The radio show – Killers of the Flower Moon
Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is frequently enthralling over the course of its three-and-a-half-hour runtime, sinking into the depths of American shame as it follows William Hale (Robert De Niro) and his unofficial lieutenant Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) as they grasp for the money and land controlled by the Osage tribe in 1920s Oklahoma, which involves slowly poisoning Ernest’s wife Mollie (Lily Gladstone) as they kill off members of her family and community. But just when it seems like the story’s final dominoes are tumbling over with inevitability, Scorsese jumps ahead for his final scene – maybe the most audacious in American movies this year. Rather than a series of solemn title cards explaining what happened to the people whose lives we’ve seen dramatized, the movie cuts to a true-crime radio show in the 1940s, with major figures from the film reduced to cartoonish voiceovers and sound effects. And then, to detail Mollie’s post-narrative life, Scorsese himself appears. It’s not a Hitchcockian wink of a cameo, but a show of respect, as he steps from behind the camera to essentially read Mollie’s obituary; the mood changes from playful to stark in an instant. Seeing this master film-maker visibly grapple with the limits of artistic expression took my breath away. Jesse Hassenger
The sexual assault – Fair Play
There are several tense, memorable moments in Fair Play, the Sundance breakout unfairly dumped on Netflix this fall – in the office of a ruthless hedge fund, where Emily and Luke, the lovers played by Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich, hide their forbidden relationship. In their apartment kitchen, where the couple’s unevenness – Emily gets a fat promotion, Luke doesn’t – curdles into increasingly sharp digs. And in the bathroom, where we first meet the couple in a pre-doom moment of carnal bliss: having ducked out of a family wedding for a quickie, Emily and Luke end up happily smeared in period blood, a ring on her finger. One male fragility-fueled implosion later, the two have once again escaped to a bathroom, this time at their engagement party. Ehrenreich and Dynevor are firing on all cylinders here, both brimming with a toxic soup of emotions: shame, love, desperation, fury, lust tinged with an overpowering flavor of disgust. What starts out as a consensual last contemptuous, rough fuck turns into something sinister, violent, final. I have thought about the moment when Luke’s good guy mask falls, when Emily realizes her position and endures, all year. Adrian Horton
The pigeon – Showing Up
Lizzy (Michelle Williams) doesn’t want a pet pigeon, particularly not an injured one palmed off on her by landlord and fellow artist Jo (Hong Chau). Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up is about the strained power imbalance between these friends and sometime creative rivals, who have very different approaches to life and art. Even though she’s swamped in the run-up to an important show, Lizzy will take care of the bird with a broken wing when it is presented to her in a bucket hat, just like she takes care of her needy family with little protest beyond shallow breaths and flushed cheeks. I’ll never forget the knot in my stomach when Jo turns up to Lizzy’s private view of delicate ceramics with “this guy!” – the bird – which, duh, doesn’t stay put in its cardboard box for long. As the pigeon takes flight, Lizzy watches in dismay as her porcelain figures come within a wingspan of going the way of Linda Barker’s teapots. In Reichardt’s subtly observed film, it’s the closest the director comes to cracking the lid of the pressure cooker. Owen Myers
The town meeting – RMN
It might seem a bit like cheating to designate a 17-minute scene as a “moment”, not to mention a stretch to add “of the year” in referring to a proceeding so dry that most municipalities stick it on daytime public-access. But by capturing a contentious town meeting with a single static shot, the director Cristian Mungiu announces this bureaucratic showstopper as a discrete cinematic unit oriented around a cogent idea. He’s described the shout-a-thon, packed with disgruntled residents of a Romanian village airing their xenophobic objections to the arrival of a few migrant workers, as a Tower of Babel in which what’s being said (in several different languages) counts for less than the fact of everyone’s inability to communicate. Even so, the dialogue nails the tenor and thought patterns of the type of aggrieved citizen that shows up for this kind of thing: the rigidity, the rage, the easy distraction, the palpable undercurrent of trembling fear. While a handful of this year’s noteworthy festival debuts addressed Europe’s immigration quagmire – Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border, Ladj Ly’s Les Indésirables, Matteo Garrone’s Io Capitano – Mungiu condenses his broadside against intolerance into a tidy package of paradoxically gripping tedium. It plays like a soulless de-parodizing of Parks and Recreation. Charles Bramesco
The reunion – Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
The Spider-Verse sequel is so bursting with spectacular sequences that splash across the screen, we barely have the time to process the awesomeness of one before we’re barraged by another. That’s partially why the moment that really stuck from Across the Spider-Verse is when time seems to stand still. Spider-Man (the Miles Morales one) and Spider-Gwen enjoy a fleeting romantic reunion at the Williamsburg Savings Bank. A giant clock is just below them (or above depending on your perspective) as they take a seat, upside down, hanging from a ledge, drinking in the water-coloured Manhattan skyline from a flipped perspective. It’s a stunning shot, towering above most at the cinema this year. I couldn’t help but savour the sexiness of it on first viewing, because this is a genre that tends to keep hormones zipped up. On return visits, the melancholy really hits. Here are two teen superheroes who have to tuck in their identities, isolated from their families and everyone around them. That image becomes one of yearning and loneliness in a crowded city, where New York with all its bustling activity, appears on a whole other axis, as distant as the other side of the spider-verse. Radheyan Simonpillai
The fart – Dream Scenario
When searching for a best movie moment of 2023, I wanted to choose something profound, a scene that spoke to the unending stream of horrors we stared down in 2023. But after racking my brain, all I could think of was a fart joke. In Dream Scenario, Nicolas Cage plays Paul Matthews, a hapless, mild-mannered college academic and family man who becomes an overnight sensation after nearly everyone in the world starts seeing him in their dreams. A hip influencer agency wants to take Paul as a client; when he meets the team, Molly, a gen Z assistant reveals she’s been having sex fantasies about the professor. After some drinking and bad decision-making, Paul winds up in her apartment, playing out the dream. None of us want to see this – Paul is happily married to Janet, his adorable suburban mom wife. But he’s high on power, awkwardly kissing a much younger woman who is less than impressed with the real-life tryst. It’s a #MeToo nightmare unfolding. Just when Molly goes to unzip his pants, Paul accidentally breaks our unbearable tension with a tremendous, stock-soundtrack fart … and then another. Juvenile humor? Absolutely. But fitting, perhaps, for such a shit year. Alaina Demopoulos
The pool – Origin
There are moments in Ava DuVernay’s unusual, academic adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s bestseller Caste when it’s easier to admire the ambition rather than love the execution. But there are also moments when her leftfield decision to transform a non-fiction study into a narrative movie feels like the only way to convey the power of Wilkerson’s argument, most effectively in a gut-punch of scene near the end. As Wilkerson, played by a commanding Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, interviews an older man about a racist act of exclusion involving the one Black kid on his little league baseball team being denied entrance to a swimming pool, DuVernay takes us back and recreates the incident in all of its horror and heartache. It brings up all of the anger and sadness that such dehumanising bigotry should, with such force that it leaves us a little winded, and the piercing image of a terrified child being ferried around an empty pool on a lilo, after being told he can’t touch the water, will haunt me for a while. Benjamin Lee
The bar – Past Lives
In the third act of Past Lives, the playwright and debut director Celine Song finally brings us back to the sophisticated, emotionally precise movie’s jumping off point, in which the South Korean protagonist, Na Young, her girlhood romance and her current American boyfriend are all sitting at a bar together feeling their way through a complicated encounter. The moment is pregnant with what hasn’t been said, which Song has magisterially suggested over the past 70 minutes. It’s right here, in a sequence that feels like a 21st-century version of some love-drenched French New Wave archetype, where this expertly observed film about everything that’s hard to articulate about love reaches transcendence, giving us much more than what most movies are capable of. It’s scenes like this that mark Song’s sky-high potential. Veronica Esposito
The diner – All of Us Strangers
I just gave up trying not to cry in the final 30-odd minutes of All of Us Strangers, Andrew Haigh’s astonishing ghost story. One devastating scene follows another, meaning you finally stagger out in a state of almost transcendental upset. But perhaps the moment that sticks with me the most – and, like The Zone of Interest, this is a film your brain won’t stop poring over – is the one in which Andrew Scott’s parents take him to a diner for a treat. Of course, it’s not quite what it seems: that American-style caff might have once existed at the top of the Whitgift centre in Croydon but it doesn’t now (I’ve checked). And, perhaps more crucially, his parents are dead, though miraculously still somehow as alive to him as they were on the day of their fateful car crash in 1987. All three know that their strange reunion, this peculiar grace from grief, is coming to an end. The mother (Claire Foy) wants to know if their deaths were quick. Her son lies: they were. And then the eyes of Foy and Jamie Bell, who plays Scott’s dad, slowly change: they blacken, and their bodies stiffen. They have gone, and Scott is just sitting in a diner by himself, a single man approaching 50, as a waitress brings him a family platter. Anyone who’s seen that astonishing ocular shift when someone dies will recognise it here, but I think that moment would destroy you anyway. I’m tearing up just thinking about it. Catherine Shoard
The confrontation – You Hurt My Feelings
Nicole Holofcener’s achingly real comedy turns on a happy marriage thrown into turmoil when Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), an author multiple drafts into her first novel, overhears her husband (Tobias Menzies) expressing his misgivings about the book to a friend. He felt it was his role to be supportive, so he’d been cheering every revision. You Hurt My Feelings makes the complicated argument that candor is sometimes the best way to show support, a point that’s reinforced in a terrific scene in which Beth’s son (Owen Teague), a flailing barista of sorts at a cannabis dispensary, blasts her for it. Her recalls a time when she enrolled him in an advanced swim class when he could barely dog paddle, because she wanted the best for him. And now, as an adult, she presses him constantly for what will surely be his brilliant debut as a playwright. It’s a lesson to parents everywhere: sometimes your encouragement can feel like an albatross. Scott Tobias
The meeting – Father’s Day
No documentary misted the eyes quite like Kirk Franklin’s Father’s Day. In a crisp half-hour, the gospel superstar takes the audience on a wild and raw journey to find his biological father – a man Franklin thought he had buried, only to discover his true DNA match had been living blocks away from his Dallas recording studio all along. Unforgettable as it was to watch Franklin’s estranged mother deny the unassailable facts time and again in her son’s pursuit of total closure, it’s final scenes between the 53-year-old Franklin and his thirtysomething son Kerrion (the strained Franklin relationship that has been the most widely chronicled) that pack the biggest emotional wallop. It’s the kind of primal yet tender moment that isn’t often captured between adult father and adult son, scripted or otherwise – and it had many grown-ass men on Black Twitter confessing to shedding real tears and delivering weepy on-camera reviews. But even those who aren’t fans of the church or its music are liable to come away from Father’s Day converted. Andrew Lawrence
