I’m rather fond of the following:
From Return of the Jedi
From The Fifth Element
The shot of the Nostromo approaching LV-426 in Alien
For starters, anyway…
There’s a way better camera shot early on, if you know what I mean 
The best thing about this shot is it’s actually a pun: it’s a match cut from the match to the desert sun, and it’s a match cut. Nice.
The final shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, with the slow zoom out to the gigantic warehouse full of who-knows-what. Instant classic.
The Jaws shot.
Chief Brody sitting on the beach - camera pushes in toward him on a dolly while simultaneously zooming out, ‘squashing’ the background while keeping the Chief in focus. Think I remember that it was invented for that movie - certainly been done a zillion times since.
MiM
Hitchcock used similar shots on several occasions. In fact, the entire movie is chock-full of Hitchcock homages - one might see it as Spielberg’s tribute to the Master.
There were a lot of beautiful fades in *Bram Stoker’s Dracular, like where they fade from a full moon to a wolf’s eye. That movie had some of the most beautiful imagery ever put on film.
Winged Migration was stunning.
The bit in Fight Club where Ed Norton’s detailing what he does for a living, and he goes up to the check in at LAX - the bright white out of the sun shining through the big window behind him sticks in my head. Also where he sticks his arm up and a plane flies over his head. Apparently they waited all day to get that shot.
The sparks flyng away in the wind as Luke and Vader lightsabre battle in the big shaft in Bespin in ESB.
Any of the rotating round a massive tower shots in the LOTR trilogy. Whoa!
The early shots of the battle scene in Matrix Revolutions, where the PAK3s are out on the bridge, blasting away at the sentinels that have formed into DNA like flying strands. Totally original imagery.
The scene in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace where they approach the underwater city.
The scene in Attack of the Clones where Anakin and Padme are hiding out and they ride a commercial space vehicle. Somehow conveyed the idea of space travel as a prosaic experience in a way that the flashier fighting ships never did. Same with the futuristic diner that ObiWan visits as he attempts to track the assassin. The sorta stuff you never see in conventional SF movies, or when you do they look so prosaic they might as well be current diners/airports/whatnot. By the same token, all the scenes in AotC where you see streams of spacecraft moving through the sky in the background – what you might expect of the capitol of a wealthy interstellar civilization.
And the ultimate mind blower of them all, the tracking shot down the side of a Star Destroyer as it chased Princess Leia’s ship in the first Star Wars movie.
My favorite has a story behind it (which I’ve related here a few times).
In Rosemary’s Baby , there’s a scene in which Roman and Minnie have come to the Woodhouse apartment and Rosemary tell them that’s she pregnant. Everyone’s very excited, as you might expect when you’ve just been told that Satan’s spawn is going to be coming to visit.
Minnie says, “I need to use the telephone.” The next shot is of an open doorway looking into a bedroom. You just barely see Ruth Gordon sitting on the bed, and you get the impression that she’s using the phone, but you can’t understand anything she’s saying.
At the time this was shot, the principal camerman told Roman Polanski, “Wait a minute - you can’t see her. Let me get her in the frame.” Polanski said, “No. Just shoot it the way we’ve got it set. I know what I’m doing.”
At the first screening of the movie Polanski and the cameraman stood at the back of the theater and when the shot comes up, everyone in the theater leans over in their seat as if to try and see around the door.
Polanski turned to his cameraman and said, “See, I told you I knew what I was doing.”
Most of the shots in Citizen Kane, including:
- The camera going through the closed window
- Candidate Kane at the political rally.
- The first image of a grown up Kane in the newspaper office.
- The opera montage
- The sled in the snow, as the train leaves
- The opening montage, leading up to “Rosebud.”
- The breakfast table montage.
There’s also Orson Welles’s first appearance in Touch of Evil.
From The Little Foxes: The look on Bette Davis’s face as her husband struggles up the stairs, dying, in an effort to get to his medication. She wants him to die. She’s in the foreground in sharp focus, and he’s behind her in soft focus. Awesome.
Best shots that show “extreme bad-assitude-throwdown-imminent”, you know the kind, where you slowly start inching forward in your seat and give an expectant knowing nod to your buddy in the seat next to you…
Crouching Tiger: overhead pullback shot as Zhang Ziyi and Michelle Yeoh face off in the training square
Return of the Dragon: Bruce and Chuck facing each other in the archway with the sunlit colosseum in the background
Return of the King: Shot looking over Eowyn’s shoulder as she faces down the Witch King.
Mad Max: Max limping slowly down the highway toward the car wreck
Blade Runner: Roy zig-zagging down the dark hallway toward the camera
There is a scene in Strangers on a Train that has always stuck in my mind. Please bear with me as I haven’t seen the movie in a while so I may get some details wrong.
I think one of the guys is at a fair or carnival to kill a woman and they take a canoe to a little island. During the ensuing scuffle, someone’s glasses are knocked to the ground. Guy strangles girl but you only see it in the reflection in the glasses. Very creepy and well done shot.
What absolutely makes this shot for me is that there are few jarring cuts from watching Brody to watching from Brody’s POV. The cut is as people walk “in front” of our POV, and as their brightly colored bathing suits pass, the shot changes. I love it.
The Bridge on the River Kwai has a few more of my favs, including Nicholson and Saito staring each other down, and Nicholson standing on the bridge contemplating his career.
from Amelie:
Amelie is standing on a lock in a canal, skipping stones. The shot starts from behind and below her, twists over her head and returns to water level about thirty feet in front of her, just in time for a rock to come skipping at the lens.
The entire segement of the village of the watermills from Dreams. Stunning.
Now, I don’t remember sexactly what the scene was, but there was something that made me say “that is a great shot”. Actually, I say that quite a bit, I just don’t remember every scene that brings it out. I’ll start going through my film library again.
Oh really?
I’ll always remember the scene from Reds when Diane Keaton goes to the station to met Warren Beatty’s train and sees the body being taken off of the train. She turns around with her eyes close, then she opens them and there’s Warren just looking at her.
Especially the first shot of Barad-Dur. You get this shot of some orcs or whatnot walking around on the top of a jagged, dark tower, and think “OK, so that’s the Dark Tower? Not too bad.”, and then the camera pans out and you see that that’s just a small outcropping of the whole massive edifice.
Johnathan Harker riding across a wind-swept plain in the final shot of Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu.
A young Martin putting his hand up to a vibrating window, thus stilling it and signifying that he has found a measure of peace in Proof.