In case titling a video “10 Best Movie Endings of All Time” wasn’t enough, here’s the BIGGEST SPOILER WARNING OF ALL TIME! We’ve looked at how movies begin, so this time we’re digging into all the ways they can end. They can twist or offer catharsis, they can wreck you with sadness or overwhelm you with joy. And how many otherwise good movies have been sullied by a less than stellar ending? And because they say there are only two important parts to a movie, the ending and everything else here are our picks for the 10 that have done it the best.
From bittersweet happy endings like Shawshank Redemption, Amelie or Charlie Chaplin’s greatest hits, to sweetbitter sad endings like Portrait of a Lady on Fire or Call Me By Your Name, to an ambiguous, top spinning ending of Inception or a cathartic full circle tiedinabow ending from Martin Scorsese like The Last Temptation of Christ, filmmakers have many tools to choose from when wrapping up their movies. There are even nonending endings like Silence of the Lambs or Ex Machina. Endings that happen too fast like Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Each kind of ending has it’s own risks and rewards, and the films that do it best end in a way that’s satisfying, fresh and also seeming somehow inevitable. It’s hard to narrow it down to just 10!
The Picks:
00:00 Intro
00:25 Happy Cinema Paradiso (1988) dir. Giuseppe Tornatore
02:46 Sad Dancer in the Dark (2000) dir. Lars von Trier
05:18 Abrupt Sword of Doom (1966) dir. Kihachi Okamoto
07:33 Gentle In The Mood For Love (2000) dir. Wong Karwai
09:38 Twist Psycho (1960) dir. Alfred Hitchcock
11:56 Ambiguous A Separation (2011) dir. Asghar Farhadi
14:05 Catharsis 8 ½ (1963) dir. Federico Fellini
16:12 NonEnding Come and See (1985) dir. Elem Klimov
18:03 Breaking the Frame Waltz with Bashir (2008) dir. Ari Folman
20:20 Poetic Beau Travail (1999) dir. Claire Denis
For more CineFix Movie Lists, be sure to subscribe to IGN Movies & TV, but in the meantime if for more deep dives on beginnings and endings, check out these lists and Brilliant Moments!!
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