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.…