Sometimes it's a showy, splashed-out set piece, and sometimes it's as simple as the look on an actor's face. Either way, a single scene can be the thing you remember from a film, and can shape the way you feel about one. The list below isn't strictly a best-of; it won't look like the Academy's nominees. It's more like excerpts from my movie-going diary. Listed alphabetically by film title are 14 moments from '14 whose impact on me has lasted. (Beware, it's one long spoiler.) I'd love to hear which scenes did the same for you.
Boyhood. Every movie is a magical distillation of time, but this one, in which star Ellar Coltrane ages 12 years in three hours, makes you feel it. In a scene all parents must live through, when her son is leaving home, Patricia Arquette sits among the half-packed boxes and sighs. She's not melancholy – she's angry. She's mad at time. "I thought there'd be more," she says. Don't we all.
Enemy. This movie, about a man divided against himself (Jake Gyllenhaal), vibrates to its own icy frequency. Yet somehow I know what Gyllenhaal is thinking in the final shot, when a nightmare comes to life and rattles in a corner, but he reacts only with a slump of his shoulders. If there were a thought bubble over his head, it would read simply, "Crap." It made the whole movie for me.
Force Majeure. Proof that you don't need a ticking bomb to create tension. A wife is struggling to understand how her husband could have run away from her and their two children during an avalanche. She's putting him on the spot in front of another couple who are writhing with discomfort. And then – kapow! – a child's toy zooms in from a corner of the frame. It's a universal domestic moment, but it provokes the kind of laugh Woody Allen got in Annie Hall by sneezing into a tray of cocaine.
Fury. I'm baffled why this, one of the saddest war movies I've seen, didn't garner more accolades. In a long scene two-thirds of the way in, American soldiers, in an idyll before their final battle, occupy the parlour of a German mother and daughter. The shifting calibrations of tone and behaviour – will the conquerors be kind? – are exquisite and agonizing. Brad Pitt, playing a leader of men, proves in a few spare sentences why he's not only a star, he's an actor.
The Grand Budapest Hotel. In the hotel kitchen, as highjinks ensue over the hiding of a painting, it hit me that Ralph Fiennes was delivering a comic performance that would please Buster Keaton. Fiennes's style is normally so contained that it verges on frustrating (Come on, Ralph – crack!). But here, the more he suppresses the mirth, the funnier he becomes.
Guardians of the Galaxy. My favourite moment for this one began in the trailer, when the pop ditty Hooked on a Feeling started to play. It set up a promise, as all trailers try to do, that the movie would be a hoot. This time, remarkably, the promise is fulfilled. Here at last is a comic-book flick that's fresh, original fun. Bonus: The song turns out to be a plot point, and a meaningful one at that. No surprise this is the top-grossing (domestic) film of 2014, $333-million (U.S.) and counting.
The Imitation Game. I'm a sucker for a movie-movie, a glossy, star-filled, smart-talky splasheroo. I'm also a sucker for British people feeling enormous emotion while displaying almost none. The midpoint of this film, when the Bletchley team cracks the Enigma code, is both. They've done a tremendous thing. They're feeling tremendous things. Yet how do they show it? A hand to a mouth, a tiny shake of the head, and three little words: Heil bloody Hitler.
Interstellar. No disrespect to the legions of CGI experts out there, but most of the stuff that's supposed to dazzle me bores me instead. Creatures are raging, elves are whirling, but I'm just biding my time until the real people come back on. But this movie's nail-biter landing on a watery planet thrilled me like no image has since the Terminator rose liquidly upward from a checked-tile floor. And here's another sentence I rarely write: You really must see it in IMAX.
Love is Strange. Two men, just married, lose their apartment and have to bunk separately with friends. It doesn't sound like much, but in the hands of great actors it stirs a lot of feelings. Smack in the middle is a surprise: a miniature master class in subtle comic acting, as John Lithgow, chatting away, disrupts the routine of Marisa Tomei, a writer who's trying to work and be polite at the same time. It must have been a gas to shoot.
A Most Wanted Man. I bet you that in the script, the relationship is barely sketched. But on screen, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Nina Hoss, playing fellow spies and former lovers, convey an entire history of passion, disappointment, remorse and reconciliation just by standing near one another. So the final scene, when he leaves, means more to us because it means so much to her. I know this wasn't Hoffman's last performance, but it turns out to be a fitting goodbye.
Mr. Turner. In the midst of this bustling, layered biopic of the painter – it's crammed with harumphs and carbuncles, with comings and goings, with art and life – all action suddenly ceases so that a lady of science can demonstrate for Turner (Timothy Spall, in a career role) the effects of a prism. The entire film narrows into a splash of light on a canvas – which then, eureka, whooshes into us. The Light! We see it! And just like that, it's gone.
Obvious Child. In a rom-com, an obstacle must keep the lovers apart until the end. But because few obstacles are credible in our Tinder age, the genre feels tired. Star Jenny Slate and writer/director Gillian Robespierre, however, found an obstacle that revivifies it: an unwanted pregnancy. Which they make funny. And then in the ultimate scene, they do something really audacious: They let an abortion be a happy ending. Who knew a snuggle on a sofa would be one of the more subversive scenes of the year?
Pride. My favourite moment of this one occurred after the movie ended, when I moderated the press conference at the Toronto International Film Festival. The writer, director, cast and real people who inspired the story – about a group of gay people who supported the British miners' strike of the early 1980s – were so articulate, passionate and, yes, proud of what they'd made that it was infectious. As screenwriter Stephen Beresford joked, "What our hero shows us is, if you get involved in activism, your clothes will get better, your music will get better and you'll get laid." If that were the tag line on the poster, the film might have had the bigger audience it deserves.
Selma. Martin Luther King's heirs have copyrighted his speeches, so writer/director Ava DuVernay had to find suitably inspiring orations for her Dr. King (David Oyelowo). In the final, incendiary moments, he recites lines from The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and as the phrases build, something happens to Oyelowo. He's not acting. He means it. He is lifted up, and he lifts us up with him. That's what a great movie moment does – it carries us out of the theatre, and then we carry it into our lives.
Johanna Schneller