What are some great movie or TV segments that use little or no spoken/written dialogue? What makes them work so well?
As examples, the starting Carl & Ellie love segment in the movie Up or the starting introduction in Wall-E work quite well although I haven’t pinned down why. 2001 Space Odyssey’s first 25 minutes have no dialogue and the movie as a whole gets a honorable mention because out of 142 minutes, 88 don’t have dialogue.
Niles ironing! David Hyde Pierce’s performance really makes it. He’s great at the snarky/sarcastic responses, but his physical comedy is so spot on. I’ve never really been into physical comedy myself, but this is an amazing segment.
Not much into physical comedy myself but I get the impression that it would be more accurate to say that I’m not into usual physical comedy.
My question was sparked by this essay: Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy - YouTube which basically makes the case that TV and movies’ major advantage as a medium lies in its ability to use visual motion and that many movies don’t leverage that much.
Then I started remembering the segments I mentioned and how effective they were perhaps in large part because they didn’t rely on dialogue.
There’s the famous Buffy episode Hush, with almost 30 minutes free of spoken dialogue.
I’ve mentioned The Thief (1952) before in similar contexts. Noteworthy is
Plenty of sound effects and every now and then you just know somebody has to say something. But they don’t. 
The 1955 French heist film Rififi is another well known example.
To add to what I said, do you like Shaun of the dead, The fuzz and The World’s End? The video I linked to shows how that uses visuals (including physical comedy) to good effect.
British comedy is often a league above American comedy. E.g.: House worked largely because the lead actor was a British comedy actor. An American actor would likely have played if goofy (ala Adam Sandler or Robin Williams) or mean. Hugh Laurie had the right mix of deadpan, snark and layering that made the show funny.
In Lawrence of Arabia, the whole scene of Lawrence and his Bedou guide at the well, ending with the introduction of Sherif Ali on a camel.
You can almost hear the heat shimmer in that scene.
The truel in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Amazingly tense, with only music and closeups.
I did really like Shaun of the Dead. And yes, I do love British comedy. I loved Hugh Laurie on Blackadder in particular.
The video you posted is very interesting. I’m watching it now–makes me think (and rethink) about a lot of what I see and take for granted!
You might like his other videos. More of them seem to be available on Vimeo than Youtube so here’s the link: Videos in "Every Frame a Painting" on Vimeo
If you speak French, Karim Debbache does equally interesting (and funny) stuff about movie adaptations of video games. Even someone with interest in only cinema and none in video games would likely find them interesting: http://www.jeuxvideo.com/chroniques-video-crossed.htm or Karim Debbache - YouTube
I’ve hyped this film before, but I think Locke is one of the best movies I’ve seen in the last few years. The combination of dialogue and lack of dialogue in between is, in my view, awesome.
There’s the mirror scenein Duck Soup.
Silent films did this all the time, of course. Much of the railroad scenes in The General, for instance, don’t use title cards to tell the story. The Last Laugh is an entire movie told visually (there’s one title card at the end, but no dialog cards).
Hula hoop scene from The Hudsucker Proxy
The end of Witness was p good
on the DVD commentary they say they wrote some dialogue for it but then just shot it without it because it’s better like that
The Twilight Zone episode “The Invaders” begins and ends with Serling’s narration of course. But otherwise only one of the characters speaks at the very end of the episode. Twenty minutes of Agnes Moorhead being silently terrified by tiny little aliens.
The animated film The Triplets of Belleville is mostly dialogue-free.
I came in to mention Rififi. A fantastic 28-minute safecracking scene that occupies a fourth of the movie without music or a single word.
Supposedly, the Paris police briefly banned the film for fear it would serve as an instructional guide, but that may be just an Urban Legend.
For action, there’s the cliffside scene from** Last of the Mohicans**. Director Michael Mann is very fond of long, dialog-free sequences in his movies.
Not only in France, but also in Germany. They had to cut out a whopping seven minutes before it could be shown in the cinemas. Thankfully, it has been restored in all its glory.
You will find an hommage to that silent scene in Jean-Pierre Melville’s The Red Circle, where the burglary at the jeweller’s is also silent. Originally, Melville was supposed to film Rififi, but gave Jules Dassin the script out of friendship, because Dassin was in a hard place after beeing denounced by Edward Dmytryk and kicked out of the US by the HCUA.