Isaac Richter- The Departed

The scene I picked is long, but it shows some really good examples of shot/reverse shots and parallel editing, so I'm just going to write an analysis for this one (since it has a lot of shots, and really quick ones). It's from The Departed, a film about two police officers, one who is infiltrated in the mob to expose their leader, and one who is a rat for the mob inside the department. The scene starts when Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), the police officer with ties to the mob, moves into his new apartment with Madolyn (Vera Farmiga), his psychiatrist girlfriend. The scene starts with a shot/reverse shot on the kitchen counter, with a box full of Madolyn's old pictures on the counter. Madolyn has a microwave behind her creating a Z-axis, and Sullivan has a blue wall in the background with pintings. There's an eyeline match scene when Sullivan looks at the box next to him and then takes out one of the pictures. We see a picture of a little girl on a bycicly, wearing a helmet and smiling in the foreground, with a house and a tree in the background. Sullivan takes the box and moves it to the other side of the apartment. It becomes a tracking shot, and it reveals a turned-on TV, a lamp, and a door at the far end of the background. This whole scene has high-key lighting, and the framing is relatively tight inside the apartment. Sullivan walks back to the counter and the shot/reverse shot continues.
This is interrupted when the phone rings. There's a small quarrel whether who should answer the phone, and in the end, Madolyn answers it. A man with a voice distorter asks for Sullivan and she gives him the phone. It's Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson), the leader of the Irish mob in Massachusetts, who is walking next to the ship yards and asks Sullivan what is wrong with his phone. There's another eyeline matching shot in which Sullivan takes his phone out of his pocket and sees that he has missed calls from Costello. Here's where the scene becomes a cross-cutting scene between Sullivan talking on the phone, on the terrace outside his apartment, with a glass sliding door behind him and white frames on the door and windows, and Costello movin through the ship yard. On Costello's side of the conversation, the camera is constantly tracking his movement around the shipyard, as he walks up the steps into a red-brick gazeebo. On Sullivan's side, Sullivan moves around the terrace, and we have another eyeline match shot from Madolyn's point of view as she looks at Sullivan, suspicious. Costello moves in a circle inside the gazeebo as soon as he tells Sullivan that he suspects a cop in his crew. He has the harbor in the background with ships sailing back and forth. Sullivan has the kitchen visible through the sliding door and Madolyn in the background. Most of these shots are medium shots, with a couple of close-ups of Sullivan when he starts telling Costello to gather information on everyone in his crew. As soon as Costello hangs up the phone, there's a close-up on ullivan's face, leaning on the terrace rail, with his kitchen and Madolyn standing in the background, loking at him with her thumb on her teeth, and a shasow on the glass creating the z-axis. Throughout this conversation, there have been cuts towards Madolyn, to build the suspense that he's talking about something secret with the person he loves in the other room, and he's being told that if anything happens, he might lose her, so it's important to keep her looking in the background. On Sullivan's side of the phone call, the framing is tight and on Costello's side, it's lose. There's low contrast in the lighting on both sides, hardly any shadows.
After this, there's another cross-cutting scene that is happening in two completely different locations, but it is assumed they're both happening at the same time, since these two locations had just been linked by a phone call a little while ago. On Costello's side of the phone call, the camera tracks him as he walks away from the gazeebo, and as he's leaving, we find Queenan (Martin Sheen) and Dignam (Mark Wahlberg) leaning on the wall of the entrance in the background right behind him, calling him. Costello turns around and sees them. The camera pans from Costello to Queenan as they approach each other. It cuts back to Sullivan's apartment after he's come back inside and Madolyn asks him what that was all about. There's a long shot of both of them on the same frame, first Sullivan on the right and then crossing to the left to pick something up and then back to the right. The camera doesn't move on this part. It ends on a medium shot of Sullivan before cutting back to a medium shot of Queenan and Dignam. It's a shot/reverse shot of them and Costello as Queenan asks him about the micro-processors.
It cuts back one last time to Sullivan's apartment, there's a medium two-shot with both of them in the frame as he approaches Madolyn and kisses her, and this cuts between close-ups of Madolyn telling Sullivan just tell her when something is a secret. The scene ends with the movers ringing the doorbell and disrupting a romantice scene. Then it cuts back to the shot/reverse shot with Costello. It momentarily cuts away to the background behind Costello, where a parade of children dressed as angels is marching on the pier in front of a woman with a white hat. This becomes the background of one last medium shot of Costello before he turns around saying "I've got a date with some angels". This is followed by a medium shot of Queenan looking at Frank with Dignam out of focus in the background and there's an eyeline match shot as we see what Queenan sees, Costello marching behind this woman and a nun.
Both of these scenes together have high-key lighting, and the framing feels relatively tight, except for any frame when Costello is alone. Costello is a man who is never backed into a corner, so I think having the frame be loose whenever he's alone indicates that he's a man who can move around wherever he wants, and every other character is tight in the frame, feeling backed into a corner. It also keeps the lighting high-key to make it seem natural to the time of day.
The Departed is a film where very few shots last more than 15, maybe 20 seconds. He cuts out of scenes very fast, and creates something new with every scene, which means he has more a lot of shots per scene in this film, but it's interesting to see what techniques he uses and I can find many examples of shot/reverse shot and cross-cutting between scenes as well as montages in other parts of the film (like the opening with Sullivan and Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) going through police training). It's an interesting film to see for editing. It arranges many different little pieces of the story throughout (it's interesting how it will cut to Costigan's mother dying at the hospital while he's having his interview with Queenan, or how we find out that Queenan and Dignam suspect the rat in the police department while Costigan is seeing Madolyn as a patient). It's a film that doesn't rest when it comes to editing.