By certain measures, it has never been easier to make a film. Cameras are more accessible than ever: smaller, cheaper, more portable and powerful. Over the past decade the phone—the word we still use for what is now chiefly a conduit of AI slop and misinformation, an instrument for doomscrolls and dopamine hits—has assumed prominence as a tool of feature filmmaking. This development dates more or less to the 2015 launch of Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” campaign, a promotional barrage of user-generated imagery meant to alert consumers to the state-of-the-art technology in their pockets. That same year the American independent filmmaker Sean Baker premiered his comedy caper Tangerine, shot on an iPhone 5s, at Sundance, aligning the emerging category of the cell phone movie with a tradition of scrappy, low-budget ingenuity. Steven Soderbergh, himself synonymous with an earlier era of indie resourcefulness, followed suit, shooting Unsane (2018) on the iPhone 7 Plus and High Flying Bird (2019) on the iPhone 8. Some of today’s most interesting films are shot on such devices, under circumstances that …