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.
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.
