#5 The Bus Masscre from Incendies
Just one of many gut-wrenching moments from this drama, a bus full of innocent passengers attempts to escape a war zone...before being stopped by a violent militia. There's so many reasons this scene is tragic, especially within the context of the film, but the scene's power is less about the violence inflicted than the terrifying choices people are forced to make in the face of it.
#4 Meaningless Interrogation from Prisoners
In most movies with vengeful fathers, the dad is the only guy willing to do what the cops won't and eventually saves the day with the power of his love/hate. Prisoners is the rebuttal to that premise. In this scene, Hugh Jackman's Keller Dover is viciously interrogating a mentally chalenged young man, believing he holds the key to his missing daughter's whearabouts. But the audience, already knows better. We know the young man is innocent, and that fact forces the audience to come face to face with the ugliness of their angriest impulses and Dover painfully questions his captive.
#3 Boarding the Ship from Arrival
Speaking of technical prowess in sci-fi films, Amy Adams Dr. Banks and Jeremy Renner's Ian Donnelly's first encounter with the alien spacecraft is a masterwork is disorientation. As they travel to meet the aliens the duo encounters a warped gravity that is contradictory to earth's and start a conversation in a language beyond their own. And it all works because Villeneuve takes the time to show the audience how disorienting this is rather than telling the audience that it's weird.
#2 The Ending from Enemy
In this head turning film, Jake Gyllenhaal plays two roles, one a hotshot actor and the other a mild-mannered professor. Through a series of chance encounters the two have effectively switch lives which seems cemented when the actor dies in a car crash. And just when things seem peaceful, our professor enters his wife's room to find a giant spider hiding in fear. No really it's a gigantic tarrantula that's cowering in the corner. It's an ending that is so viscerally shocking that audiences immediately began combing through the film looking for clues, my favorite theory lies with the character's relationship to women as portrayed by Chris Stuckmann. But that boldness and willingness to subvert audience expectations is exactly what makes Villeneuve's films so interesting.
#1 Border Crossing from Sicario
In this scene, FB Agent Kate Mercer (Emily Blunt) has joined a team of mercenaries and government heavies for a prisoner extraction from Mexico to America. Everything seems to be going smoothly...until traffic comes to a standstill right at the border. A lot of film nuts have heaped praise on this scene including the A.V. Club and the YouTube channel Cinefix, who dedicated an entire 9 minute breakdown (also above) about why this scene works so well. What it all boils down to is tension. The audience has been told over and over again that violence will occur and where it will happen and this is the scene where all of that finally pays off in nerve shredding fashion.
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