Top five unexpected film dance scenes

5. Damsels in Distress (2011)

The tremendous Whit Stillman is back after a 13-year hiatus with only his fourth feature (the first, Metropolitan, came out in 1989). There's a musical element to his latest as Greta Gerwig's character, Violet (pictured above, far right), aims to cure her fellow students' suicidal impulses with the therapeutic influence of tap dancing. Violet, too, dreams of creating her own international dance craze - Sambola! - to match the Charleston and others. But the cast breaks into an impromptu number, reminiscent of (500) Days of Summer (below), that ends atop an ornamental pond - look out for the campus security guard.

4. Inland Empire (2006)

I was inspired to write this post after catching David Lynch's three-hour mindbender in the BFI Southbank's February season. Inland Empire boasts an outstanding central turn from Lynch fave Laura Dern but such is its opacity it would sit happily alongside anything by Christian Marclay, Douglas Gordon or Matthew Barney in an art gallery. Just when the film's flagging Lynch throws in a roomful of finger-clicking, dancing prostitutes (or former loves of Dern's husband, perhaps) doing the locomotion. The director certainly knows how to end on a high. Sweet!

3. (500) Days of Summer (2009)

Posting a link to a North Korean military parade, Douglas Coupland once commented on Twitter that he imagined such scenes every day when he left home. It's not quite the same level, but greetings card copywriter Tom (Joseph-Gordon Levitt) has a fairly whacky walk to work the morning after he finally cops off with the kooky girl of everyone's dreams, Zooey Deschanel. Instead of military music, there's Hall & Oates, workmen, a marching band and a cartoon bird.

2. Simple Men (1992)

'I can't stand the quiet!' Whit Stillman's contemporary Hal Hartley likes chucking a snappy dance sequence into his movies out of the blue, but none is as good as seeing Elina Löwensohn frug out with Martin Donovan and company to Sonic Youth's Kool Thing, which is pretty cool in itself. Look out for Donovan dancing in character - as Graham Fuller writes of a brief dance in Hartley's earlier Surviving Desire, 'the dancers wear no Gene Kelly smiles; here is the quintessential American music number, shorn of classical artifice and genre tropes.' And it owes it all to...

1. Bande à part (1964)

The ultimate unexpected dance scene occurs in Jean-Luc Godard's movie. Robin Wood suggests Anna Karina and co's impromptu dance in the café has 'the classic function of dance numbers in a musical, that of giving expression to dimensions of the characters which can only be hinted at in naturalistic action...' For him: 'The dance suggests our final separateness. Although the dancers are linked by the beat and steps of the routine, each appears entirely self-absorbed, unaware of the existence of the others...'

Damsels in Distress is out 27 April.

Hal Hartley and Whit Stillman - missing in action

The other week, my best friend and I watched Hal Hartley's Trust, separately. I had found the DVD for cheap in HMV, he paid to watch it online. How strange that we should have both returned, unprompted, to this idiosyncratic film that was emblematic of the burgeoning US indie cinema scene in the late 1980s, early '90s. (In another coincidence, I just uploaded my copy of Pilote's Dotinowman, which features dialogue from Trust. Hartley has also popped up recently in reviews of Lourdes, which stars an almost unrecognisable Elina Löwensohn who, some particularly esoteric critics have noted, of course also featured in the director's 1994 Amateur, alongside Isabelle Huppert.)

I followed my viewing of Trust with Hartley's breakout feature, The Unbelievable Truth (1989). (The late) Adrienne Shelley was the star of my double-bill, opposite Hartley regulars Robert Burke and Martin Donovan in Truth and Trust respectively. They're what are usually described as off-beat romances; the theme of trust is central to both, which Hartley seems to associate with elevation somehow. The films are only separated by one year, but Hartley markedly honed his camera style and dry dialogue of non sequiturs between the two. As this process continued, it inevitably produced the almost unwatchable sparse anger of such later films as Henry Fool (1997) and The Book of Life ('98).

And, because I was thinking of Hal Hartley, my mind wandered to another US indie talent who emerged at the same time: Whit Stillman. The scene they were identified with when their films were sold in the UK is probably the main connection between them, an interest in young characters - often New York (sub-)urbanites - and language notwithstanding. Hartley continues to direct while Stillman's last was The Last Days of Disco back in 1998, but they're often seen as lost talents. For me, they'll be forever linked for offering an exciting vision of cinematic possibility.

Stillman is the notably warmer film-maker. His only other two films - Metropolitan (1990) and Barcelona ('94) - are filled with sparkling dialogue and sympathetic portrayals of idiots (they are, he says, only young). An unofficial fan site says he long ago abandoned plans to direct an adaptation of Christopher Buckley's Little Green Men (probably no bad thing) though he may still be working on a film on Jamaican music he wrote about in the Guardian - four years ago! This is a guy who even takes a long break between penning newspaper articles.

Probably the nearest to these two directors' tone in recent cinema is (500) Days of Summer: quirky, natch, sharp (though the dialogue could have done with being a bit wittier) and even bearing a Hartley-esque dance sequence. It would be lovely to have Stillman back but, as one of the main protagonists says at the end of Metropolitan, 'You don't want to over do it'.