The ending of "25th Hour" kills me. For some reason, I'm always terrifically moved by scenes in which we see the main character age in a moment and reflect back on his life: "The Last Temptation of Christ" comes to mind, and, yes, the ending of "Saving Private Ryan," which is the only time I've ever really lost it in…

@some guy: Ahhhh, the duel scene! One of my favorite Kubrick sequences. (Also, if you haven't seen Powell and Pressburger's "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp," you should check it out posthaste—the duel scene in "Barry Lyndon," which isn't in the original book, is clearly a loving homage.)

If we're going to pick scenes from "The Third Man"—although there are countless classic moments—I'd have to go with the ending, when Valli walks past Joseph Cotten on the tree-lined road. Possibly the best closing shot of any movie. I've seen that film at least twenty times, and I still can't believe how good it is.

@Lone Audience: Agree completely about "The Red Shoes," which is my favorite movie of all time. The scene that always stands out for me, aside from the central ballet, is when Lermontov goes to see Vicky dance at the Mercury Theatre: the beautifully interlocking imagery, the point-of-view shots of Vicky's pirouette,…

@Random Exposition: Thanks for the tip about the online extensions. I even found a link to the PDF version:

@Dumbledore: Yep, that's what happened to my copy, too. Although come to think of it, maybe the glue was just defective.

Amazing Colossal Episode Guide
Just wanted to say that the official MST3K episode guide is also great. I read mine to pieces growing up, to the point where some of the jokes still turn up in the way I write. And yet for some reason I didn't bring it to college with me, and now it's lost forever. (Well, I could always…

@Adrian: We aim to please.

@i and 1: When I first saw "Hollow Man," and particularly the scene we're talking about here, I thought that the time for the movie version of "The Fermata" had finally arrived. Very tricky, since it would need to be a hard R for nudity with a lot of expensive CGI. Maybe too tricky—apparently Neil Gaiman wrote several…

I've got to admit that I was a little surprised when they killed off Tom McCarthy. I mean, why introduce a character like that in the first place, if it isn't so Cusack can nobly sacrifice himself for the sake of all humanity while entrusting his family to his wife's new boyfriend, who seemed like a jerk at first but…

The third one is actually my favorite, maybe because I saw it first (and at exactly the right age), and because it embodies a sense of adventurous discovery that I've been trying to recapture at the movies ever since. "Temple of Doom" is probably the least of the original three, but that's mostly because the story has…

The first three movies were about searching for an awesome treasure and finding it at the very end.

Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls
How could you forget the Asylum version?

I dunno—I think that "Taken" has a bunch of slack, underconceived scenes, especially the stuff at the beginning with the pop concert and Neeson's ex-wife. I'm not saying that such scenes aren't necessary, but they could have been a lot better. And the pacing seemed off to me: once it introduces its basic premise, the…

Taken
I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking to hire Liam Neeson again, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career as a first-class action director. Skills that make me a nightmare for a…

@ODL: Hendricks's jib isn't cut too badly, either.

This reminds me of Patton Oswalt's story about working as a script doctor on "Shrek the Third," where his job was to come up with funny throwaway lines for offscreen characters to yell over the action in already completed scenes. It wasn't very efficient.

Wow
This might be the most awesome newswire headline I've ever seen.

WHERE'S CHRISTINA HENDRICKS???

De Palma really likes playing that card (not surprisingly, since it's a great card to play). Tim Robbins's death in "Mission to Mars" is equally unexpected—and pretty awesome, I might add. And he wanted to bring back the original TV cast of "Mission: Impossible" for the first movie, just so he could kill them off in…