Valkyrie had Tom Cruise’s fingers removed/shortened by CGI for a few brief shots.
And so much 80s synth. I can’t watch it anymore.
I’ve seen the CGI for Something Wicked This Way Comes, and I approve of the director’s choice to cut it. It’s jarringly different from the look of the rest of the film, and just doesn’t work at all.
A lot of early 1980s CGI had a “cartoony” look to it that made its use problematical. The effects in The Last Starfighter exemplify this. Although the people responsible turned out some test footage for this (and for Star Wars stuff, too – they were trying to get Lucas to go CGI long before he actually did) that looks absolutely gorgeous and real, for some reason the things in the film don’t look as good. Shorter rendering times, maybe. Even though it was years later, the effects in The Hunt for Red October look the same way. They don’t look “complete”, and the lighting doesn’t match reality. Today, the stuff in THfRO looks laughably bad, but it was close to state on the art at the time. It was only a few years later that the (still somewhat flawed, but by no means cartoony) dinosaurs of Jurassic Parkcould blow people away with their appearance and movements.
Speaking of which, Jurassic Park actually fits the OP’s requiremnents pretty well. There are surprisingly few CGI shots in the film. A lot of dinosaurs were done completely without CGI (the triceratops and the Dilophosaurus); many of the effects shots with the Velociraptors were done with puppetry, and the T. Rex was done in part with a full-size mechanical model. As the Wikipedia article notes, rendering the dinosaurs took two to six hours per frame (the long ones for the T. Rex in the rain). For those times, you economize as best you can.
Yeah, that is quite annoying. I wish they’d remaster* it with an all-orchestral soundtrack, but apparently director Richard Donner thinks the music is great, so that is unlikely to happen.
Mind you, he’s responsible for the “Can You Read My Mind” sequence in Superman.
*A digital colour grade and some sky replacement would help it too. Sunsets and sunrises are so important to the plot, yet they clearly filmed day-for-night and had some dawns that lasted milliseconds, others half an hour.
If the OP is asking for movies that had short sequences that were pure CGI, standing out in style and tone from the rest of the film, there’s a gorgeous animated sequence in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, laying out the history of the 3 brothers.
Granted, the rest of the movie is jam packed with CGI, but the animated sequence has a different kind of CGI, so…
That makes me think of the gratuitous CGI segment in Bridge to Terabithia that made the deceptive trailers possible.
Modern movies, even rom-coms where the characters just walk around and talk to each other, often feature a tremendous amount of CGI effects to remove or add background features.
And the reason nobody notices is that the whole point of these is that they not be noticed. So for example, they filmed the characters walking down the sidewalk. Is there a sign in the background? That sign could be completely digitally replaced with another sign. A telephone pole could be digitally erased. A car’s license plate number changed. A cloud painted out or painted in. And so on and so on.
We notice some CGI effects. If there’s a monster or a spaceship or a dinosaur or implausible stunt, we know it’s an effect because there’s no way it could be real. But most effects don’t exist to represent something impossible, they are there to create something that looks plausible, and you don’t notice because there’s no reason to notice.
And as was mentioned above, some things that seem like they’re CGI are actually practical effects that are so cleverly done that you just assume they’re computer trickery. To take Lord of the Rings, they sometimes used CGI to shrink the actors playing the hobbits, but they tried to avoid that as much as possible. If you see a tiny Elijah Wood next to a tall Ian McKellen it’s very often done with forced perspective, not computer animation or compositing.
I’ve just started watching American Gods. In episode 2, there is a scene where a character throws a vase at another character and it strikes the wall behind them and shatters. Could easily have been done with practical effects. But for some reason, they choose to do it with CGI. And it was obvious CGI, not especially well done.
There’s very subtle and effective use of CGI in Black Swan. Look carefully at the drawings on the walls of the dancer’s apartment.