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Movies started out more as moments than stories. In the earliest days of the medium, audiences watched 60-second scenes of everyday life and entertainers – dancers, bodybuilders, and even cats in boxing rings, anticipating the fragmentary appeal of YouTube, TikTok, and the general state of online moving images over a century later.
These days, most people go to the movies hoping for something that can work as more than the sum of its parts, but it’s still usually the scenes that linger: An exciting, emotional, or hilarious encounter on the big screen can resonate long after the credits roll.
The Playhouse has hosted many of these over the past year that reflect the sheer range of cinematic experiences on offer in 2025. Because top 10 lists are overrated, here are 15 of the best movie scenes that stood out to me over the past year. Hit the links to view some of these highlights in full.
15. A Magic Showdown (Now You See Me 3)
Misdirection, hidden compartments, and even a little bit of mind reading. When the entourage of globe-trotting magicians known as the Four Horsemen find themselves in a room filled with props, it activates an extended showdown as they all try to one-up each other to hilarious and charming results. This is the essence of the appeal behind the Now You See franchise as a whole: one trick after another.
14. Fast and Furious in Flushing Meadows (Caught Stealing)
In director Darren Aronofsky’s absorbing crime caper, a down-on-his-luck bartender (Austin Butler) finds himself on the lam from a corrupt cop (Regina King) and her cronies as they pursue him through ‘90s era New York. Among the many fast-paced moments that careen from thrilling to hilarious, Butler’s character and his punk rock pal (Matt Smith) find themselves cornered in Flushing Meadows park in Queens as they circle the famed Unisphere left over from the 1964 World’s Fair. It’s a head-spinning twist on the traditional car chase that turns into a hilarious form of vehicular slapstick.
13. Marty’s Comeuppance (Marty Supreme)
Timothée Chalamet is the centerpiece of this dark comic odyssey, opening Christmas Day, as the titular table tennis champ in 1950s New York City who hustles to get by and can’t seem to catch a break. But Marty doesn’t truly meet his match until he attempts to gain sponsorship for his athletic pursuits from an affluent businessman played by no less than Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary. When Marty’s desperate, he faces his comeuppance in a cringe-inducing (and very, very funny) scene for the ages. No spoilers here. Needless to say, it’s not the use of the paddle you might expect from this kind of movie.
12. Huntrix on a Plane (KPop Demon Hunters)
The animation phenomenon of the year might be best remembered for dominating pop charts with earworms like “Golden,” but directors Chris Appelhans and Maggie Kang deserve a lot of credit, too. The imaginative look at pop stars who excel at battling the undead is filled with rapid-fire showdowns that make the most of the medium. One of the best moments comes early on, when the group find themselves cornered by demons on their private plane en route to the gig. Not only do they beat the demons, but they manage to parachute out of the plane and land at said gig before even finishing their song. Now that’s entertainment.
11. How to Survive a Plane Crash (The Phoenician Scheme)
The Huntrix managed to escape a plane crash, but the star of The Phoenician Scheme wasn’t so lucky. In the opening moments of Wes Anderson’s charming father-daughter story, slippery con artist Zsa Zsa Kora (Benicio del Toro) finds himself on a sabotaged plane careening out of the sky and winding up in a cornfield. Rather than overwhelming us with a bombastic explosion, Anderson leaves the action off-screen and instead shows us the wreckage strewn about a cornfield. Zsa Zsa, of course, is nowhere to be found. It’s a delightful setup as the movie delivers a character somehow able to finagle his way out of even the diciest of circumstances. How? That’s a secret he – and the movie – will never tell.
10. Subway Pursuit (Highest 2 Lowest)
“Safety is always job number one. The next priority is the money. It’s showtime.” Spike Lee always delivers amazing, operatic sequences and this breathless remake of the Akira Kurosawa kidnapping drama High to Low is no exception. When a powerful music executive (Denzel Washington) agrees to pay the ransom to retrieve his kidnapped son, he winds up pursuing the bad guy on a dizzying trip through New York City’s subway system – from Borough Hall all the way up through Harlem – that doubles as a celebration of the city’s lively, diverse communities.
9. Friendship Fight (Splitsville)
Filmmaker Michael Covino’s twisted romcom follows a love triangle about friends whose attempt at an open relationship goes very awry. Splitsville is a buddy movie that constantly threatens to devolve into chaos at any moment. It eventually does that in an incredible fight sequence that finds the two main characters (Covino and Kyle Marvin) duking it out in a mansion as walls break and windows shatter around them. The brawl is all the more impressive (and nerve-wracking) when you realize that neither performer used a stunt double.
8. Shout! (Final Destination Bloodlines)
The Final Destination horror franchise is steeped in nefarious Rube Goldberg inventions as invisible forces doom its various victims. Death has a design, and in every movie, people who think they’ve escaped its clutches generally find out they’re sorely mistaken. The sixth entry takes the historic view, flashing back to a 1960s disaster that almost happens at the top of a poorly constructed tour (as usual, it’s a vivid premonition that leads one person to recognize the danger at hand). As a band performs The Isley Brothers’ “Shout,” dancers show off their moves on the glass floor, ignorant to the cracks seeping across its surface. It’s high-stakes sequence that borders on the absurd and tips the material into musical territory, leading to one of the most innovative moments throughout this ever-entertaining series.
7. Interrogation Gone Wrong (Naked Gun)
If you thought it was impossible to reignite the appeal of 1988’s comic opus The Naked Gun, think again. This contemporary sequel finds Liam Neeson ostensibly playing Leslie Nielsen’s son, Frank Drebin, Jr. with the same deadpan delivery that made the original such an outrageous treat. Among the more inspired bits finds the cockeyed detective stumbling through an interrogation sequence with a series of ridiculous verbal stumbles (mistaking “manslaughter” for “man’s laughter” among them), capping it off with a body cam bit in which the body cam goes everywhere it probably shouldn’t.
6. Eerie Footsteps (It Was Just an Accident)
Iranian director Jafar Panahi defied his government to make this thrilling, awards-worthy look at a group of former prisoners trying to figure out if the man they’ve kidnapped is the one who tortured them years ago. In addition to its thrilling moments, the movie is a fascinating morality play that provokes rich questions about the nature of justice and how to process a society in which things can go very wrong at any moment. The closing sequence revolves around ominous footsteps that could signify a cathartic moment – or certain doom. Panahi makes the brilliant decision to leave the outcome up to his audience.
5. Hamlet at the Globe (Hamnet)
A gripping adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, director Chloe Zhao’s drama finds William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and his wife Agnes (Jesse Buckley) grieving the loss of their young son in very different ways: Agnes, by pulling back from the world, and William by writing one of his most celebrated plays. When we finally see Hamnet in the movie’s powerful climax, Noah Jupe endows the character with a level of meaning that reignites the emotional tenor of this 400-year-old achievement with a whole new set of connotations.
4. Chasing Aunt Gladys (Weapons)
Missing children are at the center of the summer’s biggest surprise, the gripping horror-comedy Weapons, but it’s their captor who really dominates. Played by Amy Madigan in an alternately creepy and campy turn that might just bag her an Oscar, the witch known as Aunt Gladys spends most of the movie conjuring spells that put her in charge of the show. But in the movie’s climactic moments, the equation changes with dramatic payoff that puts the kids in charge. You’ve never seen justice like this before.
3. Ready or Not, Here I Come (One Battle After Another)
A revolutionary action-comedy of the highest order, Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic story of faded activist Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) seeking to rescue his kidnapped daughter (Chase Infiniti) kicks into high gear once Bob gets rescued from hospital incarceration by his easygoing sensei (Benicio del Toro), who hesitates to hit the breaks on their getaway car before snapping a selfie. As that happens, the Jackson 5’s “Ready or Not, Here I Come” takes over the soundtrack as Bob rediscovers his potential to save the day. It’s the most inspiring movie moment of the year…
2. Alpha Chase (28 Years Later)
…Which leads us to the scariest one. In Danny Boyle’s long-awaited third installment of the 28 Years Later franchise, a survivalist dad (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) attempts his haul his young son (Alfie Williams) back to their fortress after exploring the deathly neighboring island that has overrun by the infected (otherwise known, but not in this series of movies, as zombies). With a giant “Alpha” on their trail, Wagner music overtakes the soundtrack as the entire sequence takes on an operatic sense of urgency unlike anything most modern horror movies are able to muster. Nearly 30 years after Trainspotting, Boyle remains a master of visceral filmmaking that goes to unexpected heights.
1. The Surreal Montage (Sinners)
Back in February (when the Playhouse first opened), Sinners wasn’t on a lot of audiences’ radars. That quickly changed when it turned out that writer-director Ryan Coogler had delivered a masterful look at the roots of Delta blues music through the prism of gothic fantasy. Before it becomes a story about vampires, Sinners is a story about juke joints, where African American communities often found safety and camaraderie among their peers despite the hostilities of the outside world. In a mesmerizing, one-of-a-kind long take, Coogler explores this history at a juke joint circa 1932 as past, present, and future collide: Blues gives way to rock and DJ beats as generations of Black experience merges into a singular statement on the resilience of community. The whole movie rules, but this scene is a masterpiece unto itself.