In the case of The Last of Us specifically, I don't really think the cutscenes look all that better. They essentially use the same assets and same image quality as the real time game (you'll still see aliasing and stuff in the pre-rendered cutscenes, for example). The lighting is better because they can control the positioning due to the directed nature of them, and probably use more lights in a given scene, but in TLOU's case the cutscenes look more or less like the game, especially in the Remastered version where the models are identical, textures and all. Photomode has only made that explicitly clear.
But I still think shots of pre-rendered cutscenes just have no place in this thread. There's nothing unique about them, they are identical for everyone playing and aren't in real time so there's nothing inherently impressive about them. And due to compression they more often actually look worse than any real-time shot.
