What other films have great single shots? Not necessarily just long (time-wise) shots.
My tuppence worth to get us started:
Electra Glide in Blue: closing shot
Goodfellas: Maury's dead body is revealed in the car
Touch of Evil: Opening shot
Oldboy: tracking shot of fight in corridor (wow how did they do that?)
The Conversation: Opening Shot
Don: No, you are going to have to turn this opportunity yes!
Still Life (2006): the opening shot
Atonement: the Dunkirk scene
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The opening and closing shots of Tarkovsky's "The Sacrifice" probably blow everything else in movie history out of the water.
Hitchcock's "Rope" is in a sense a single shot lasting the entire length of the movie. And I think Mike Figgis' "Timecode" consists of four continuous DV shots, in splitscreen.
Of course Altman's opening shot in "The Player" was self-concsiously designed to outdo Orson Welles' opening shot in (I think) "Touch of Evil".
Paul Thomas Anderson's no slouch either - the first scene of "Boogie Nights" is a pretty remarkable single steadicam shot.
I used to want to change the world. Now I just want to leave the room with a little dignity.
Don't forget Russian Ark, the hour and a half single take.
"A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse"
Yeah, 'Russian Ark' pretty much takes the cake for single shots. Otherwise I believe Scorcese delivers in 'Goodfellas', and a friend tells me there's a great tracking shot in Godard's 'Weekend', put personally I can't go past Michael Haneke's 8.5 minute opening shot to Code Inconnu http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3O2cnaMUyY
shareTarkovsky was a master of the long shot. Nostalghia has a couple of really great moments like this, where the length of the shot itself becomes an integral part of the metaphor.
shareI always liked the long camera sweeps in Pulp Fiction and the part Tarantino directed in Four Rooms.
But my all time favourite is the car chase scene in Children of Men and the scene in the refugee camp when Clive Owen is running away from the fishes and the military on these ridiculous plastic thingies to which I don't know the name in English (not even in Dutch and that's my native language). Anyway in that shot there is a drop of blood on the lens that is being removed with the use of CGI for the rest of the shot, which still lasts for about a minute from then on.
Off course Touch of Evil is a classic. And then there's the opening shot in the Van Sant version of Psycho, something which Hitchcock couldn't do because of limitations to rent a helicopter or so. He wanted to beat Welles' opening shot from Touch of Evil only to find that Welles' was indefeatabl at the time. So Gus Van Sant filmed it the way Hitchcock envisioned it.
And then something I don't know qualifies as a long take: the opening scene with the Jews in Antwerp in Snatch. I always loved it but some people call it fake.
I'm gonna take that gun, put it up your ass and pull the trigger until it says 'Clic'!
Any Max Ophüls film will have these long take shots.
1948 Letter from an Unknown Woman
1949 Caught
1949 The Reckless Moment
1950 La Ronde
1952 Le Plaisir
1953 Madame de... The Earrings of Madame de...
1955 Lola Montès
“Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.” Ludwig van Beethoven
There's an amazing scene in David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. where Betty has her audition with another actor and the shot lasts about 3-4 minutes and it's pure intensity.
"There's something inherently wrong with the human personality." Stanley Kubrick
Love all these replies, seen most.
Haven't seen this as I don't have HBO but people talking about it said a recent episode of True Detective there's a 6 minute continuous tracking shot, apparently full of action no less. Worth a look I suspect.
Encouraging to see this sort of work still out there, and still being praised.