The best movie scenes of 2021

Next week, The A.V. Club unveils its list of the best movies of 2021. Today, we’re getting a little more granular on this rapidly elapsing, pandemic-shaped year for the cinema by looking at the movies within the movies: those unforgettable moments that served to either fortify the greatness of the films that contained them or offer a silver lining for the less-than-great ones they momentarily improved. These were the best scenes of the year, and they hailed from blockbusters and indies, musicals and action flicks, our absolute favorite films of the year and a few that just made us laugh or wince or cheer for a couple blissful minutes. Note, as always, that there will of course be spoilers—especially towards the end, where we’ve stuck the most climactic scenes chosen by our 11 contributors. And with that caveat out of the way, let’s take a page from one of our selections and ask: So may we start?

The best scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s comedy of California dreaming and hustling is really more of a series of scenes—a screwball collection of mishaps from a single wild day in the life of teenage entrepreneur Gary (Cooper Hoffman) and his older crush/employee, Alana (Alana Haim). The passage begins with an antagonistic encounter, as the two arrive to install a waterbed in the home of legendary Hollywood producer Jon Peters, played by Bradley Cooper in a pricelessly, casually hostile cameo. What follows is a self-made predicament that seesaws back and forth on the edge of danger: Gary and Alana vindictively flood Peters’ house, almost get caught by him on the way out, give him a tense lift down the road, and then destroy his prized, out-of-gas car while he’s fueling up… only to discover that their own vehicle is now bone dry, too, leaving them stranded at the scene of the crime. Taken together, these moments constitute a breathless microcosm of youth, depicting it as a rollercoaster of bad decisions and subsequent scrambles to escape the consequences. Is it unfair to call such an extended stretch of movie one scene? If so, let’s narrow it to the sublimely stressful climax, in which Alana rolls the stalled-out delivery van down and backwards through the Hollywood hills—an even more potent metaphor for the illusion of adolescent invincibility. [A.A. Dowd]

Annette establishes right from its opening number that it’s going to be a different kind of movie musical. Ron and Russell Mael—the brothers best known as the long-running art-pop band Sparks, and the co-writers of this film with director Leos Carax—begin the picture in a recording studio, playing one of their typically catchy and offbeat songs, exploring the pleasures of repetition. Then they leave the room and are joined by Annette’s cast, who walk out of the building and through the streets of Santa Monica, singing the song live. “So May We Start” is part prayer and part explanation, offering to the audience the filmmakers’ hope that we’ll appreciate this overtly theatrical, unapologetically operatic romantic tragedy. It asks humbly for our indulgence, but there’s nothing modest about this performance, so impressively well-choreographed and rousing. [Noel Murray]

For a few minutes at least, The Harder They Fall is pulp perfection. The film opens with a flashback straight out of a Sergio Leone Western, the score swelling behind Idris Elba’s Rufus Buck as he interrupts a frontier family’s humble dinner. Two gold guns are laid on the humble plank table and tears well up in terrified eyes, as an old grudge is settled and a new one is born. Using classic Western iconography—a mysterious loner in a leather duster, a faceless hand with a scorpion tattoo—director Jeymes Samuel brings the emotion of the scene to an operatic crescendo, with a clarity of stylistic purpose that sadly gets lost later on in the film. [Katie Rife]

The French term is amuse-bouche, but the brief front-of-book travelogue that precedes the three main stories of Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch is really more like dessert served first. To introduce the city of Ennui-sur-Blasé, where the New Yorker-ish magazine of the title maintains its offices, a travel writer played by Owen Wilson offers a quick bicycle tour around various disreputable districts; sights include rooftop cat communities and roving bands of drunken altar boys. As complicated comic tableaux alternate with zippy shots affixing the camera to (or parallel with) the writer’s trusty bicycle, the sequence fires off verbal and visual details at an astonishing clip, showcasing intricate beauty one moment and slapstick the next. Though later moments in The French Dispatch carry greater emotional resonance, this one feels like Anderson’s later work recreated in miniature—yet another box within a box for this wonderfully frame-obsessed director. [Jesse Hassenger]

Early in Memoria, a sound is heard. It awakens Jessica (Tilda Swinton) in the middle of the night, and appears to set off car alarms, though subsequent recurrences strongly suggest that it’s resonating solely within Jessica’s skull. (Director Apichatpong Weerasethakul was inspired by his own experience with a phenomenon colorfully known as “exploding head syndrome,” though that term never gets mentioned on screen.) The sound in question—a sort of loud metallic thunk—is quite hard to describe, and Memoria devotes several fascinating minutes to the effort, as Jessica sits down with a sound engineer who attempts to reconstruct what she heard based on her verbal recollection. What follows is a series of increasingly precise tweaks that reflect the process of accurately translating something uniquely personal into a form that others can share. In other words, art. [Mike D’Angelo]

Recently separated, David (Clayne Crawford) and Nikki (Sepideh Moafi) agree to go on a date to try to work on their marriage. Unfortunately, Nikki doesn’t feel comfortable leaving their moody daughter alone to watch her three little brothers, so the night becomes a drive around the block with David and Nikki awkwardly talking about and around their relationship. Filming in extended long takes and alternating close-ups, director Robert Machoian captures the melancholic intimacy between two people who’ve known each other for years— one possibly falling out of love, the other desperately trying to save it. The scene’s centerpiece arrives when David, a washed-up musician, sings a song he wrote for Nikki, sans any music. The tune itself is more than a little corny, but Crawford imbues it with an unbearable vulnerability, a sentiment that extends to the film as a whole. [Vikram Murthi]

It took more than 2o years, but someone finally topped the queasy can’t-look-but-can’t-look-away intensity of the most famous moment from Misery, the one involving Kathy Bates, a sledgehammer, and some very vulnerable ankles. In Ben Wheatley’s instant cult movie In The Earth, it’s Reece Shearsmith as the hobbling psychopath, and he doesn’t swing his trusty axe to prevent his captive (Joel Fry) from escaping; he’s trying to “help,” in his deranged and misguided way, by stopping the spread of an infection. Yet the dramatic/darkly comic thrust of the scene is basically the same: the futile attempt to talk an insane person out of doing something insane for the supposed good of the victim. And Wheatley even compounds our dread with close calls and false starts, prolonging the agony of the moment when blade meets digit. A masterclass of barf bag suspense. [A.A. Dowd]

How do you take one of the most rousing numbers from In The Heights and kick it up a notch? By making it a Busby Berkeley homage, of course. Of all the adaptation choices in bringing Lin-Manuel Miranda’s beloved musical off the stage and into the real Washington Heights, this might be the most inventive. As word spreads that someone in the neighborhood bought a winning $96,000 lottery ticket, the local community begins to gossip, celebrate, and fantasize. And choreographer Christopher Scott uses the massive Highbridge Park public pool as the backdrop for a neighborhood-wide “I Want” song that features 500 extras, dozens of pool floaties, and 90 dancers different styles to represent each characters’ dreams. It’s splashy, literally and figuratively, with Chu’s camera diving in and sometimes underneath the water, emerging to one of the most exhilaratingly original dance moments of the year. [Caroline Siede]

No Time To Die is unlike any James Bond movie that’s come before it, with a surprisingly emotional series-finale sendoff to the Daniel Craig era. Before this version of Bond heads out, though, he has some fun with an all-time classic set piece, wherein 007 rolls into Cuba to rendezvous with CIA operative Paloma (Ana de Armas) and infiltrate a secret SPECTRE party (complete with Blofeld’s eye ceremoniously brought around on a fancy pillow). The two spies meet, flirt, dress up nice, and eventually kill a bunch of bad guys; it’s basic Bond stuff, freshened up with a few updates, like how the chemistry between Bond and Paloma is more mutual delight than purely sexual. All the same, the Cuba sequence falls firmly within the Bond tradition: great location photography, stylized violence, and actors looking absolutely spectacular. [Jesse Hassenger]

While Marvel’s track record in the action department is pretty shaky, the bus fight from Shang-Chi is a masterful exception. What starts as a simple brawl escalates into a Jackie Chan-inspired martial-arts battle, all while the bus itself careens, -style, through the hills of San Francisco. The scene effortlessly mixes innovative action choreography, perfectly timed comedy, and actual character and relationship development, as Awkwafina’s Katy comes to learn that her best friend, Shaun (Simu Liu), is no ordinary valet. It’s one of the last amazing sequences from stunt coordinator , who came up in the Hong Kong film industry as a member of the Jackie Chan Stunt Team and died just a few weeks before the film’s release. [Caroline Siede]

The year’s other great rumble on a bus is a marvel of choreography, too, courtesy of some John Wick veterans. It only looks like pure chaos. Ready to explode from all his pent-up rage, seemingly meek family man Hutch Mansell (an ingeniously cast Bob Odenkirk) decides to take it out on a bunch of drunk Eastern European hooligans who board the vehicle during his commute home. The result is five minutes of jaw-droppingly brutal full-contact fighting that shades, through sheer duration, into a kind of slapstick hilarity—especially when our secretly ass-kicking hero returns to the bus after getting tossed through a closed window and starts the brawl all over again. It’s the neanderthalic Nobody in a nutshell, building its superbly visceral violence around the qualities of its star, the rare middle-aged action hero who actually convinces as a lamb before going full lion. [A.A. Dowd]

Jane Campion’s latest film is a Western of sorts, featuring plenty of guns, but a banjo proves to be the most potent weapon any of its characters wield. At one point, Rose (Kirsten Dunst) sits down at the piano in her new home and starts practicing a simple, sprightly tune; she’s not particularly skilled, repeatedly having to start over… but, then, she’s alone, playing only for herself. That is, until her spiteful brother-in-law, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), wanders through the parlor and upstairs to his room. As she continues plunking away, the same melody emerges from above, played on a banjo; Phil makes a point of improvising complex fillips that underline her own lack of facility, like Mozart improving on the welcome march that Salieri composed in his honor. Here, it’s expressly meant to intimidate, and Phil’s final sharp strum might as well be a knife’s slash. [Mike D’Angelo]

One of the boldest alterations in Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s West Side Story involves one of the least beloved numbers. The 1961 adaptation shifted “Cool” from early in the show to the aftermath of a big fight between the Jets and the Sharks, with the Jets’ new leader urging them to keep their heads. The new version places it back before the rumble, closer to its position in the original stage show, and restores the participation of Riff (Mike Faist). In the process, the number becomes a showdown between Riff and Tony (Ansel Elgort), the latter trying to neutralize the former’s new gun and keep the violence from escalating. Basically, it’s an intense and exhilaratingly choreographed game of keepaway, with Spielberg teasing out both a childish sense of play and an adult sense of genuine danger. In the ’61 movie, the “Cool” is, appropriately, a bit of a cooldown in between bigger moments. In Spielberg’s, the temperature just keeps rising. [Jesse Hassenger]

The protagonist of The Worst Person In The World is anything but. The doubts and fantasies that run through the head of aimless Oslo twentysomething Julie (Renate Reinsve) are touchingly relatable, particularly in a scene midway through the film where director Joachim Trier translates Julie’s secret desires into whimsical choreography. Looking at her boyfriend but thinking about another man, Julie blinks… and everything around her stops. She rushes past neighbors frozen on the apartment stairs and commuters suspended in a single moment of their everyday lives, running towards the man who’s driving her to distraction. Free inside this stolen daydream, the confusing mess that is Julie’s real life becomes a romantic fantasy with the exhilarating emotion of a movie musical. You half expect her to burst into song. [Katie Rife]

It’s one thing to summon the person who prepared your meal in order to bestow a compliment or a criticism. It’s quite another to interrogate the life choices that led him to that particular combination of ingredients. Pig’s remarkably intense centerpiece serves as a welcome reminder that Nicolas Cage can accomplish as much with deliberation and stillness as with the gonzo theatrics for which he’s usually celebrated and/or mocked; indeed, it’s David Knell who goes a little over-the-top (in a good way), with the chef reduced to involuntary nervous tittering as his former boss quietly, compassionately shreds his soul. For viewers who go in with little foreknowledge, this is the moment when it becomes fully apparent that Pig has more on its mind than its goofy-sounding premise suggests—that it’s the story of a deeply damaged man with only a single fuck left to give. [Mike D’Angelo]

Not long after the Twitter thread that inspired Zola went viral, the author’s real-life former friend, Jessica, mounted a pitiful defense on Reddit. In the film, that rebuttal is reworked into a final-act perspective shift narrated by Jessica’s lightly fictionalized onscreen surrogate, Stefani (Riley Keough), who tells her ludicrous version of events, painting herself as a preppy model citizen in a pastel blazer who only “fucks with Jesus.” Zola has great fun with this sojourn into Stefani’s unreliable narration, which skews the world cartoonishly racist and hilariously mean-spirited, as Keough’s character insists that Zola (Taylour Paige) was just jealous after an evening on the pole that only earned her “a single dollar.” @Stefani is Zola in miniature, mining pitch black laughs from experimental style. [Leila Latif]

If there’s a villain in Chaitanya Tamhane’s perceptive drama The Disciple, it’s the very concept of success, and how elusive it can prove even for those who devote their entire life to a calling. In one moment, however, Tamhane does personify the struggles of his main character, long toiling Hindustani singer Sharad (Aditya Modak), in the form of an actual adversary, and he’s the most loathsome of all creatures: a critic! The scene, which unfolds mostly in a pair of crosscut medium shots that creep slowly into close-ups, depicts a supposedly friendly meeting with a music writer (Prasad Vanarse) who ends up dismantling, with casual cruelty, Sharad’s hero worship of some cult figures on which the young man has built an entire system of artistic belief. The power of this loaded exchange lies partially in how Tamhane sequences it as a flashback towards the end of the movie. By this point, there’s no cathartic satisfaction in Sharad’s climactic rebuke; years later, life has thrown plenty of water in his face and on his lofty, difficult-to-achieve dreams. [A.A. Dowd]

For most of its runtime, Tsai Ming-Liang’s Days alternates the solitary existences of two men: aging, ailing Kang (played by Tsai’s longtime muse, Lee Kang-Sheng) and younger Laotian immigrant Non (Anong Houngheuangsy), who we see performing everyday activities like cooking. But the film’s amorphous shape resolves into a shining “X” as two divergent paths are united by one brief, carnal encounter: a 20-minute erotic massage midway through that reveals Non to be a sex worker hired by Lee. Starting with a shot of Lee naked and face down on a hotel room bed, we see a nearly naked Non begin to rub him with oil, before turning him over and gradually bringing things to a climax. Perfectly encapsulating the film’s structural balance between intimacy and distance, age and youth, tension and release—and featuring only a single cut—it’s one of the most sensuous passages of Tsai’s career. [Lawrence Garcia]

Jealousy brews within Alberto as curious Luca and his human friend Julia bond over their interest in learning. To make the point that neither boy belongs in Portorosso, Alberto jumps in the water, transforming into his seemingly menacing sea monster form. Luca’s reaction—pretending to be shocked to divert attention from his own dual identity—pierces Alberto’s tender heart like a dagger. The gravity of such betrayal at this vulnerable age reveals the profound closeness of their fraternal kinship but also that neither is yet mature enough to grapple with their negative emotions. The devastating scene is a reminder that Enrico Casarosa’s luminous Luca is not a small-stakes Pixar affair but one of epic interiority, built on moments that are recognizably foundational in any young person’s life. [Carlos Aguilar]

Violation is a rape-revenge thriller that abstracts the rape, with a brief scene that shows us only what we need to see to understand what’s happening. And so audiences might be lured into a false sense of security, unprepared for how fully the film swings to the other end of the spectrum for the revenge half of its genre equation. Miriam (Madeleine Sims-Fewer) blindfolds a naked and fully erect Dylan (Jesse LaVercombe) on a chair with a promise of an illicit tryst, before exacting her grisly retribution. What follows is as difficult for Miriam to do as it is for us to watch. Sobbing and retching through every methodical step of her plan, she doesn’t commit murder so much as complete evisceration; it’s an unflinching commentary on the entire subgenre, on the impossibility of catharsis and the ignobility of trauma [Leila Latif]

Partway through M. Night Shyamalan’s latest (adapted from the French graphic novel Sandcastle), a pubescent Trent (Alex Wolff) and Kara (Eliza Scanlen), trapped with their respective families on the beach that makes you old, begin to explore each other’s bodies. Their unwitting actions lead to the film’s best set-piece: a gonzo pregnancy-to-birth countdown that works as superb body-horror (think Prometheus’) and as an object lesson in how to realize a high-concept premise with cinema-specific means. Transforming cinematographer Mike Gioulakis’ sleek, sinuous oners into threatening sand clocks, Shyamalan makes every camera movement land with both conceptual and emotional force. This is clearest when Kara’s mother, Chrystal (Abbey Lee), breaks away from her as she’s giving birth and the camera pans away, compressing an entire arc of maternal abandonment into just a few seconds. It’s a thrilling convergence of ambition and execution. [Lawrence Garcia]

It’s far from the most outrageous scene in the movie. All the same, the firehouse party sequence that arrives late into Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or winner might be the moment that best expresses Titane’s complicated tangle of themes. Young bodies in eroticized motion were also featured in Ducournau’s debut, , but here the camera’s gaze locks on the chiseled chests of shirtless firemen moshing to thumping techno. Then Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), who’s been posing as the chief’s son Adrien, is lifted up onto the roof of a fire truck, and begins a seductive dance that seems like muscle memory from her previous life as a murderous car-show model. As the men look on, the movement of Alexia/Adrien’s hips sends the viewer floating down a river of gender, sexuality, and family—an ever-shifting flow of emotions and identities that runs deeper than simple shock value. [Katie Rife]

James Wan’s unhinged supernatural thriller takes a huge turn in its final third after this brain-bending scene, which reveals that the mysterious, super-powered serial killer known as “Gabriel” has more than just a spiritual connection to the movie’s heroine, Madison (Annabelle Wallis). It’s fun to watch the pieces come together for Madison’s friends and family, as they watch old footage from her childhood stint at a mysterious research hospital and learn her biggest secret. It’s even more fun to see Gabriel’s bloody, gnarled face pop out of the back of Madison’s skull, right before he/she starts bludgeoning a group of women in a holding cell. Attentive viewers might figure out Malignant’s big twist before it hits, but no one can be prepared for the awesome sight of Gabriel (performed by the contortionist dancer Marina Mazepa) punching and kicking people to death, backwards. [Noel Murray]

Emi, the embattled Romanian schoolteacher whose leaked sex tape sets Radu Jude’s blithely obscene satire in motion, has been slut-shamed, ostracized, and accused of everything from pedophilia to crypto-Zionism. In the greatest humiliation of all, she’s forced to sit through a fascist PTA meeting that gradually turns into a kangaroo trial ruling on her continued employment. After dragging her (and us) through about 40 minutes of maddening discourse that feels like a nightmare Twitter thread brought to life in a Bucharest courtyard, Jude presents three possible outcomes for the verdict. There’s a righteous acquittal and a disappointing yet expected conviction—and then there’s a realization of fantasy in line with the film’s bawdy sensibility: Emi transforms into Wonder Woman and silences her most reactionary critic by jamming a dildo down his gullet. It’s cathartic to see an opponent of the far-right deciding not to go high when they go low, instead busting through bad taste right into triumph. [Charles Bramesco]

It takes well over two hours for The Last Duel to arrive at its climactic showdown, but director Ridley Scott makes it well worth the wait. After Sir Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) and his former friend Jacques le Gris (Adam Driver) get into an extended dick-swinging match that culminates with the latter raping Carrouges’ wife, Marguerite (Jodie Comer), the court agrees to a duel to the death. The stakes are especially brutal for Marguerite, a beacon of fortitude standing between two boys, who will be burned alive at the stake if Jean loses. Scott focuses all that tension into Jean and Jacques’ gory battle that begins on horseback, proceeds in the mud, and concludes with a violent act of silencing. It’s a remarkably suspenseful scene, especially from a director in the fourth decade of his career. [Vikram Murthi]