The more we think about the role of movie endings, the more sense it makes to say that how something ends can often be more important than how it began. Compare the idea to the various types of relationship that we establish with people in our lives. First, there are people with whom five minutes is enough to tell you that you’d rather cut your fingernails with the lawnmower than have to see ever again. Next are the people who you do like and who are awarded a lasting position in your life (generally known as friends, family, and – if we’re lucky – occasionally spouses and our own children.) Then there are those people who make an excellent first impression, but who later turn out to be the sort that you’d gladly volunteer to a real life Human Centipede programme.
And then there’s the fourth kind. These are the people who you meet and make a decent connection with, but who turn out over time to be outright diamonds. The theory here is that all movies follow one of these basic templates. Love at first sight can happen, and many movies’ opening credits prove this (see the gorgeous tone of Amelie’s opening cut, the effortlessly cool snappiness of Guy Ritchie’s Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrells, or the quiet but violent power of Apocalypse Now) – but most of the time there’s a process.
Movies such as Rocky, The Graduate, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Blair Witch Project, Midnight Cowboy, Joe Carnahan’s 2010 reboot of The A-Team (“FINALLY!” shouted 10 million original A-Team fans, as the theme tune was cracked out over the closing credits), and Shutter Island, for instance, all have much to offer throughout, but they are also great examples of the fact that it is often only in the end that we find out whether something was truly worth the commitment.
This isn’t an article about terrible movies that were saved by their endings, or even about good movies that were made great by their endings. In fact, one of the movies on the list can only be classified as staggeringly dreadful. And the list is certainly not meant to represent the best ending sequences.
Choosing these would be impossible, and everyone’s opinion would be different anyway (although do please feel free to add your own favourites in the comments below). All this article is, is a selection of movies in which the final scenes were, for some reason or another, remarkable.
Oh, and spoilers ahead – obviously.