Best film endings of all time

Casablanca!

Usual Suspects is good, too.

gets its name from a line in Casablanca.

:bounce:

I agree. Casablanca is truly the best film of all time. "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." (That ending was a last minute rewrite, too.)

And, to the previous poster, you're right! I didn't even think of that. :dunce:

:thumbsup:

Jay

For all the right reasons.
They'll always have Paris.

Sixth Sense, or Unbreakable.

There's also that other movie that I can't remember the title...it's the one where Kevin Beacon had his full nude scene.

Neve Campbell and Bill Murray had 'em all snookered.

I loved the twists and turns in that movie

....was some SCARY shit!! :evilgrin:

"Nobody's Perfect!"

That movie is as close to flawless as they come. :thumbsup:

of "Bonnie & Clyde" Heartbreaking.

A series of swift cuts heightens the emotion and the loss.

Great choice! :toast:

Cheney (not DICK) finds that he has enough money for "the in-betweens", gives Poe and Speed $500 or so "to look after the cat", and strolls out of town.

Speed: For a man who came to town to make some money, you're sure leaving alot of it behind
Cheney: You're forgetting about the in-betweens
Speed (to Poe): He sure was somethin'
Poe: Let's go get the cat

You XX'ers may cry at the end of An Affair To Remember, but this one makes me get all misty...

And well it should. But, you have bitten off a mighty big topic here. What about Hitchcock's "Rebecca," "North by Northwest," "Rear Window" or "Vertigo?" Comedy? The aforementioned "Some Like It Hot," "Arsenic and Old Lace," "Young Frankenstein?" I can't go on. My head is swimming. Oh yeah - what about "Jaws?" See, I told you so.

nod to Seven.

"I'm having an old friend for dinner"

.

Raiders had a great climax, but the ending was intentionally anticlimactic. Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade was the one with a good ending.

People don't much remember (apparently), but the ending of Casablanca was Rick and Louis heading off to the Free French base (the "start of a beautiful friendship"). I myself voted for Casablanca, meaning the final scene with Bergman, but of course the actual ending is great, too.

a dancer, a composer, a crazy boss and a train.


Honorable mention to Papillon, The Wild Bunch and The Sand Pebbles.

Last line from The Sand Pebbles:

"What happened? What the hell happened?"

"Pike...Pike..." Took me a few viewings over the years to twig to just what Ernie's deal was :)
A great movie

Not mentioned...

Shane
Bridge Over the River Kwai
Planet of the Apes (original)

was a good ending. I like movies that don't end in some false tale of "everything's going to be just fine". Those are often too cutesy sweet and nowhere near reality.

and of course Casablanca.

*bleak mood*

Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick agreed with me on this one!

But seriously, City Lights is an incredible film with an even more incredible ending. I encourage everyone to check out the new DVD.

Talk about heartbreaking! :thumbsup:

my old standby, good for any thread. but seriously, all those oscars can't be wrong.

"CHINOOOOO! come and get me too, chino"

bang

"YOU KILLED HIM! YOU ALL KILLED HIM!"

"chino, do you have another bullet for me? how many? enough for him, and him?"

te adoro, anton

boohoo boo hoo hooooo

A classic.

thrilling, chilling.

But I wish it had ended differently. I really cared about the characters and wanted a happy ending... or at the very least a Thelma & Louise II.

-- Allen

Callie Khoury's Oscar! In her acceptance speech she said "For everyone who wanted a happy ending to 'Thelma & Louise,' this is it." :loveya:

the original (and i hate that i have to differentiate between two of them.)

eom

If you only knew the power of the Dark Side. Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.

He told me enough. He told me you killed him.

No. I am your father.

by far!

There are two...

The bad guys who are the film's good guys decide to face the Mexican warlord and rescue their friend, knowing they will die. They machine gun (gattling gun?) the entire encampment and each and every one of them die. It uses a hellish Hollywood finish of blood and violence but with no traditional Hollywood message. There is no moral center in the film. The heroes are flawed bad men. They are old and ugly and over-the-hill. Yet, we feel a certain joy at the end as they go out in a blaze of violence and a sadness or emptiness when others arrive to find them.

Il Sorpasso is a fantastic Italian film of the early 60's. I saw it with subtitles on TV when I lived in Oakland many years ago and I actually went out and bought the video: Vittorio Gassman (a great Italian actor) and the French actor Jean Louis Trintignant, directed by Dino Risi. It's about a shy law student (Trintignant) who is studying for a college exam when this loud-mouthed Italian guy (Gassman) who is basically good but overly self-assured and bombastic asks to use his telephone. He ends up inviting the shy law student in his sports car driving cross country through Italy, trying to get the shy guy to open up (and also getting the law student to finance their adventures with his money). At the end, just as the shy college student starts acting more cool and looks forward to going back to his dorm to ask that girl next door out on a date, the loud-mouthed guy tries to pass a car at high speed and drives off a cliff into the Mediterranean. The loud-mouthed self-assured guy of course manages to save himself. The shy guy gets crushed on the rocks below. Although I don't like Hollywood remakes, I'm surprised that a film this good was never Americanized and updated into an American film, as Hollywood seems to be short on ideas of late.

Thus the enormous sense of loss when they are gone.

Good call on this one -- :toast:

Best movie endings ever are as follows...

#1 The Shawshank Redemption

#2 Apollo 13

#3 Citizen Kane

#4 Fight Club

#5 Singin' in the Rain

#6 Do the Right Thing

#7 Jaws

#8 Dead Poets Society

#9 The Wizard of Oz

#10 In the Bedroom

"You bastards!!!..."

Good ol Chuck...

IMO this is one of the best scenes in the history of cinema. I always pull for him to steal the bike.

n/t

'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' has my all time best ending...I cry every time I see it *lol*

Great ending :evilgrin:

Snarf snarf!

It's funny as hell, though... fer sure! {burp!}

... the young Don Johnson was SOOO cute! We are such suckers for a pretty face, we can forgive anything!

:evilgrin:

That sacrifice scene was really fucked up.

A movie that's a study of food and what it means to people. The final scene, under credits, is the bow on the package. No other film has ever been wrapped up so perfectly.

Preacher comes late, out of the bushes to Cochise's burial. He stands over the grave remembering the good old days and the "high nights" of their youth. And he spills a little wine for all the brothers who aren't there. Then he jogs away to the song "I'll Be There" by the Four Tops, to become a screenwriter.

Talk about living and dying by your beliefs!!!!

Breaking the Waves
Pieces of April
The Soft Skin
Leaving Las Vegas
Girl on the Bridge
Respiro
In the Mood for Love
The Shame (Bergman)

--definitely The Shame. I will never forget that.

The Italian Job.....the original one with Michael Caine!

P.

Seasons, The Agony and the Ecstasy...I could go on...

the new version of "Dawn of the Dead" to the mix. If you haven't been to see it yet, stay thru the credits, you'll see the truly heartbreaking and scary ending.

:scared:

PS: The original The Vanishing (the Dutch-French one) had another great bleak ending.

I loved the ending to it. The encounter with the alien spaceship, the return of the airmen abducted decades earlier (and none having aged at all), Richard Dreyfuss' character leaving with the aliens.

One of the best film endings ever.

Terry

As Mifune shakes off the dust and rambles on to another town.

Bleak endings are the best.

You had no idea what was up until the last 5 minutes of that movie.

;-)

Carpenter is genius.

No, I'm not kidding.

Other films that had good endings: The Warriors, Cheech and Chong's Up in Smoke, Full Metal Jacket, and of course Black Rain.

Shug and her dad making up and Celie getting her sister back (and Albert redeeming himself in order to make that happen).

Good stuff.

... both endings! I love it when they give alternate endings on the DVD!

Other good endings:

Catch Me If You Can
American Graffiti
... they give a little bit more on what happened later.

Identity
Phone Booth
Matchstick Men
... it gives a kick to an otherwise "why did I watch this?" movie.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off
... just because!

n/t