3. Slo-Mo - Dredd
Last year's Dredd was a pleasant surprise in many areas, most of all its technical proficiency, namely its clever use of slow-motion to convey the effects of the film's pervasive drug, itself called Slo-Mo. The drug tricks the brain into thinking that time has slowed down to 1% its normal speed, creating some wildly hallucinogenic, saturated images in slow-motion. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyjfNQ0lJn4 One of the highlights of the film comes when we see various characters being hopped up on the drug before they are hurled from atop an apartment block, giving their brain the sensation of a very long ride to the floor. This is repeated at the climax of the film as the villainous Mama (Lena Headey) is administered some Slow-Mo by Dredd himself, and she is then promptly lobbed out a window. Director Pete Travis captures all of this in a beautiful combination of slow-motion and effects-aided saturation, making for one of the most conceptually provocative uses of slow-motion in recent memory.