Brian DePalma borrowing from Hitch with the staircase gunfight in The Untouchables.
As I’ve mentioned in the past, my wife has a deep an abiding love for romantic comedies. It makes no difference if they’re utter crap or not, as long as the guy gets the girl in the end. And, since I love her to death, I sit through these messes with her.
Like the Freddie Prinze Jr./Julia Stiles abomination called Down To You.
An amazingly bland film, but it had one scene that was so smartly done, it actually pissed me off that it was wasted on such a bad film. Prinze and Stiles are having a “getting to know you” conversation, talking about their early school years. They show a young version of Stiles going through some school trouble or another (it’s been awhile since I’ve seen it), while she gives a voice-over narration.
Prinze had some question for Stiles, but instead of the two of them having a voice-over conversation, he walked into the flashback and asked the younger Stiles. She responded and the young Stiles and older Prinze had a short coversation. They later did the same thing with the characters reversed.
It was done very smoothly and was brilliant how out of left field it was, especially in such a bad film.
Some of my favorites are the unsentimental and rather short beach vacation scene in Klapisch’s When the Cat’s Away; and the sentimental, optimistic endings of Linklater’s Slacker, Kiarostami’s Through the Olive Trees, and Rohmer’s Autumn.
The multi-minute cutless opening of Altman’s The Player where he smoothly picks up lots of characters and stories impressed the hell out of me. But my favorite flourish is the million year cut between the bone and the spaceship in 2001.
The most recent one I can think of was in Frieda. I loved, loved, loved how they used the color and imagry from Kahlo’s artwork in the film. The poses against the backdrops at certain points throughout captivated me.
Also–in *The Hours * (which I thought was a bit overrated, to be honest) I was absolutely blown away by the scene where she’s lying on the bed and is overtaken by the water around her–very impressive.
In addition to the skylight scene in Citizen Kane, there’s the scene during the ill-fated opera where the camera rises up, up, up from the stage, into the scenery being suspended from the ceiling, all the way up to the cat-walk where two stage hands are standing. One silently turns to the other, squishes up his face and holds his nose.
The moment in The Third Man where we are introduced to Harry Lime (Orson Welles).
The restaurant/introduction to the gangsters tracking shot as well as the similar Copacabana sequence in Goodfellas.
The moment in Silence of the Lambs where we realize that Clarice is alone at Jame Gumb’s house and the FBI SWAT team is at an empty house miles away.
Psycho. Norman Bates is trying to sinkthe car in the swamp. The moment when it stops sinking and you think it won’t go down… and then it does.
Top Secret The Swedish book store scene - for which the actors had to do the entire 3-4 minute scene in reverse, just so that when the scene is played backwards in the movie allthe action looks right but the dialogue sounds like some weird Swedish dialect. And we, the audience, only gradually realise that the scene is being played in reverse.
Schindler’s List The little girl’s red coat.
Fargo The art shot of the endless fence, tapering away into the distance, black against the virginal white snow. First from one angle… and then from the other. The Coen Brothers couldn’t agree which looked best, so they included both!
Citizen Kane As mentioned above, the camera tracking through the neon sign and down through the skylight. Plus a zillion other little touches.
Terminator 2 When the shape-shifting robot momentarily spots a silvery shop mannequin and does a double-take of recognition. (In some editions).
Pulp Fiction Tarantino’s decision not to explain what’s in Marcellus’s briefcase, or how Jules and Vince Vega ‘miraculously’ survive the hail of bullets when ambushed. That’s a brave and confident director.
Onegin There are several still-life scenes which you could frame and sell as Old Master oil paintings, they are so beautiful.
LOTR II Legolas swinging back and up on to his horse. One of the best and most delightful uses of special FX in modern times.
X-Men 2 The opening sequence, with Nightcrawlers’ "Bamf!"assault on the White House. Absolutely stunning visual poetry, and a massively difficult sequence to achieve.
2001 The cut: bone to spaceship. Often hailed as the greatest single cut in movie history. And the decision to use the Strauss waltzes (reached only after countless other options had been chosen and rejected).
Lawrence of Arabia Omar Sharif’s first appearance, in the heat haze near the horizon.
The Hollow Man When Sebastian is stalking the girl as she sits at her dressing table mirror, before he attacks her, the decision to have the camera go all the way around the girl so that we, the audience, see directly into the mirror… and of course see absolutely nothing except the empty room. Very neat FX work, and a nice touch.
Indiana Jones Shooting the arab guy rather than wasting time on another sword fight.
The Exorcist The shot, immortalised in posters, of Father Merrin arriving at the house, all in silhouette and darkness save for the shaft of light emanating from the one upstairs window. It doesn’t make any sense (unless Regan has a spotlight in her bedroom) but it looks superb.
There’s one shot that does it for me every time from Oh Brother, Where Art Thou. In the scene with the sirens the camera starts on the right side of the scene and starts panning across each characters face, but as the camera pans to the right, the second face comes in from the right hand side rather than the left which gives the whole scene a very surrealistic quality.
Make that “as it pans to the left.”
There’s some subtle special effects in Contact that were pretty impressive. It begins with the camera focusing tightly on the young Jodie-Foster-to-be’s face as she runs up the stairs to get some medicine from the bathroom. When she gets to the medicine cabinet, it seamlessly turns into her reflection in the mirror as the door opens. It’s a difficult scene to describe but a great transition.
Two cinematic brushstrokes from David Lynch via Blue Velvet:
The gunfight between the cops and Frank set to the tune of Ketty Lester’s “Love Letters.”
The brief, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cutaway edit to an empty, ominous staircase as Jeffrey enters Dorothy’s apartment.
If these flourishes can safely be called “style” then I nominate Sergio Leone’s (sp?) The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly .
I had watched some westerns. I had seen parodies of westerns. I had a bubble in my head of what it is that makes a western a western. Like the language of the genre.
Then I saw this classic film, it had EVERYTHING that you would expect from the genre, but perfected. The entire language of the western genre culminated in one great movie. And with fresh directorial style.
Did Quentin ever say that Leone influenced his own filmmaking?
Everything influences Tarantino. Some people make movies about their families, some people make movies about their view of humanity, Tarantino makes movies about his video collection. 
[quotte]
There’s some subtle special effects in Contact that were pretty impressive. It begins with the camera focusing tightly on the young Jodie-Foster-to-be’s face as she runs up the stairs to get some medicine from the bathroom. When she gets to the medicine cabinet, it seamlessly turns into her reflection in the mirror as the door opens. It’s a difficult scene to describe but a great transition.
[/quote]
The shot is even more amazing in that it looks like a constant tracking shot, but in fact it was filmed in different parts of the country. The interior was on a soundstage in LA, and the rest of it was on location. It was all stitched together by computer to look like a continuous shot.
There is also a lot of CGI in that scene - Zemeckis uses a lot of CGI not for special effects, but to do things like darken the sky, improve contrast on certain things, etc. In this case, when the camera zooms out from the girl’s eye, her pupil is originally CGI, and it seamlessly transitions back to the real eye once the camera is back far enough. And the reflection in the vanity mirror was, I believe, a composite. Zemeckis couldn’t get the image or angle he wanted in the mirror during the shoot, so he had it digitally removed and replaced in post production.
Sabotage [1936; dir. Hitchcock] features two great sequences of suspense – which, due to the relative obscurity of this film, are overlooked (or unknown) by many erstwhile “Hitch” fans. The first is the prolonged buildup of suspense in the boy-unknowingly-carrying-a-bomb-through-London montage, in which mood shifts and the hastening pace of the editing both rachet up the tension. Several circumstances conspire to delay the boy on his errand: he’s the focus of a street vendor’s sales demonstration; there’s an official parade that keeps him from crossing a boulevard; and afterwards, traffic is congested. Shortly before the bomb is due to detonate, Hitch pans over the boy’s proximal fellow-travellers on the bus to revel in the sentimental tableau: a little old lady, a puppy dog, and the beanie-wearing boy himself… and the viewer thinks that something, however improbable, will surely occur to spare these quintessentially innocent victims. Finally, a brief series of accelerating cuts on a tower clock and the package containing the bomb, comparing the inner workings of the murderous package (a hoary cliche, now, and ubiquitous in things like “CSI”) with the inexorable clock…
The second great suspense scene is the murder over dinner. The boy's sister, married to the saboteur responsible for his death, confronts him while serving him dinner and carving a roast. As she realizes she wants to kill him, she recoils in horror from the knife, guiltily setting it down -- but a tad too hastily, too forcefully. Her husband, watching her serve, notices but does not grasp her reasons for doing so. Fearing that her husband may be reading her thoughts, she resolves to act as if all is normal and resume serving, but her hands still hesitate to pick up the knife, tentatively reaching for it and reflexively pulling back from the handle as if it was red-hot. This time, her husband gets it, and his reactions quickly transition from surprise to alarm, and then to a grim determination to subdue his wife... all this is conveyed through a complicated series of accelerating cuts among her face, his face, her guilty hands, and the knife.... and after the deadly confrontation, the scene concludes, shockingly, with the dying man's P.O.V. shot from floor-level of the wife's shoes as she, benumbed and in shock, unsteadily totters back to the kitchen.The opening and closing shots of High Plains Drifter, with Clint fading in with the heat shimmer, so one can’t be sure if it’s just supposed to be an optical illusion that’d been obscuring the rider, or if his character is actually fading into existance.
'Nother one.
In The Quick and the Dead, when…
[spoiler]Gene Hackman finally gets shot. He doesn’t realize it himself at first, until he glances down at his shadow on the dirt…
…Which has a little pinprick of light in the middle of it, where his heart would be. He’s been shot clean through. Cut to a wider shot of Hackman, from the front.
Not only do we see the sky behind Hackman, through his wound…but we see the little swirls of dust lit up by the sunbeam shooting through Gene’s chest.[/spoiler]
Not too realistic, sure. But very coooool… 
Hey, people, naming whole movies doesn’t count. This isn’t just some random thread; this is the internet. It’s science.
Good call! These movies are usually overlooked because they’re so silly, but there’s a lot of brilliant stuff going on in them. One of the gags they use the most often is having something going on in the background while characters are dead-panning important dialogue in the foreground.
Top Secret! is my favorite of all of them – one visual gag that cracks me up every time is the scene that starts with a phone in the foreground, dominating the frame. It rings, a Nazi comes to pick it up, and we realize that it wasn’t just in the foreground, the phone itself was ridiculously oversized.
And the nominations for other brilliant flourishes not appearing in Zucker/Abrams/Zucker movies:
Darkman: I don’t like the movie, but the whole scene with the explosion that creates Darkman is just fantastic, the closest I’ve ever seen to a live-action comic book. The close-up shots of the dunking bird figure about to set off the bomb, then the explosion, and Frances McDormand seeing the explosion and the morph to her standing at the funeral.
Miller’s Crossing: The scene in which The Dane and Johnny Caspar fight over who gets to kill Tommy. As the scene progresses, the shots get closer and closer into the characters’ faces, building suspense. And it keeps cutting to the boxer guy, just screaming through the whole scene. Still one of the most unsettling scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie.
Blood Simple: I wanted to be the first to name the newspaper’s suddenly hitting the screendoor in the middle of a silent, tense moment. I’m not, but it’s still cool.
Pulp Fiction: When Uma Thurman’s character calls John Travolta’s character a square, she traces a dotted square on-screen with her fingers.
Kill Bill Volume 1: The shots of the plane flying into Tokyo, complete with cheesy models to set it in some 60’s B-movie alterna-Tokyo. Also, the plane to and from Japan having space for passengers to keep their samurai swords. Plus, playing the music from Ironside whenever The Bride focuses on her target.
There are a lot of transitions in time in Once upon a time in America, but my favorite is the phone that keeps ringing ofr about - oh two minutes - which brings us from back then to, well not now but, modern times.
I also like the fact that Noodles never acknowledges James Wood’s character.
Come to think of it, I should write an OP about the movie. It’s absolutely brilliant.