others. This year her costuming can be seen in One Battle After Another and Marshall's new take on Kiss of the Spider Woman. 

For Sinners, Ryan Coogler worked again with Ruth E. Carter, who won an Oscar for her costuming of Black Panther – the first time for a Black woman – and has worked on Spike Lee titles from Do The Right Thing onward, as well as classics like Love & Basketball and Joss Whedon's Serenity.

Score

Longtime Spike Lee collaborator Terrence Blanchard's work on Highest 2 Lowest caused quite a stir this year. Blanchard's signature swooning, Gershwin-esque horns and swelling, jazzy, emotional motifs bolster the high-stakes story. Some viewers found it overwhelming and wildly overstated. For others, it's the right fit for the story, whose issues may lie elsewhere. Daniel Pemberton's score, on the other hand, is the least divisive thing about Celine Song's Materialists, a funky, forest-y thing with arpeggiating marimbas, flutes, and mood to spare.

Nala Sinephro's The Smashing Machine score has dabs of Philip Glass, touches of Bernard Herman. It's a dreamy, half-druggy, somatic take on a movie all about where the body meets the world around it.

Max Richter – whose enormously-moving “On The Nature of Daylight” has been used and re-used (most notably in Arrival), scored Chloe Zhao's Hamnet. Appropriate considering the unabashed spiritual emotion that the movie seeks to achieve.

As the film year concludes, let's celebrate the many talented people who brought light, color, and poetry to the screen this year.