Even though I'd seen that shot from the Avengers 100 times in trailers, it still gave me goosebumps when I finally saw it on the big screen. That's certainly a mark of a classic shot.

SuperScuba | April 18, 15:46 CET

Wish they had put the year in the corner for each scene...

The Fight Club scene is good, but I don't know how you can not take the circular bullet-time shot from the Matrix for '99. Was there anyone whose eyes didn't get really wide when they saw that for the first time? (heh, to be fair someone asked him what the most difficult years were, and he cited '99 and struggling between the two)

Anyway, this is really cool!

DreamRose311 | April 18, 16:59 CET

What an incredible video! Must have been so hard to choose between shots for some years. So glad Braveheart, Shawshank and Die Hard are in there, as they're in my top four films. The other is Serenity, but I'll take Avengers as a substitute, gladly!
Speaking of which, does anyone know if Serenity had the same cinematographer as Firefly? Because as much as I love the film, I loved the way the show was shot so much better. Strangely enough it seemed more cinematic, especially the incredible blu ray. The movie had far more space-age sheen to it, even in the costumes, that I felt stripped some of the magic away. Hope if they ever return to that world they go with the original look a little more, love the warm earthy feel.
For the record I feel like some of the shots from the episode 'Serenity' would be right at home among the incredible ones in this video. Such a beautifully shot episode.

Fivewordsorless | April 18, 18:00 CET

Jack Green was the DP for Serenity; Joss raves about his work in the audio commentary. He lit a bunch of Clint Eastwood's movies, most memorably Unforgiven. David Boyd did the work on the TV show. I definitely think the TV show has more veracity, the film more classicism. Serenity was very much a movie; in some sense the whole film is about earning the right to be a movie, to find something worth sacrificing for, dying for, to justify a Last Stand. This informs the lighting, the compositions. The gravity of the scenes. But the film itself is clearly also much more Sci-Fi than the TV show. The Western tropes are more allegorical or covert than the TV show's more brazen, literal approach, partly to avoid coming across as hokey or quaint: the standoffs, the Indians coming over the crest of the hill in waves all mimicked in a futuristic space-age context. This also makes for some impolitic associations in conflating the Reavers with Native Americans but in purely cinematic terms the analogues are obviously intentional. The space-age sheen may also have something to do with the role of River in the movie, whose presence in the TV show felt at times like something of a non-sequitur: her near-alien quality wrests the movie away from the earthier tones of Mal and Jayne and the rest of the crew, sans Simon. She is quite literally a "product of The Alliance" and a Pandora's box of their secrets and subterfuges. In unwittingly harbouring these secrets and subterfuges she cocoons the film in her own weird translucent aura.

Profane | April 19, 12:30 CET

This person really really likes shots with people raising their arms to the sky.

kleemotion | April 19, 13:28 CET

That was a good moment in Avengers. But then, there were a lot of great moments in that movie.

NYPinTA | April 19, 17:08 CET

That was fun. I enjoyed watching it and yelling the names of the movies. (OK I'm a dork.)

jcs | April 19, 18:46 CET

Not a big fan of foreign movies, is he? I think I only spot a handful. Did I miss a Kurosawa? And where's the animated movie love? Just Snow White? ? No Pixar?

Yeah, The Matrix deserves to be there but I'll admit that Fight Club shot is unforgettable. And Avatar is more like a theme park attraction than art. At least he did pick quite a few classics. Those shots from The Lawrence of Arabia, The Searchers, Shawshank Redemption and The Breakfast Club are iconic.

luciddreams | April 20, 05:03 CET