We’re only halfway through 2025—somehow both the longest and fastest year of our collective lives—so it felt like the right time to take stock of what’s actually stuck with me at the movies. Many films have come and gone, but there are two sequences that set the bar impossibly high, reminding me why we sit in the dark with strangers who lack theater etiquette and let stories take over.

One made me believe Tom Cruise could out-swim the ocean and cheat death in his underwear. The other made my soul levitate out of my body as my brain scrambled to make sense of centuries collapsing into a single room. 

Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning and Sinners couldn’t be more different, but both delivered pure, god-level movie magic.

If you haven’t seen these movies, be warned: light spoilers ahead.

The Submarine Sequence – Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning

The unyielding brick wall of exposition in the first hour is a lot to sift through, but once the action kicks in, Final Reckoning had me locked in like Kobe in Game 7. Then comes the submarine sequence, a set piece so intense it cranks the tension higher than Seth Rogen on 4/20.

It starts with music, but not the sweeping orchestral cues you’d expect. Just deep bass rumbles and Russian throat singing vibrating through the water, the only sound Ethan Hunt hears as he sinks into the pitch-black ocean. The Sevastopol, a sunken Russian sub holding the Entity’s base code (that all-knowing AI thingy that’s gonna destroy the world), rests somewhere near Titanic depth. So Ethan suits up in high-tech dive gear and drops in to get his hands on the code.

The atmosphere is super creepy as Ethan moves slowly through the wreck, past frozen crew members still strapped to their posts, with only the glow from the flashlights on his gear cutting through the darkness. At first, watching him drift through the silence is almost peaceful, even mesmerizing.

Then the sub shifts. 

Water floods in. Torpedoes snap loose. The entire sub starts to roll. Ethan adjusts on instinct, literally walking along the interior wall as gravity tilts the space around him. Any sense of direction is gone, and you’re just as lost as he is.

But we’re not done.

Ethan secures the code, but his exit is blocked (ofc). The only way out is a narrow torpedo chute and his bulky dive suit won’t fit. So he can either lose the suit and live, or keep it on and join the ghost crew. Also, if that code doesn’t make it back to land, the world ends. 

He doesn’t really have a choice. Time to get naked. (The picture below is hilarious to me.)

He cuts himself out of the suit and crawls through the chute, wearing nothing but some extremely determined black boxer briefs. I’m no expert, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and say the second his bare skin touched that water, he’d be full Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining internally.

But Ethan Hunt is gonna finish what he started, hypothermia be damned. We watch as he swims through freezing water, gets the bends (light work), drowns, gets resuscitated in a portable decompression tent… and 28 minutes later, he’s hanging off the side of a plane like it’s just another Tuesday. 

And I bought all of it. Like the absolute sucker I am.

Even with all the absurdity that follows, that underwater sequence still holds because Cruise sells it like his life—and yours—depends on it.

The Surreal Montage – Sinners

Now let’s talk about the scene that might already be locked in as my favorite of the year. In Sinners, Ryan Coogler gives us an out-of-body experience at a 1932 Mississippi juke joint, right before the vampires show up to ruin everyone’s night/lives. No one talks or explains anything during the scene. They’re just there to catch a Great Depression vibe. 

As Sammie kicks off his performance of “I Lied To You”and everyone floods the dancefloor, the film slips into a montage that feels more like a moving mural than a traditional scene. Dancers appear as spirits, with the past, present and future communing in the same space, moving to the same rhythm.

It’s the kind of thing you feel before you understand. When that Bootsy Collins-esque guitar player appears on screen, it’s jarring, but as the sequence unfolds, the pieces fall into place: You’re watching time fold in on itself. In IMAX 70mm, it’s immersive on a level that made my brain buzz. 

Coogler described it like this: “When you see a virtuoso perform, and you’re in the presence of people who understand the context, the feeling becomes like a storm system… You feel immortal, like you’re outside of space and time.”

I imagine this scene will be dissected in film schools for decades to come, if the Entity hasn’t destroyed everything. 

And the wild part is, it’s only June, so there’s so much more great cinema to come. Here’s hoping the rest of 2025 keeps that same energy.