Chris Lee

An erotic underwater love scene, the cheap but colorful motels of the displaced, a tennis match with more than a trophy at stake: Three cinematographers explain how they got their shots, and why they mattered.

In the Martin Scorsese-produced shoot ’em up “Free Fire,” South African actor Sharlto Copley plays Vern, a narcissistic gunrunner in a polyester suit who’s prone to a certain behavioral grandiloquence.

The opening set piece in Paramount’s “Ghost in the Shell” should be soothingly familiar to those who love Masamune Shirow’s groundbreaking manga comic book on which the live-action 3-D movie adaptation was based — at least, insofar as any on-screen shoot ’em up can reasonably evoke fan nostalgia.

Veteran movie producers Jennifer Todd and Michael De Luca landed the job producing next week’s Oscars telecast by pitching the academy a novel concept: They wanted to bring “an overarching tone of joy.”

Amid the clatter and bustle of an oceanside Santa Monica restaurant, Michael Keaton shrugs, describing his decision to star in “The Founder” as “really pretty simple.”

More than three decades into one of Hollywood’s most blue-chip movie careers, two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks has entrenched himself in the public imagination as a baby-boomer version of Jimmy Stewart: an über-American avatar of unimpeachable decency and everyman triumphalism with a shelf full of acting awards and a real-life Presidential Medal of Freedom to prove it.

Once upon a time in Hollywood, the big-screen adaptation of a cherished novel was moviedom’s fair-haired boy.

In the opening sequence of the indie bullying drama “Goat,” Nick Jonas obliterates any vestige of his Disneyfied boy-band past by demonstrating a voracious hunger for drugs, alcohol and freaky sex.

It arrives as a singularly Scandinavian cinematic offering that until last year had somehow never materialized on theater screens: the fiord disaster movie.

The film academy’s actors branch may be loath to admit it, but landing an Oscar nod is a fairly precise science.