50 Greatest Movie Scenes Ever
35. You're Going To Miss That Plane - Before Sunset
Richard Linklater's Before Trilogy stands as the greatest movie trilogy ever made, with each instalment every bit as great as the last. As the scenes run long and are generally very dialogue heavy, however, it's not one that obviously lends itself to isolating certain moments.
Unless that moment is the end of Before Sunset, that is. A relatively simple setup, the closing moments of the first sequel when Céline puts on Nina Simone's Just In Time and dances around her apartment."Baby, you are gonna miss that plane," she tells Jesse, who responds with "I know" and a smile.
After the whole movie has built up to, their staying together marks the great romantic ending to this chapter of the story, and it's superb when reading it as Jesse's decision to stay. It's even better, though, when you realise it's Céline saying it first.
"Baby, you ARE gonna miss that plane."
Neither of them have a choice. They're in this together. Romance prevails, everything is beautiful, and you believe in the enduring power of love again. And it's all thanks to one film scene.
[JH]
34. Final Duel - For A Few Dollars More
Sergio Leone’s impact on cinema is impossible to overstate, but perhaps simple enough to convey. The director, who passed away in 1989 at the age of 60, helmed some of the most revered classics of the 20th Century, including Once Upon a Time in the West, Once Upon a Time in America, and the revered ‘Dollars’ Trilogy, which climaxed in dramatic fashion with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, set during the American Civil War.
However, while The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time are oft considered Leone’s finest efforts, neither feature the director’s best scene. That honour goes to the most overlooked film of the Dollars Trilogy, For a Few Dollars More, which paired Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name with Lee van Cleef’s Man in Black, with Cleef cast against type as the hero of the piece.
On the surface, For a Few Dollars’ climax looks like just another obligatory Spaghetti-Western duel, but to label it as such would be to ignore how perfectly the scene is constructed. Ennio Morricone’s ‘Watch Chimes’ plays overhead, almost hauntingly, as van Cleef’s character stands helpless in the face of the film’s adversary, unarmed, and seconds away from death.
Then Eastwood enters, and the scales shift in Cleef’s favour. What happens next is inevitable, but the way everything comes together in this sequence - from the mystery, to Morricone’s score - makes this particular duel, the genre’s best.
[Ewan Paterson]
33. Diner Nightmare - Mulholland Drive
The diner scene in Mulholland Drive works so well because it's essentially its own short, context-free movie. It's a pretty basic set up: two detectives are eating breakfast, and one of them begins to tell his partner about a nightmare he's been having, which takes place at the diner they're currently in.
He goes into it in detail, how a face he "never wants to see outside of a dream" lurks in the parking lot, how his partner stands at the counter, looking horrified, and how he's got to find out if there is anything out there. At that point the film slips into a dream itself, and the camera starts subtly flowing around, no longer confined by any sense of reality.
The nightmare that was just foretold becomes a reality, and even though you know exactly how it's going to play out, seeing that face in the flesh feels like a punch to the heart. The whole sequence is dripping in dread and anxiety, and it's the slow realisation of "oh, this is happening" that's just as terrifying as the jump-scare payoff.
[JB]