Films With the Best Endings

A great ending doesn’t resolve the story. It completes it, a different thing. Resolution closes the question and releases the audience. Completion fulfills the story’s argument and sends the audience away with the argument still active in them. The best endings make everything before them land differently. They’re not surprises. They’re inevitabilities that feel surprising because the story has been building toward them so carefully that you didn’t see them coming until they arrived.

Each entry identifies the technique at work. What kind of ending it is and why it’s the only honest ending available to that particular story.

Bad endings make me angrier than bad beginnings. A weak opening costs you ten minutes, but a cowardly ending takes back the two hours you already gave the film, and it usually happens because somebody in a meeting decided the audience couldn’t handle the truth the story had been promising. Every film on this list trusted its audience with that truth. I’ve got a lot of affection for the people who fought to keep these endings intact, because several of them had to.

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1. Chinatown (1974)

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“Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Evelyn Mulwray is shot dead by the police as she drives away.

Her daughter (who’s also her sister) screams. Noah Cross, the man who raped his own daughter and engineered everything, walks away to collect what he came for. Jake Gittes, who tried to do the right thing, stands in the street having made everything worse by trying. “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” The ending isn’t a twist.

It’s the completion of the film’s argument: some systems are too large and too corrupt for individual competence or individual decency to defeat. Trying makes it worse. The correct response to Chinatown is to stay out of Chinatown.

Robert Towne wrote a different ending, one in which Evelyn survived. Polanski changed it on set. Towne was furious. Polanski was right. Towne’s ending offered the audience a release that the film had spent two hours showing wasn’t available. The story Polanski was telling required the kind of defeat that only total defeat could provide.

I’m with Polanski all the way. Towne’s version would have handed the audience a consolation prize the film spent two hours proving doesn’t exist, and I’d have walked away feeling cheated. The hardest part to watch is Gittes standing in that street. He did everything a decent man should do, and his decency made it worse. Few endings leave me that angry at the world a film describes, and the anger is the film working exactly as intended.

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2. Se7en (1995)

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“Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.”

John Doe surrenders. He leads Mills and Somerset to a field and waits for a delivery van. The box arrives. Doe tells Mills what’s in it. Mills shoots him anyway. Somerset’s final voiceover (Hemingway, the second part) is all that stands between the film’s ending and complete despair. Doe designed every element of his final sequence. He chose his sin, he chose Mills’s sin, he arranged the delivery, and he accepted his own death as the seventh sin’s completion. Mills does exactly what Doe predicted.

The villain’s plan worked perfectly. Somerset watches it happen and can’t stop it.

The studio wanted a different ending. Brad Pitt threatened to leave the film if the ending was changed. The ending wasn’t changed. The film made $327 million. The studio was wrong and Pitt was right: the ending is the film. A Se7en that resolves with the villain defeated is a competent thriller. The Se7en that ends with the villain’s complete victory is the film that’s stayed in the culture for thirty years.

Good for Pitt. Studios have a long and ugly habit of sanding the teeth off endings like this one, and every time they win, we get another forgettable thriller where the cops save the day. The box is the reason anyone still talks about this film. My one quibble is how little Somerset’s Hemingway line does to soften the drop. The bleakness fits, but it’s a heavy thing to walk away with.

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3. The Shining (1980)

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“Overlook Hotel, July 4th Ball, 1921.”

The camera tracks slowly toward a framed photograph on the Overlook’s wall. The photograph is from 1921. Jack Torrance is in it, front and center, grinning. The Steadicam closes in on his face until his face fills the frame and the film ends.

The image is impossible within the film’s apparent reality. Jack wasn’t alive in 1921. The photograph can’t exist. Kubrick doesn’t explain it and has never explained it, and the explanation is less interesting than the question.

The ending has generated forty years of interpretation (the hotel consumes people and keeps them, Jack was always the caretaker, the Overlook produces versions of the same violence cyclically) and none of these interpretations are wrong because Kubrick constructs the ending to sustain all of them. Kubrick’s final image is a question designed to stay open, an uncanny moment the viewer can’t process and therefore can’t release.

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4. No Country for Old Men (2007)

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“And then I woke up.”

Moss dies offscreen. Chigurh walks away from a car crash, checks his arm, and disappears. Bell sits with his wife and describes two dreams about his father. The film ends on Bell’s face in the silence after the dreams are described. There’s no confrontation between Bell and Chigurh. The hero doesn’t face the villain.

The case isn’t closed. The film simply ends, with Bell in retirement and Chigurh still loose, and the audience sits in the discomfort of a genre that’s refused to deliver what the genre promises.

The Coens and McCarthy are making a clear argument: evil of Chigurh’s kind doesn’t get confronted and defeated. It continues. It walks away from car crashes and disappears back into the world. Bell’s retirement is honesty. He recognized something he couldn’t defeat and stepped aside. The dreams about his father are about passing the flame. Bell understands he’s not the last man who will try, only the latest to fail.

This is the ending I’d hand to anyone who thinks a story owes them a showdown. I understand the complaint that the Coens never let Bell face Chigurh. The film told us from the start it was never going to be that kind of story. Bell’s dreams move me more than any gunfight could. A man admitting he’s outmatched and stepping aside takes more nerve to put on screen than one more hero who wins, and I think it’s the best thing the Coens ever did.

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5. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

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“Also Sprach Zarathustra.”

Bowman ages through a series of rooms. He sees himself at every stage of his life at once.

He points at the monolith from his deathbed. He becomes the Star Child, orbiting the Earth, looking down. The film ends on the Star Child’s face. No explanation is provided. Kubrick didn’t believe an explanation was possible.

The film’s ending is the point where human cognitive categories run out, where the story that began with an ape using a bone as a weapon four million years ago has arrived at something no one can articulate in human terms.

As an ending, it’s one of cinema’s great acts of formal courage: Kubrick committed to showing something that can’t be shown, to ending a narrative at the point where narrative categories no longer apply. The Star Child is the question that replaces every preceding question. What comes next is outside the film’s scope because it’s outside human scope. The film ends where it must.

I respect that courage more than I enjoy the result. The Star Child is a bold place to stop, and I’ll defend Kubrick’s right to stop there, but I can’t connect with the ending. I admire it and feel almost nothing, and on a list about endings that work, that’s a real limitation. 2001 makes the list on nerve. It doesn’t win a place among the films I’d want to sit through again.

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6. The Godfather Part II (1974)

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“I know it was you, Fredo.”

Michael Corleone sits alone at the end of the film. On the dock at Lake Tahoe, the leaves falling, everything he’s fought to protect now gone or destroyed by his protection of it. Kay has left. Fredo is dead at his order. His children are gone. Tom Hagen manages the empire but isn’t his friend.

The final image is a man who has won every battle and lost everything the battles were supposed to be for. The camera holds on Michael’s face (older, colder, completely alone) and the film ends without a word.

Its last scene completes the transformation that the first film began. The first film ends with Kay watching the door close on a husband she doesn’t fully understand. The second film ends with Michael alone, the door having closed on everything. The two endings together form the complete arc: the promise and its cost, the man who said he wasn’t like his father and the man his father wouldn’t recognize.

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7. Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

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“Keep your loving brother happy.”

The final duel between Harmonica and Frank completes the film’s central mystery (why Harmonica is pursuing Frank, what the harmonica means, what debt is being collected) in a flashback delivered mid-duel. Leone holds the revelation until the exact moment of Frank’s death and then gives it fully: Frank forced a young boy to watch his brother die, a harmonica forced between the boy’s teeth. The boy grew up. The harmonica is the explanation of everything.

Formally, the ending is perfect because it’s the answer to the question the film has been asking since the opening frames (why is this man here, what does he want, what does the harmonica mean) delivered at the exact moment the answer is paid. Leone understood that the revelation and the resolution must arrive at the same time. The audience receives the meaning of the entire film at the moment the film ends.

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8. Planet of the Apes (1968)

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“You maniacs! You blew it up! Damn you! Damn you all to hell!”

Taylor rides along the shoreline. The Statue of Liberty rises from the sand, half-buried, broken. He was never on another planet but on Earth all along, a future Earth that destroyed itself. The shot is one of cinema’s most iconic images and one of cinema’s most efficiently deployed twist endings: a single image that takes three seconds to process and retroactively rewrites the entire film’s context. Every scene that came before it now means something different. The horror isn’t the apes; it’s us.

Rod Serling co-wrote the screenplay and understood from his Twilight Zone years exactly how the twist ending functions, not as a clever puzzle solution but as a moral argument delivered as a gut punch. The audience has been watching a story about humanity’s future and has been watching humanity’s past. The twist is an accusation.

That statue still shocks me, and I give Serling full credit for knowing the twist had to accuse somebody. My reservation is the road there. Too much of the middle marks time waiting for the beach, and the last three seconds end up carrying more of the film than they should. It’s a great ending bolted to a good movie, and I’d still recommend it to anyone lucky enough to have avoided the spoiler.

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9. Some Like It Hot (1959)

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“Nobody’s perfect.”

Osgood and Jerry/Daphne are in the speedboat. Jerry confesses every disqualifying fact: he smokes, he’s a terrible cook, he can never have children. Osgood accepts each one cheerfully. Jerry removes the wig. “I’m a man.” Osgood: “Nobody’s perfect.” The film ends.

Billy Wilder’s last line is the greatest last line in the history of comedy: four words that function at once as the punchline to the immediate scene, the punchline to the entire film, a statement of Osgood’s complete and cheerful acceptance of something society in 1959 wouldn’t accept, and a comic refusal of the moral anxiety the film has been generating about gender and identity.

The line was written as a placeholder. Wilder assumed he’d think of something better. He never did, because there was nothing better. “Nobody’s perfect” is the correct ending to this film because it’s the correct answer to every objection the film has raised, delivered with a complete indifference to objection that only acceptance can produce.

That line makes me laugh, and I’m delighted it started life as a placeholder. Writers polish last lines until they’re dead, and Wilder wrote the plain thing, waited for something cleverer, and found nothing cleverer existed. Osgood’s shrug is the warmest ending on this list. It’s the one I’d put on for somebody who swears old comedies can’t make them laugh.

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10. The Graduate (1967)

“Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me. Aren’t you?”

Ben and Elaine are on the bus, having escaped her wedding.

They’re laughing, exhilarated by what they just did. The camera holds on their faces as the laughter fades. The Sound of Silence plays. The smiles go. They sit in silence, looking forward, and what they’re looking at (their future, the consequences of the impulse that brought them here) settles over them like weather. The film ends on their faces, not laughing anymore, not sure what comes next.

Nichols holds the shot long enough for the audience to watch the victory dissolve into uncertainty. The romantic-comedy ending (the big gesture, the escape, the triumphant music) is undercut by the sustained attention to what comes after the gesture. The gesture got them onto the bus. Neither of them knows what to do once they’re on it. The ending is the most honest romantic ending in American cinema because it refuses to cut away before the truth arrives.

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11. The Usual Suspects (1995)

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“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

Verbal Kint limps out of the police station.

The detective inside connects the dots on his bulletin board. Outside, Verbal’s limp straightens. He drops his coffee cup in a trash can without breaking stride. A car pulls up. He gets in. He becomes Keyser Söze in the time it takes to walk to the end of a block, and the audience watches the transformation happen and understands at once that everything they’ve just watched was a fabrication performed by the most dangerous man in the film while the detective asked him questions.

The walk is the film’s ending and its argument at the same time: the most dangerous person is the one you’ve dismissed, the one whose weakness you accepted as real. The detective looked at Verbal and saw a cripple. Verbal showed him exactly what he wanted to see. The ending is the revelation of the entire film as performance, and the performance is still happening as the credits roll.

The walk is a superb piece of filmmaking, and the coffee cup dropping into the trash is the detail I’d point to first. My reservation is what happens once you know. A film built entirely on a con has less to give once you know the trick, and the story Verbal spins doesn’t hold as much on its own as the reveal promises. I’ll still take one great con over a dozen tidy thrillers that never surprise anybody.

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12. Taxi Driver (1976)

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“Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”

Travis Bickle survives the bloodbath, is hailed as a hero, gets a thank-you letter from Iris’s parents, and returns to driving his cab.

Betsy gets in his cab. He drives away without acknowledging her. The camera drifts to his eyes in the rearview mirror and then cuts (suddenly, jarringly) to the street outside as if something is wrong with the vision. Scorsese and Schrader have always maintained that the ending may be Travis’s dying fantasy, that he died in the bloodbath and constructed the heroic outcome in his final moments.

The jarring cut is the seam between the fantasy and the void.

The ambiguity is the correct ending for a film about a narrator whose relationship to reality has been uncertain throughout. Whether Travis survived or fantasized survival, the final image is the same: a man looking at the world through a rearview mirror, still driving, still watching, still not part of anything he sees. The cab is the metaphor. He’ll always be outside, watching.

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13. Paths of Glory (1957)

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“Gentlemen, I give you, the men of France.”

A German girl is brought on stage to entertain French soldiers who jeer and catcall. She begins to sing, a simple German folk song, and the soldiers go quiet. One by one they begin to hum along. Men who have been killing each other share a moment of musical recognition that strips away the war’s justifications and leaves only people. Kubrick holds on the soldiers’ faces as they’re moved by something that’s nothing to do with France or Germany. Dax watches from the doorway. He’s given orders.

He turns and walks out to return to the war.

Kubrick’s most humane moment and his clearest statement come at the end: people share a common humanity that institutions (military, political, national) obscure and exploit and occasionally, for a moment, can’t quite suppress. The song breaks through the war. Dax takes his men back into it.

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14. The Great Dictator (1940)

“You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful. To make this life a wonderful adventure.”

The barber, mistaken for the dictator, is brought to the podium and expected to deliver a fascist address. Instead he delivers a plea for human decency, directly to camera, for four minutes. Chaplin the silent clown speaks.

He breaks every rule of cinema storytelling (character, narrative, the fourth wall) and addresses the audience as Chaplin, not as the character, in the most naked moment of artistic advocacy in cinema history. Hannah hears it on the radio. She looks at the sky. The film ends on hope.

Critics have called the speech an artistic mistake: too earnest, too direct, breaking the comedy’s frame. Chaplin made it in 1940 with Hitler’s armies in France, and it’s the most urgent thing he ever said. Whether it’s an artistic mistake is less interesting than whether it was the right thing to do, and Chaplin wasn’t ambivalent about the answer.

I side with Chaplin on the speech. Critics can call it an artistic mistake all they like. A man with his audience and his gift chose to spend four minutes asking people to be decent, and I’ll take that earnestness over a clever exit that kept his hands clean. It’s clumsy as storytelling. It’s also the moment on this list where I most feel the person behind the camera.

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15. Brazil (1985)

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“He’s got away from us, Jack.”

Sam Lowry appears to have escaped: he’s with Jill, driving away through the countryside, free. Then the interrogators pull back the camera of his imagination and Sam is sitting in the torture chair, humming to himself, gone. “He’s got away from us, Jack.” The escape was interior. The body is still in the chair. The system won. Sam’s last freedom, the only one the bureaucratic dystopia couldn’t reach, was the freedom to go mad and live inside a dream that the dream machinery couldn’t follow him into.

The studio version ended with the apparent escape intact, Gilliam fought the studio for years over this ending and eventually won. That version is a different film, a satire with a happy ending, and that’s not a satire. The real ending is the correct ending: the system wins absolutely, and the only territory it can’t occupy is the territory where Sam has already retreated beyond its reach.

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16. All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)

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“11:00. The armistice is signed.”

The armistice is signed at 11:00 AM. A German general orders one final advance at 10:44 because he wants a German victory on record before the ceasefire. Paul Bäumer, who has survived four years of the war’s most complete horror, dies in the advance’s last minutes when a French soldier stabs him in a trench, eleven minutes before the guns stop. He dies for nothing. For a general’s pride. For a line in a report that nobody will remember.

The camera holds on his face in the mud as the church bells ring the armistice.

Berger’s ending is the most devastating on this list because it’s the war’s actual logic applied to one person at one moment, a young man who survived everything dying for literally nothing at the moment when survival had finally become available. The bells are the cruelest sound in cinema.

This one stirs up anger in a way few films manage. The general wants a line in a report, and a young man who survived everything pays for it eleven minutes before the guns stop. I don’t need the ending explained to me. I wanted to grab that general and ask him what he thought Paul’s life was worth. Berger made the waste personal, and I can’t think of a war film that’s done it better.

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17. Atonement (2007)

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“I gave them a happy ending.”

The elderly Briony speaks directly to camera. She tells us that Cecilia and Robbie died, Robbie in the war, Cecilia in the London Blitz. The reunion the audience just watched never happened. She wrote it. The novel she couldn’t stop writing gave them the ending she couldn’t give them in life. Her atonement is the happy ending she invented. The story the audience has been watching is Briony’s fiction, and the fiction is the only atonement available to her because real atonement is impossible.

She’ll die before she publishes it. She chose not to publish it in her lifetime because publishing it would mean someone could contradict it.

Briony’s ending is the most formally honest statement about fiction’s relationship to guilt and to the desire to undo what can’t be undone. The novel can’t restore Cecilia and Robbie. It can only give them, in Briony’s imagination and in the reader’s, the life they should have had.

I admire what Wright pulls off here, and Briony’s confession to camera is a cold shock. My reservation is that the reveal appeals to the head more than the heart. Once you know the reunion was invented, the film asks you to feel the loss and admire the structure in the same breath, and the structure sometimes wins. It’s a smart ending I respect a great deal. I just wish it had hurt a little more.

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18. Oldboy (2003)

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“Laugh and the world laughs with you. Weep and you weep alone.”

Oh Dae-su learns the truth. He begs the hypnotist to erase it. The final images show him in a snowfield, meeting Mi-do, and smiling. But the smile is the question the film ends on.

Has the hypnotist erased the truth and restored his happiness, or has she failed and is he choosing to smile anyway, knowing what he knows? Park Chan-wook refuses to confirm which reading is correct. The smile that may be ignorance and the smile that may be the choice to survive the truth are identical, and the film ends on the ambiguity.

Both possible interpretations are awful in different ways, which makes the ending one of cinema’s most disturbing. If he doesn’t know, his happiness is built on a lie that the audience can’t unknow. If he does know, his choice to smile is an act of survival so extreme it implies a relationship to horror that’s itself disturbing. Park understood that the less comfortable ending is the one where the audience can’t determine which it is.

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19. The Third Man (1949)

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“In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.”

Holly Martins stands at the side of a road waiting for Anna Schmidt to walk past after Harry Lime’s funeral. The road is long and straight and she’s a small figure in the distance walking toward him. She walks, doesn’t slow down, doesn’t look at him. Then she’s past him and out of frame. Holly hasn’t moved. The camera stays on the empty road. She doesn’t come back. He lit a cigarette and was left standing there.

It ends by refusing the romantic resolution the story appeared to be building toward. Anna doesn’t forgive Holly for betraying Harry, doesn’t transfer her feelings to the man who was there and tried, doesn’t give him the conclusion that conventional narrative logic suggested was coming. She walks past. The long road and the empty frame communicate everything that’s not going to happen. It’s the most honest ending in noir.

That long road is the finest final shot in noir as far as I’m concerned. Anna walks right past a man who thought he’d earned something, and she never so much as turns her head. Holly deserved that walk. He’d been telling himself a romantic story the whole film, and Reed and Greene had the nerve to let it die on an empty road. The cigarette is the perfect last touch, a small gesture from a man with nothing left to do with his hands.

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20. Blade Runner – Final Cut (1982/2007)

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“All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”

Roy Batty saves Deckard’s life. He sits on the rooftop as his four-year lifespan expires, and he speaks (improvised by Rutger Hauer on set, the script’s lines replaced by his own) about attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, about C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate, about moments that will be lost in time like tears in rain. He dies. A white dove is released into a sky that should be perpetually overcast. The film ends.

The speech Hauer wrote is one of cinema’s great improvisations, he stripped the scripted lines down to their essence and delivered a meditation on transience and memory that’s the film’s central question spoken at the exact moment it’s answered: what makes a consciousness real, what’s lost when it ends, whether the memories of an artificial being have the same weight as the memories of a human one. Batty’s tears in rain are the film’s answer. They have weight. They were real. They’re lost.

Hauer’s speech is the best thing in the film, and that’s also my reservation. The rest of Blade Runner looks gorgeous and feels cold, and for long stretches I care more about the atmosphere than the people standing in it. Then Batty sits down and gives the film the heart it’s been missing, in lines the actor rewrote himself. The ending is worth having. I wish the film had earned more of it along the way.

What Every Great Ending Does

Across these twenty endings, the techniques vary: the impossible image, the villain’s victory, the withheld resolution, the revealed frame, the walk away, the dying speech. What they share is the quality that separates completion from resolution: each ending does more than close the plot: it fulfills the story’s central argument.

The one thing no great ending does is offer comfort the story hasn’t earned, and that’s the sin I forgive least. Every ending on this list is honest about what its story was building toward, even when the honesty hurts. The comfortable ending was always sitting there, sometimes with a studio note attached, and the people behind these twenty films refused it. A film that grabs the easy exit cheats everyone who spent two hours paying attention, and I don’t forgive films that do that.

What film has the best ending?

The Sopranos cut to black. Casablanca’s foggy tarmac. Sunrise’s dawn. Drop your nominations in the comments.