I guess some of these are just coincidences; in any event I mean scenes which evoke a very similar scene/shot in an earlier film.
One powerful, one humorous/trivial:
[Spoiler Warning Applies]
In The Shawshank Redemption, when Andy finally escapes, he stands up in the drainage ditch and embraces the rain and embraces his freedom. In V For Vendetta, a virtually identical scene plays out where Evey stands in the rain in an identical pose, and even more significantly for exactly the same reasons as Andy.
In The Two Towers, Saruman is planning to use gunpowder in his attack on Helm’s Deep; he has a big container full of the stuff as Wormtongue approaches it with a lit candle, at which point Saruman grabs his wrist and moves the flame away from danger. But in Army of Darkness 10 years earlier Bruce Campbell warns away the wise man and his flame from a container of gunpowder in a virtually identical manner. I believe Peter Jackson mentions this in the commentaries.
Not quite in the spirit of your OP, I don’t think, but South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut is one huge homage to the musical Les Miserables. Considering its target audience, a pretty brave decision.
Classic: The ending scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the “top men” place the Ark in a generic wooden box inside a giant warehouse of wooden boxes clearly pays homage to the final scene in Citizen Kane.
Blatant: The Bond film, The Living Daylights has homages to both The Third Man (Vienna as a setting, the Ferris wheel, the balloon man as a disguise, the conflict between sides and the “villian” playing his girlfriend as a stooge) and Lawrence of Arabia (the Afghanistant scenes).
Subtle: In one scene in Sideways, the protagonist, Miles, is eating breakfast. He’s having an omlette with wheat toast and tomatoes, which is the same meal that Jack Nicholson orders in Five Easy Pieces. Director Alexander Payne is an avowed fan of Bob Rafelson (who directed Five Easy Pieces) and Jack Nicholson stared in Payne’s previous film, About Schmidt.
It’s not homage to a specific film, but the opening segement in the recent Bond movie, Casino Royale, alternated between a German Expressionist style (the office scenes) and a French New Wave-ish type of cinematography (the fight scene) giving it a very classic appearance and indicating the the viewer that they are “going back to basics”.
Yeah I know the thread is dead, but I just saw another one (another Shawshank one actually). Remember the aria (Canzonetta sull’aria)that Andy plays in that film, broadcasting it through the PA? Well The Great Raid, another prison movie, has that exact same song in it, playing on a prisoner’s record player.
I love noticing little things like this.
I have to say my favorite is one that came out of nowhere. In the movie “Navy SEALS” with Charlie Sheen and Michael Biehn there is a scene that is an homage to Star Wars, specifically the Death Star Prison Escape scene. It ends with “It was a boring conversation anyway. _____ we’re gonna have company!”
That’s the real problem with finding homages: The scene is exactly as it appears in the comic book, which was published in 1982-85. The Shawshank Redemption came out in 1994.
I remember watching a Jerry Lewis film called The Geisha Boy on TV about twenty or so years ago and remember a scene showing a Japanese grandfather building a footbridge in the garden. It was clearly an homage to The Bridge on the River Kwai. It was pretty funny at the time.
In Nacho Libre, during the final match, the female lead shows up at the arena after the fight starts. Pretty much an exact match with the corresponding shot in Rocky, except that she has a little kid with her.
In Spiderman 2, Aunt May in peril on the ledge of a building was highly similiar to Lois Lane in Superman, in the crashed helicopter, right down to the shot of dangling feet.
I love the “oooooh” from the audience when these homages happen.
There’s one number with a definite LesMiz vibe to it (“La Resistance”), but there are plenty of other musical parodies with equal time abounding there: Oklahoma, The Little Mermaid, The Pirates of Penzance, Busby Berkeley musicals, etc.
The Smashing Pumpkins video for “Tonight, Tonight” is a marvelous tribute to the early fantasy films of Georges Méliès, particularly Le Voyage dans la lune (1902), down to the look of hand coloring.