Long Take

Last year I watched Victoria (2015), a German crime thriller film which was shot in a single continuous take.

Cinephiles love to nerd out over long takes. There's a famous one at the start of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958). We see someone set a time-bomb to just over three minutes and place it in a car. The camera then loosely tracks the car in real time until, just over three minutes later, the bomb goes off. The scene was referenced in another long take shot from In Bruges (2008).

Two of my favourite long takes:

1. At the start of the short film, Les Bicyclette de Belsize (1968) – also because I love bicycles, and the film makes me feel nostalgic about London.

2. At 25:40 of The Cranes Are Flying, a 1957 Soviet war drama. I'm not even sure if it counts as a long take, because it's not that long (less than a minute) and I've seen some comments saying there's an invisible cut at 26:00 as Veronika is running through the crowd, when the camera is presumably transferred to a crane. But I love the camerawork and choreography of the scene.

While we are on the subject of single-take, I have to mention One Cut of the Dead, a hilarious Japanese indie film from 2017. I believe it's on Shudder, and depending where you live, you may be able to watch it with a free 7-day trial. Highly recommended!

The Lambs Multiply on Balestier

Grassy patch in front of a restaurant in my neighbourhood (Chuan Yang Ji, specialising in lamb).

It appears that the lambs, previously featured on Dangerous Sheep and The Lamb Lies Down on Balestier, have multiplied. Three sheep and three lambs, where previously there were two and one respectively.

Wide-Angle Cinema

The movie which inspired this post is Left-Handed Girl (Shih-Ching Tsou, 2025), which I recently watched on Netflix. It was shot on iPhone (at 0.5x?), and has some gorgeous wide-angle shots:

To make the footage look less iPhone-like and more cinematic (at least, that's my guess), they used diffusion filters – see the glow around the light sources in the still below – and also bumped the saturation in some of the scenes.

In fact, some shots look over-saturated to my eyes, but I can forgive that because I thoroughly enjoyed the movie.

At the opposite extreme is Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018), which is monochromatic – no saturation at all. It's also at the opposite extreme when it comes to format: a 65mm camera whose sensor is over 27 times the area of an iPhone 15 sensor. But like Left-Handed Girl, Roma too has some wonderful wide-angle shots. According to Jon Fauer in Roma and the Look of Large Format, the suite of lenses included a 24mm prime (the full-frame equivalent would be as wide as 14mm).

Some movies have gone even wider, such as Fallen Angels (Wong Kar-wai, 1995). According to this excellent video essay, Wong Kar-wai and his cinematographer Christopher Doyle probably used a Century Tégéa 9.8mm lens with a wide angle attachment that gave it an effective focal length of 6.8mm on 35mm film.

If you know of any other movies with good wide-angle cinematography, please let me know in the comments.