Here is an exercise. Name the cinematographer on five films you love.
Not the director. Not the lead actor. The person who made the decisions about where to put the camera, how to light the scene, what lens to use, how to move through the space.
Most people who follow film seriously can name two or three. The field of people who follow cinematography with the same attention they give directors is a fraction of the field of people who follow directors. And this is a specific failure of film culture - not an inevitable one, but a chosen one.
WHY THE GAP EXISTS
The auteur theory is the structural cause. By locating creative authority in the director, the critical framework that dominated film culture from the 1950s onward made the director's vision the primary object of analysis and the cinematographer's contribution a technical realisation of that vision. The cinematographer frames the shots that the director tells them to frame. The lighting is in service of the director's emotional intent. This is not entirely wrong - the collaboration does involve the director's vision as the primary organising principle. But it systematically undervalues what the cinematographer contributes.
Roger Deakins is the most acclaimed cinematographer currently working, and the degree to which his visual language shapes the films he shoots is visible to anyone who watches No Country for Old Men, Blade Runner 2049, Skyfall, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford back to back. These are films by different directors with different subjects and different tones. They share a visual language that is recognisably Deakins - the specific quality of the light, the relationship between figure and landscape, the use of shadow. The cinematographer is the author of that visual language.
WHAT CINEMATOGRAPHY ANALYSIS ACTUALLY IS
The tools for analysing cinematography are different from the tools for analysing script or performance, and the film criticism establishment has historically been more comfortable with the latter. Analysing a screenplay requires the tools of literary criticism; most critics are trained in literary criticism. Analysing performance requires the vocabulary of acting, which is familiar cultural territory. Analysing cinematography requires the vocabulary of light, lens, and composition - which is technical and visual rather than literary, and which most critics don't have.
What cinematography analysis looks like when it's done properly: identifying the specific quality of the light in a scene (hard or soft? directional or diffuse? motivated by a source within the frame or unmotivated?) and connecting it to the emotional information the scene is carrying. Identifying the lens choice (wide lens distorts space; telephoto compresses it) and connecting it to the film's relationship to space and figure. Identifying the specific camera movement and connecting it to the film's formal argument about how it inhabits its world.
THE PRACTITIONERS DOING IT RIGHT
The cinematography discussion that exists at the level of serious engagement is almost entirely within the practitioner community - cinematographers talking to cinematographers about the decisions they make. The American Society of Cinematographers' magazine, the Master Class series, the specific practitioner conversations on YouTube - Deakins talking to other cinematographers about his process, Conrad Hall's interviews, Emmanuel Lubezki on natural light.
The film criticism that engages seriously with cinematography is the exception rather than the rule. Jonathan Romney's writing for Sight & Sound, some of the more technically-oriented video essayists - these are the places where the craft is being discussed at the level it deserves. The gap between the quality of the practice and the quality of the critical discussion of the practice is larger for cinematography than for almost any other element of filmmaking.
THE SPECIFIC FILMS TO STUDY FOR THE CRAFT
For learning to see what cinematographers are doing: In the Mood for Love (Christopher Doyle) - the most widely cited demonstration of what colour and lens choice do to the emotional register of a scene. Children of Men (Emmanuel Lubezki) - the natural light and the long take as a combined formal argument about the world the film inhabits. The Godfather (Gordon Willis) - the darkness as a character in the frame. Parasite (Hong Kyung-pyo) - the lighting as class argument. Watch these with the sound off and watch them again with the full attention on the light.
This is a specific failure of film culture - not an inevitable one, but a chosen one.