Linus Sandgren
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Noah Baumbach on “Jay Kelly”
30 years after his debut feature Kicking and Screaming (1995), writer-director Noah Baumbach, having crafted a notable career both in Hollywood and outside of it, has made his softest film yet, and that’s not meant as a pejorative. George Clooney stars as a fading movie star who embarks on a European trip to attend a film festival that’s planning to gift him a career tribute, using the honor as an excuse to spend time with his unsuspecting, backpacking daughter. Jay Kelly is a movie made by a parent in a time of reflection. That it was co-written by actress Emily […]
by Erik Luers on Dec 19, 2025 -
“Our Entire Moon Was Lit by One Single Lamp”: DP Linus Sandgren on First Man
In La La Land, cinematographer Linus Sandgren imbued the love story of two showbiz strivers with the opulent grandeur of the Golden Age Hollywood musical. First Man, which reteams Sandgren and La La Land director Damien Chazelle, presents the opposite challenge — reducing the mythic nature of mankind’s first voyage to the moon to something intimate, personal, and human. To do so, Sandgren eschewed the intricate, elegant long takes of La La Land in favor of an immersive cinéma vérité aesthetic inspired more by Pennebaker, Maysles and Wiseman than the sterile cosmic wonder of Kubrick. With First Man now out in […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Oct 22, 2018 -
Pink Skies and Poetic Artifacts: DP Linus Sandgren on La La Land
Early in La La Land, Emma Stone’s aspiring actress rises from a restaurant conversation about the unpleasantness of contemporary moviegoing and sprints to the Rialto Theatre to take in Rebel Without a Cause with Ryan Gosling’s intractably traditionalist jazz pianist. The burst of exuberance doesn’t last. The Rialto later closes down and as Gosling waxes poetic about jazz’s declining cultural relevance you begin to feel that for La La Land jazz is just a surrogate for the state of film itself. La La Land is an ode to the magic of movies – at a time when going to the movies has […]
by Matt Mulcahey on Jan 18, 2017
