Happy Tuesday, dear readers! Each week, we’ll rank the top 10 films in a specific category. While we aim to tie these lists to big releases, that won’t always be the case. Our goal? For you to enjoy, share your own lists, and join in on a lively, friendly debate. This is an interactive space to build community here at The Contending.
No fancy intros, no long essays – just a category and a list. Sound good?
As 2025 winds down, Top Ten Tuesday is shifting into year-end mode. Over the coming weeks, I will be rolling out a series of best-of-the-year lists, including performances, direction, cinematography, musical scores, and more.
We are kicking things off with the ten best scenes of the year, and this was a particularly strong field. These are the moments that linger: the scenes that stuck with me because everything clicked, from the performances to the way they were shot and staged.
Let’s get to it!
10. Masks – Eddington
The grocery store meltdown where Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) unmasks the local mayor (Pedro Pascal) in a tirade against pandemic paranoia.
9. The Awkward First Date – Magazine Dreams
The most painfully uncomfortable date where Killian (Jonathan Majors) orders every menu item in a gluttonous bid for connection.
8. The Dinner Party – Black Bag
The high-stakes dinner party where suspects, including spouses and mentors, trade barbed diplomacy and veiled threats over clinking silverware, spilling secrets amid candlelit tension.
7. For Good – Wicked: For Good
The tearful duet finale where Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) and Glinda (Ariana Grande) reflect on their transformative friendship in a soaring rendition of the hit Broadway tune.
6. The Tuscany Film Festival Tribute – Jay Kelly
The Tuscany film festival tribute where Jay (George Clooney) views a career montage that triggers a hallucinatory family memory and fourth-wall plea to “go again.”
5. The Summoning – Weapons
The midnight summoning where enchanted children bolt from their homes into moonlit streets, arms outstretched like phantoms under Aunt Gladys’s (Amy Madigan) hypnotic pull.
4. He’s Flying – F1: The Movie
The Abu Dhabi Grand Prix final lap where Sonny’s (Brad Pitt) high-speed overtake erupts in euphoric radio calls of “He’s flying!” amid triumph.
3. River of Hills – One Battle After Another
The third-act desert chase along the River of Hills, with Willa (Chase Infiniti) breaking free from her captors, flips the usual rescue trope and delivers a reunion that feels earned.
2. Agnes’s Globe Catharsis – Hamnet
The Globe Theatre finale where Agnes (Jessie Buckley) witnesses her husband’s (Paul Mescal) performance of Hamlet, blurring her grief with communal mourning as the crowd reaches out in waves.
1. Sammie’s Haunted Juke Joint Blues – Sinners
The surreal six-minute juke joint musical number where Sammie (Miles Caton) performs “I Lied to You” amid time-jumping spirits and choreographed hauntings.
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submarine scene in Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning
The scene of the year is absolute THAT heart stopping moment from Sirât. It's a spoilerwhen the truck starts going back and.. there is nothing else near it.
This is such a fun concept! I haven’t seen everything yet that I still want to see from this year, but I’ll put one together regardless, and I’ll be a bit loose with release dates to include either movies with 2025 US releases or 2025 worldwide releases. I’ll stick to one scene per movie.
1. The opium den, Resurrection
I haven’t been as transfixed by any movie this year as during the stunning opening, silent-movie-inspired section of Resurrection, so it certainly has to top the list.
2. The train ride to Moscow, Two Prosecutors
This ingeniously constructed scene, with an old man rambling on a train and a sleepy young man struggling to pay attention, is the entire reason for this terrific movie to exist.
3. Bob and Sergio in the car, One Battle After Another
Any scene could be on this list from this one. The rolling hills are absolutely stunning. But to me, somehow the real impact of One Battle After Another comes from all the scenes assembling into something magical, and the best scene to represent that isn’t simply the technical marvel of the hills. The scene with Bob and Sergio has everything I love about this film: some of the best characters, emotional depth, humour, quirky “action”.
4. The cloakroom, Blue Moon
Once again many bits could be chosen, and the entire film is almost one long scene, but the cloakroom scene is stunning because it somehow provides a devastating emotional climax for Hawke’s Hart while also being entirely driven by Qualley’s Elizabeth, and seemingly not really concerning Hart at all.
5. The tribute, Jay Kelly
It’s sentimental, perhaps even a little cheap, but it’s the most emotional I’ve felt at the movies this year, it twice made me proper cry. Once again feels like it was worth making the movie just for this moment.
6. Epilogue, The Phoenician Scheme
Another scene I find very deeply emotional, although in this case, I find it hard to articulate even to myself what exactly creates this reaction. Perhaps it’s just so beautiful to see the simple truth that the entire film is exploring crystallised in one moment.
7. Alma posing like a photograph, Sound of Falling
An astonishing movie that builds a cumulative effect unlike anything I’ve seen this year, it’s hard to single out just one scene. But one of the many moments that still haunt me is Alma’s reenactment of a photograph of a dead relative – it literalises the films’s underlying themes of trauma of the past haunting us in the present in one striking moment.
8. The ladder, The Mastermind
If The Mastermind is both a heist film and an anti-heist film, it is the ladder scene, shot with all the patience in the world, capping off the heist, but also simultaneously destroying its illusion in our eyes, that ties everything together.
9. Red taillights, It Was Just An Accident
Probably self-explanatory, a stunning finale to a movie that, up to this point, purposefully avoids concrete confrontations to instead explore uncertain clashes of subjective viewpoints.
10. At the priest’s house, Misericordia
Hilarious, unexpected, weirdly dark, and very unique, just like the entire movie.
Again, couldn’t agree more Mark. Unsurprisingly I’d swap the Hamnet scene to the top spot but my goodness both of those top two are extraordinary moments in film. I was absolutely undone by that final moment in Hamnet. The hands reaching towards him was a devastatingly brilliant move, and completely took me by surprise.