3. The Secret In Their Eyes (2009)
An Argentinian murder mystery that's as disturbing as it is gripping, I saw this one quite by accident and necessity one evening when locked out of my flat. It's tense, terse and brutal throughout, but one scene reduced me to the same state of awestruck glee that overcame me when I first saw the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Having tracked down his man, Esposito attempts to confront him at a football stadium whilst a game's taking place. Beginning with a wide aerial shot of a city at night, the camera slowly zooms in on a stadium before sweeping across the pitch and settling into the heaving crowd. We then follow Esposito and his assistant as the push through the throng in an attempt to find their man. Having spotted him, a frenzied pursuit commences through the corridors of the stadium, culminating in a desperate leap from a window. Though certainly achieved using CGI, this is nonetheless a fine example of cinematic spectacle, as things shift seamlessly from the epic to the intimate. Mainly I admire the scope and the ambition of the scene, but it's also impressive in the amount it manages to capture the scale of the city; the energy and excitement of the football game; the sheer desperation of the chase and the escape all captured in five intensely thrilling minutes. And as it's only the initial zoom that's achieved using computers, it still counts.