20 Most Perfect Scenes In Cinema History

In Gregory Hoblit’s superior thriller, Richard Gere is Martin Vail, a smarmy defense lawyer representing Aaron, a shy, stuttering altar boy accused of a bloody murder, only to find himself believing in Aaron’s innocence despite himself. Edward Norton plays the kid, revealed during a psychological assessment to be suffering from dissociative personality disorder: Aaron didn’t kill the man, his violent alter ego ‘Roy’ did.

Unable to change to an insanity defence this late in the trial, Vail takes a desperate gamble and places the angelic Aaron on the stand, counting on the prosecutor treating him as a hostile witness. Aaron crumbles under the pressure, the psychotic Roy emerges in open court, Vail has his mistrial and all is right with the world. Except...

Word of mouth surrounding the unknown Norton’s screen test was so extraordinary that it launched his career before filming even began; legend has it that the casting director was convinced that she had a genuine headcase on her hands.

This final scene, however, is the crown jewel. Originally, it ran to six pages, far too long, but Gere and Norton played with it, improvising to pare it down to the essence, heavy with dawning dread as Vail, smug in his rare moral victory, discovers that he’s lost after all.