Robert Richardson, ASC counts three Oscars®, and four other Academy Award® nominations among his many accolades. His remarkable and highly-influential body of work includes Born on the Fourth of July, JFK and Natural Born Killers with Oliver Stone; Snow Falling on Cedars with Scott Hicks; Casino, The Aviator, Shutter Island and Hugo with Martin Scorsese; and Kill Bill and Inglorious Basterds with Quentin Tarantino.

Richardson reunites with Tarantino for Django Unchained. The film is a mélange of the director’s signature ingredients, including spaghetti western and Blaxploitation elements, stylized and extravagant revenge violence, and snappy, memorable dialog. In the story, a former slave becomes a bounty hunter determined to rescue his wife from a villainous plantation owner. The cast features Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kerry Washington and Samuel L. Jackson.

Down by the Mississippi River, if you take 4x4 trucks deep into the woods on what barely qualifies as a “road,” and then switch to utility terrain vehicles, you reach a deer camp. Next, continuing on foot, there is a large, old tree that happens to have a 35-foot, 1960s-era cabin cruiser wedged 30 feet up in its canopy. This location was dubbed “Boat-in-Tree,” and this was the trek that cast and crew — with equipment — made on a daily basis for director Jeff Nichols’ latest film Mud.

“We found locations that were hard to get to,” admits director of photography Adam Stone, “but when you see them on film, they are just gorgeous. It sets the movie apart.”

When legendary movie star Robert Redford began putting together his latest film, The Company You Keep, the contemporary thriller presented the filmmakers with a raft of technical and aesthetic challenges — including using Vancouver to double for East Coast and Midwest locations, and a story that, while firmly set in the present, has its origins in the counter-culture movements of the 1960s. With a stellar cast that includes Redford himself alongside Julie Christie, Shia LaBeouf, Nick Nolte, Susan Sarandon and Stanley Tucci, it tells the story of a fugitive, former Weather Underground radical (Redford), who is forced to once again go on the run after a young reporter (LaBeouf) exposes his true identity.

The Company You Keep is Redford’s ninth film as a director, and is scheduled for release next year by Sony Pictures Classics. The film was shot by Adriano Goldman, ABC, whose extensive and varied credits include the gritty drama Sin Nombre, the legal drama Conviction, and a lush reworking of the classic Jane Eyre. It was his atmospheric work on Sin Nombre that first got Redford’s attention, after the ’09 Mexican-American thriller made a big splash at the Sundance Film Festival, winning Goldman the cinematography award. “A year later we met in L.A. about The Conspirator, and even though we didn’t end up working together that time, he promised me we would when the right project came along,” Goldman recalls.

Caleb Deschanel, ASC, winner of the 2010 ASC Lifetime Achievement Award, has the luxury of choosing his projects carefully. His most recent feature film, Jack Reacher, appealed to him because it embodied the straightforward, honest values of a classic western.

Tom Cruise stars as a former Army MP trying to get to the bottom of a crime spree in which five people are shot dead by a master sniper. The cast also includes Robert Duvall, Rosamund Pike and Werner Herzog.

“We dance for laughter, we dance for tears. We dance for madness, we dance for fears. We dance for hopes. We dance for screams. We are the dancers. We create the dreams.” These few song lyrics neatly encapsulate the essence of Aayna Ka Bayna — The Dance Film, a feature film from Indian director Samit Kakkad and cinematographer Sanjay Jadhav, presented by Akshara Films Division and produced by Amar Kakkad and Pushpa Kakkad.

Where most Indian films, and particularly those shot in Marathi, one of India’s many dialects, portray traditional Indian forms of dance, Aayna Ka Bayna eschews this convention, substituting instead many contemporary forms of western dance including hip-hop, street jazz, bachata and freestyle.