20 Most Perfect Scenes In Recent Movies
The movies are full of amazing moments, the kind that stay with you forever.
Marion's death in Psycho. The baptism in The Godfather. Gandalf's last stand in Fellowship of the Ring, Maximus' speech in Gladiator. Bullet from the Matrix. Charlie Chaplin's monologue in The Great Dictator, "Tears in rain" from Blade Runner. The chest-burster from Alien. The main battle scenes in Star Wars, Seven Samurai and Saving Private Ryan. The endings to Whiplash, The Usual Suspects and City Lights. That's just naming a few!
There's often much pessimism about the state of the movies today, but that's not really warranted. No, we're still getting awesome cinema every single year and with that, inevitably, come a whole new load of brilliant movie scenes that remind us why we go to the cinema.
These twenty moments, though by no means an exhaustive list, are some of the very best scenes from recent movies. Ranging from gut-bursting gags to heartfelt drama, from knockout action sequences to mesmerizing bits of pure cinema that'd make Stanley Kubrick proud, these will all make you feel grateful to be a film-lover.
Kicking off with a little something from Sam Raimi...
20. Send Help - The Golf Club
What are some of cinema's best match cuts? Well, some great examples are: the match cut in Lawrence of Arabia, the bone turning into a spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey, a falcon turning into a WWII plane in Powell & Pressburger's A Canterbury Tale, the cut from the drain to Marion's dead eye in Psycho, the final cut of Saint Maud and now, it's time to talk about another match cut deserves to be discussed among the GOATs.
This comes from Send Help, the long-awaited return to horror for the great Sam Raimi. This one sees two colleagues who loathe each other stranded on an island - an eccentric, downtrodden and possibly crazy strategist named Linda (Rachel McAdams) and her toxic, repulsive boss Bradley (Dylan O'Brien). As is generally the case in any horror story, things escalate more and more throughout, with it eventually turning out that the island isn't deserted after all and that Linda has actually been preventing them both from leaving, setting the stage for a gnarly showdown.
This eventually ends when Linda kills Bradley with a golf club. And here, the amazing match cut is deployed. The movie jumps from Linda swinging the club into Bradley's head to her playing an actual golf at a celebrity golf tournament. Having capitalized on her survival story, Linda is now a celebrity and is living a life of success. This is visual storytelling at its best, and it's darkly hilarious to boot.