Cinephiles are filing down films to find their favorites scenes of all time.
Redditor alkjgf112 is responsible for this nuanced discussion. They asked r/movies “What is your favorite sequence/scene in a movie?” in addition to providing several of their own picks: the trippy ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey; when the Droogs beat Alex and dunk his head in a water trough in A Clockwork Orange; Jack threatening a bat-wielding Wendy in The Shining; and the third impact in The End of Evangelion, which the Redditor puts above the others because it’s the “single most memorable thing [they] have seen on a screen and it still is.”
As of this writing, the highest-upvoted scene in the thread is the Ride of the Rohirrim, where the Army of Rohan arrives to save Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
Other top scenes are the endlessly parodied standoff in The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, the sitoff(s) in Inglourious Basterds, and the famous baby-revealing one-shot in Children of Men.
Redditor shalafi71 went strictly with action films to suggest such sequences as the “club scene in John Wick” and the “Mexican border shootout in Sicario.”
Some iconic scenes that we didn’t see in the thread include the horse’s head surprise in The Godfather and the patriarchal twist in The Empire Strikes Back, the latter of which has been rated by critics as the best moment in movie history.