The Best Film Scenes of 2022

In the opening scene of The Fabelmans, Slant’s collective pick for 2022’s best film, Steven Spielberg establishes a dichotomy for understanding the power of cinema as embodied by his two parents. His on-screen proxy’s father (played by Paul Dano) provides a long technical breakdown of how the phenomenon known as persistence of vision creates an illusion in the mind, while his mother (Michelle Williams) offers the emotional reassurance that “movies are like dreams that you’ll never forget.” The year’s best film scenes managed to strike some balance of both elements. Be it by collapsing time, expanding space, holding attention in a single scintillating moment, or simply taking us somewhere we’ve never been before, these sequences wielded the tools of cinema to make themselves unforgettable indeed. Marshall Shaffer

Aftersun, Under Pressure

Aftersun’s climax involves an intense threading of a grown-up Sophie’s (Celia Rowlson-Hall) imagined sighting of her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), in the strobe-light chaos of a nightclub with the end of their Turkish vacation 20 years earlier. Set to the isolated vocals of David Bowie and Queen’s “Under Pressure,” the scene brings to the surface what was kept simmering throughout: the searing pain of loss that’s led Sophie to reflect on the past. Pat Brown

Athena, Opening Oner

Romain Gavras plunges viewers into the immediacy and intimacy of urban warfare in Athena with frequent use of extended takes. None establish the setting quite like the film’s opening as residents of Paris’s beleaguered Athena banlieue take their anger directly to the police officers who besiege their community. In a 10-minute-plus unbroken burst of fury, the choreographed nature of the shot slowly emerges as the camera moves from surveying the sacking of a police station to a group of young men making an escape with weapons back to their neighborhood. It all feels natural until it doesn’t, specifically when the camera begins making gravity-defying leaps through cars on the highway. When the civilians declare victory in their mission by proudly unfurling the French Tricolour, it’s an emphatic capper on a shot by demonstrating just how much effort it takes to reclaim the mantle of patriotic pride. Shaffer

Blonde, The Audition

Early in Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, an unknown Marilyn Monroe (Ana de Armas) goes above and beyond with her richly textured, emotionally wrenching audition for The Asphalt Jungle. But she lands the part because the director (Garret Dillahunt), a stand-in for John Huston, notices that she’s got a knockout body as she walks away from him. The irony-laced sequence is the film’s most effective and biting example of the rampant misogyny that Monroe faced throughout her all-to-brief Hollywood career. Wes Greene

The Fabelmans, Senior Ditch Day Projection

In a film full of clues into Steven Spielberg’s own origin story, none explains his fearful and awesome control of the camera quite like the senior ditch day film that young Sam Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle) projects at senior prom. After dutifully capturing a series of seemingly banal beachside scenes of his classmates, Sam’s directorial eye emerges from the edit. He cowers in embarrassment to start but quickly realizes the immense power of wielding image and montage to turn people into characters, transforming one of his antisemitic bullies (Sam Rechner) into an Adonis and another (Oakes Fegley) into a dolt. After providing decades of oblique clues into his artistic development and process, this display of vulnerability represents the most revelatory and self-reflexive moment Spielberg has ever committed to film. Shaffer

Nope, Gordy’s Home Massacre

With Nope, Jordan Peele uses big-budget filmmaking to provocatively explore the very ethics of showbiz spectacle. In an unnerving flashback scene, the chimpanzee star of the sitcom Gordy’s Home attacks several of its human co-stars during the filming of an episode. A marvel of sustained tension, the nearly wordless sequence is shot from the perspective of child actor Ricky Park (Jacob Kim) as he hides under a table. Throughout, the darkly ironic setting of a sitcom soundstage only enhances the eerie atmosphere of Gordy’s shocking rampage. Greene

Tár, Teaching at Juilliard

Throughout Tár’s runtime, Todd Field and his crew keep things consistently compelling visually and aurally. The film’s pièce de résistance, set during one of Lydia Tár’s (Cate Blanchett) classes at Julliard, deliberately reveals this to be a story about cancel culture. Captured by cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister in a showstopping single take that expertly attunes us to every uncomfortable word and gesture, the scene follows Tár as she condescendingly dresses down a “BIPOC pansexual” student (Zethphan D. Smith-Gneist) who takes issue with the canonization of dead white male composer Johann Sebastian Bach. It’s a confrontation that, when it’s later sliced up into a bite-sized social media video that muddies the nuances and shifts the power dynamics considerably, helps contribute to Tár’s downfall. Keith Uhlich

RRR, Suspenders Dance

Recalling the oneiric and elaborately choreographed dance numbers of classic Hollywood musicals, the wild suspenders bit from S.S. Rajamouli’s RRR is a remarkable piece of craftsmanship. And in how the exuberant dancing routine breaks up a stodgy British ball, the sequence is also memorable for its subversiveness in addressing colonialism. Greene

Saint Omer, The Chimera of Motherhood

The unspoken jury of any cinematic courtroom drama is the audience, deliberating alongside the characters as new evidence emerges. Alice Diop makes that explicit in Saint Omer’s culminating speech by the defense attorney (Aurélia Petit), delivered as a solemn direct address to the camera. As Maître Vaudenay invokes the chimera of motherhood, a dimension both biological and mythological, each successive line of her closing statement grows more incandescent with power. Though her final remark “we are all monsters, but we are terrible human monsters” feels like a mic drop, Diop smartly does not leave us there. Instead, she cuts to the accused, Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), as she weeps tears of recognition and release into her lawyer’s arm. Perhaps we are not the jury but the defendant after all. Shaffer

Top Gun: Maverick, Hangman’s Rescue

While Top Gun: Maverick introduces us to an entire ensemble of new cadets attending the elite fight training school from which Maverick (Tom Cruise) graduated, the film winnows down the action to him and Rooster (Miles Teller). Each of their presence hints at an absence—that of Maverick’s former partner and Rooster’s late father, Goose, who died in Top Gun—and becomes a way of negotiating the grief and guilt they suppress in the line of duty. Their fierce rivalry gives way to partnership that feels quite unexpected, especially for the independently minded Maverick. The twinning of their fates in the film’s conclusion appears headed toward a reprise of the original Top Gun until the re-emergence of the rebellious Hangman (Glen Powell) to save the day after seemingly sitting the climax on the sidelines. The maverick streak lives on after all, just not embodied by the person the film primes us to expect it from. Shaffer

Triangle of Sadness, The Captain’s Dinner

Throughout Triangle of Sadness, Ruben Östlund often voices class critique in blunt, obvious terms, but his approach works wonders when it embraces lowbrow humor. To wit, the brazen, downright Buñuelian sequence where the guests aboard an exclusive yacht sit down for a multi-course meal, throughout which Östlund proceeds to take the piss out of them. The scene’s knowingly shaky camera simulates the feeling of the ship navigating choppy waters as the guests become violently ill and vomit all over the vessel’s luxe interiors. Greene