It’s not very hard to determine what makes a great cinematic moment. A more than efficient barometer for judging such things is simply if an audible gasp, a bewildered stare, or even a small laugh was unconsciously produced. These moments can be wholly visceral in nature or challenge what we’re seeing and have seen (sometimes even a little bit of both), ranging from technically extravagant escapism to minor gestures that induce an overwhelming emotion or past memory—occasionally with the capacity to be seen on its own, regardless of context. (Then again, where’s the fun in not experiencing the entire film?) From Stray Dogs’s penultimate marathon take to Force Majeure’s avalanche sequence, 2014 saw no shortage of aesthetic pleasures. Here are 10 essential moments that kept our eyes open and thoughts racing more than any other. Wes Greene
Man Cry: Force Majeure
Outside their hotel room, Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) breaks down and tells his wife, Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), that he’s a victim too, “a victim of my own instincts.” The snow avalanche, the film’s most underlining narrative element, has already taken place. But it’s here that the real tragedy materializes, or dematerializes, as the phallic rock that’s supposed to prop up a family is reduced to ashes before the horrifying eyes of the woman, who’s now humiliated and groundless. It was a mirage all along. Diego Costa
Kiss of Death: Godzilla
After Godzilla’s purposely inconsequential first half shifts into a ballsy pop treatise on man’s non-relationship with nature, the real kicker in Gareth Edwards’s film comes in one stunning shot wherein Godzilla breathes a nuclear blast into the mouth of his adversary. Edwards tempts the romantic notion that Godzilla has “saved” humanity with such a beautiful and operatic image, which slyly exposes our inherent self-interest in the process. In reality, Godzilla, like the rest of nature, doesn’t care if the human race even exists or not; he’s simply doing what he’s hardwired to do. Greene
Prison Break: The Grand Budapest Hotel
Wes Anderson has long faced accusations of self-parody. But this scene, along with Moonrise Kingdom’s storm sequence, unequivocally proves that the opposite is the case. In shot after shot (notably, the shadows on the wall showing our heroic quintet of inmates sneaking past the sleeping prison guards), Anderson pushes the limits of his creative expression while never abandoning the strictures of his distinct visual style. Tomas Hachard
Because I Love You: The Guest
The banal violence that keeps America American plays itself out ever so gratuitously when David (Dan Stevens) comes into a diner, asks the waitress, Kristen (Tabatha Shaun), about Anna’s (Maika Monroe) whereabouts, and, when she can’t really say, he “never minds” her with a bullet straight through the heart. At which point Steve B’s “Because I Love You,” a scarcely believable soundtrack cut to be playing at such a diner, is turned up. David is about to leave, but knows better, so he heads back inside and throws two hand grenades on the floor. Because he can. Costa
Ending: The Immigrant
Two characters locked in a relationship both symbiotic and parasitic depart from one another at the end of James Gray’s The Immigrant, but the shot, focusing on a wall bisected by a window and a mirror, optically creates the impression that they’re moving in the same direction. It’s a simple, almost Melies-like cinematic trick, and in a movie less in tune with the complexities of its characters one might call it schematic, but Gray builds to it so organically that it becomes an expressive synecdoche of the entire drama. Carson Lund
Trapped by a Thing Called Love: Only Lovers Left Alive
In a film where cynicism and apathy are continuously being challenged by sentimentalism, the dance shared by a suicidal Adam (Tom Hiddleston) and his wife, Eve (Tilda Swinton), tips the scales firmly toward the latter. Wistfully tender and remarkably sensual, the scene, set to Denise LaSalle’s “Trapped By a Thing Called Love,” is the shining example of both Only Lovers Left Alive’s emotional pull and Adam and Eve’s most perfect union. Hachard
Car Crash: The Rover
Despite its narrative follies and recycled, soft-boiled existentialist dialogue, The Rover benefits from director David Michôd’s keen sense of atmosphere and pace. It kicks off with a Melvillian mood-setter that climaxes with a getaway car toppling over violently outside a window while Guy Pearce’s gruff loner remains oblivious from inside. The moment, captured by a rigidly unfazed camera and only the ambient din of an auto shop on the soundtrack, portends a film of escalating tension held hauntingly in check. Lund
Palace Escape: The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
The princess’s escape from the palace condenses the protagonist’s bursting out of a reality tailor-made for her—out of the fabric of someone else’s desire with the filmmaker’s own disavowal of the literality of a fable for the abstraction of feeling. What’s supposed to be the rolling out of a dreamy red carpet before the princess’s feet is actually felt like a straitjacketing nightmare. If the nightmare is called womanhood in a patriarchal society, this is the moment where Kaguya comes undone. It’s as if implosion were the only way out of the father’s palace. She becomes mere colors shooting up in the sky, unseizable. Costa
Axe Fight: Snowpiercer
Snowpiercer is propulsive cinema at its finest. Interestingly, its most action-packed scene hinges on eerie calm. Curtis (Chris Evans) and his revolutionaries wage war against a legion of axe-wielding henchmen inside a train car. It begins quickly and violently—blunt-force trauma incarnate. Then director Bong Joon-ho charts Curtis’s advancement through slow motion, a shift inspired by a particular blast of arterial spray. Sharp weapons swing through the air and bodies drop, each movement becoming a dance step in perfect harmony with the classical piano score playing on the soundtrack. Fittingly, the bloody sequence ends with Curtis slipping on a dead fish, falling out of step for a second before recovering to kill again. Glenn Heath
The First Seduction: Under the Skin
It’s the death drive writ as a purely visceral piece of impressionistic filmmaking: Alone within a stark black environment, a man attempts to act on the seductions of Scarlett Johansson’s otherworldly predator before being swallowed into the void. As the first in a string of similar seduction sequences, this proves to be most effective in its mystifying withholding of specifics concerning the man’s abrupt and bizarre disappearance. Complemented by Mica Levi’s simultaneously stirring and disturbing score, the aural and visual intoxication of this scene pretty much sums up the experience of watching Jonathan Glazer’s body-horror masterwork. Greene
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