Perfect endings

OP I never saw that. Looks interesting

"The 400 Blows"

The Mechanic with Charles Bronson and Jan Michael Vincent.

Perfection.

Sid & Nancy

Erica walks the painting home.

Splendor in the Grass. The Awful Truth.

This always makes me laugh.

"Hair" (1979)

The Shawshank Redemption

Choose Me directed by Alan Rudolph.

Final scene is on a bus after an elopement with a slightly crazy Keith Carrasine and a very prickly and wary Lesley-Ann Warren.

The camera focuses on her face as it floods with doubt, and then it slides into an expression of complete fulfillment.

It’s like the anti-Graduate in that sense.

The movie tends to be divisive, but I love it, especially for that final payoff.

The ending of the original "Planet of the Apes."

Need I say more?

Days of Heaven

Brokeback Mountain:

Ang Lee built up the desolation and solitude in the two preceding scenes and then twisted the knife when Heath Ledger returned alone to the trailer to grieve alone in silence.

The “Jack, I swear” has since become a meme, but when I saw the movie in the theater, I felt a profound sense of sadness and complete understanding that I had never felt in a film before.

Mary, away!

Alien

Babette’s Feast

R11's clip.

Probably the most moving I've ever seen was the ending of "Red," which was also the ending the entire "Trois Couleurs" trilogy. I was really crying at this, and so was almost everyone in the theater. if you haven;t seen the film, the ending won't make any sense, but if you've seen it, it may make you choke up again.

One favorite is the great scene at the end of Jacques Tati's "Playtime" where the American tour bus leaves Paris to bring the tourists back to the states, and the traffic circle they're stalled in is filmed like a funfair carousel.

Nothing anyone could say could out-MARY! your next-to-last sentence, R17.

"Lola"

Sorry, no subtitles.

Papillon

The Third Man

"That's not the Northern Lights... that's Manderley!"

Final Destination 5!

It has a stinger of an ending that pays a glorious reward to any fan of the series, which I am only faintly embarrassed to admit being.

It even inspires a critique of cultural rot that goes beyond the confines of the twisted fean hose!

I don't know if this will work on DL, but the ending of 'The Umbrellas of Cherbourg'. Always makes me cry.

^ And Final Destination 5’s ending also provides unintended parallels with Kieslowski’s Three Colors trilogy!

Link especially for you, r18.

Sunset Boulevard

R26, the ending is sublime.

The losses of love and youth, the inescapable presence of the past without hope of return, and the mutability of our own characters in time, which makes an intensity of long ago seem almost unreal in the context of the present.

I’ve seen the movie a dozen times and I’m never prepared for the finale.

Psycho

The incomparable SIX FEET UNDER, still gives me chills.

Birdy

Awful movie but the final shot is immortal.

Pret-A-Porter. Chris Rea setting up a baby model shoot while Grace Jones' La Vien En Rose starts playing.

The Graduate. Ben and Elaine, still wearing her wedding dress, in the bus. Driving away.

Sorry, it's of course Stephen Rea who's in Ready To Wear aka Pret-A-Porter.

Call me Mary but I just saw Mamma Mia 2 yesterday and thought it had a wonderful ending. The scene in the chapel where we see Donna watch over Sophie, her family and friends while singing about her love, her life was magical.

[italic]The Long Good Friday[/italic] - English mobster Bob Hoskins and his classy girlfriend Helen Mirren have been setting up a huge business deal. It all goes pear shaped because a colleague, unbeknownst to Hoskins, did a deal with the IRA and screwed them over. So stupid. At the end Hoskins thinks he's got everything squared away, gets into the car, and realizes the IRA has him. And that is a very young Pierce Brosnan holding the gun.

It's worth seeing. There is a gay subplot.

Cinema Paradiso

Another vote for Cinema Paradiso

El secreto de sus ojos

What on Earth happened to dear Ronee Blakley to make her swell up so dreadfully in the last decade? Food issues?

Hannibal( tv series) ending:

The Howing

*The Howling

Well Carrie of course. How'd we get this far without anyone saying that?

The Stepford Wives 1975- That creepy supermarket music and the end focus on Katherine Ross' eyes.

I saw that recently with some relatives young and old who had never seen it r45. It was so cool to hear them say NOOO! and aw!!! at the end. They were so shocked and sad. It really was a change of pace that the hero/heroine didn't get away.

I fuckin loved the ending of Mamma Mia 2 too!

Billy Wilder and Mike Nichols made their careers out of great endings. Wilder always had the perfect line (Sunset Blvd., Double Indemnity, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment), and Nichols was great at making viewers reconsider everything they thought they should feel (The Graduate, Closer, Working Girl).

“The Last Picture Show” had just about a perfect ending.

R46- The 1975 version was truly great cinema [never saw the remake]. I actually read the book recently and the film is much better - even though the book had a major scene change from the film that really made more sense than the one in the film.

What is the scene change r49?

R50- *SPOILER*

In the book, the men tell Joanna that if she goes to Bobbie and Bobbie cuts her finger and bleeds, that will convince Joanna that she's mistaken about the women being "changed". So she goes to Bobbie who pulls out a knife and tells Joanna to come closer to watch her cut her finger- but that's where the scene ends. The next scene is in the supermarket with the "new" Joanna, so the assumption is that Bobbie killed her.

Death Wish (original)

Planet of the Apes (original)

2001: A Space Odyssey

Carrie

American Graffiti

A Christmas Story

Some Like It Hot

Sunset Boulevard

The Apartment

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

The Godfather

Cabaret

The 400 Blows

Chinatown

Dr. Strangelove

Shane

Easy Rider

Gone With The Wind

It's A Wonderful LIfe

Psycho

Bonnie and Clyde

The Wild Bunch

All That Jazz

The Terminator

The Thing (remake)

The Vanishing (original)

Let The Right One In

Being There

A Clockwork Orange

Brazil

The Graduate

Fight Club

Aimee and Jaguar

Brokeback Mountain

This after credits scene was actually the perfect ending to Hannibal.

That is better r51. In the movie the whole way she goes to the mansion to find her children is a bit awkward. The kids are safe. She should have just hid herself until the doctor comes back.

In the book does Diz have a wife? It is odd in the movie how he makes them for the other men but doesn't have one for himself.

(although this movie obviously works better if you don't think about it too much. Otherwise you start thinking what happens when the kids grow up and notice mom doesn't seem to age or dad dies and they take mom somewhere else and she short circuits and the doctors find out she is a robot.)

I'd go with "Georgy Girl." It has the reprise of the Seekers' famous theme song, but with lyrics that are rarely sung (they're not on the pop single), that suggest (as do the images of Georgy's posh wedding to the millionaire) that neither she nor he have fully what they want in the end: he's going to have to put up with someone else's baby, and she's going to have to put up with the millionaire to legitimate the baby. She does have the baby, though:

That's all you wanted,

Right from the start!

(Well, didn't you?)

A very haunting ending to what was once a very seminal movie.

R54- I agree- I didn't think that it made much sense in the film for Joanna to just stand there while her double came strolling up to her to kill her. Especially after she whacked Walter over the head with the fireplace iron.

I don't remember Diz having a wife in the book but some of it I skipped over because there were a few dull passages. Walter came across as a total non-entity- although that could be because it was all from Joanna's point of view- and there wasn't any real reason as to why he would agree to this.

The end of "Georgy Girl" is really ominous. The final image is of Georgy cuddling and kissing the baby with a look of bleak resignation on her face. Oh she's "rich" now, with a baby, but also stuck in a loveless marriage to an old man who does not appear pleased to have a baby in his life. Not a happy ending at all.

From Dusk to Dawn. The final shot when the camera pulls back to reveal what the bar really was.

I like the one with a little girl tells her friends and family that there’s no place like home.

The ending of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. I saw it in the theater and it was the last thing I was expecting. Totally shocked.

What about one of DL's favorite movies, Rosemary's Baby? I always thought that the ending to both the book and the movie was really the perfect way to end that particular horror story.

r60, no one has ever been as great a screamer as Veronica Cartwright.

The ending of "Walkabout" always haunts me.

It makes sense. Roseanne is not well now, but back in the 90's this shit she kicked ass!!

Jaws Some like it hot Casablanca The Getaway Contempt Don’t look now After hours What’s up doc Mad Max The Godfather

The ending of Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood is super shocking.

Of all the great directors, I think fellini is the greatest at endings:

NIGHTS OF CABIRIA: Cabiria, utterly devastated after having discovered her true love was just trying to take her for her money, walks along the road in the forest is sobbing n tears. A group of young people walking the same direction catch up to her and start walking past her, and their high spirits make her smile through her tears despite herself.

LA DOLCE VITA: Marcello and the young girl try to talk across the estuary at one another but cannot hear each other. Marcello is led away by a woman from the party, and the young girl across the estuary smiles enigmatically and sadly--he can't hear her voice (representing innocence).

JULIET OF THE SPIRITS: Abandoned by her philandering husband, Giulietta almost completely breaks down into complete hallucination in the villa. But she seems to put the fantasy of her father running away aside, and walks slowly out of the villa in the very early morning out past the cypresses, as if she is walking into sanity and independence.

FELLINI SATYRICON: Encolpius starts to narrate what happens next, but suddenly his words stop and he--and all the characters in the film--are shown to be now crumbling mosaics in a ruined house, all that is left of the nearly forgotten past.

"The French Connection II" -- "Popeye" Doyle finally eliminates the elusive drug dealer "Frog One", and nothing more needs to be said.

I loved the ending to Spanking the Monkey. Also Big Night.

Some foreign gay themed movies come to mind with Ferzan Opatek being involved in all of them.

Loose Cannons. The characters from the flashback and present mingle together at the wedding. Beautiful shot.

Hamam: The Turkish Bath. Francesca d'Aloja smoking while looking over the city. The music, the voice over. Wow.

Magnifica presenza. Pietro taking a seat in the empty theatre and watching the group's play.

My apologies. Ferzan Ozpetek, of course.

for TV finales. Newhart with Emily showing up post-dream.

old school movies with Claude Raines and Ingrid Bergman:

Casablanca - Rains and Bogert walking into the fog

Notorious - Rains walking back into the mansion knowing he is going to meet his fate after one of the more suspenseful scenes that is people simply walking down a stair case.

Hey Fellini Fan / r67, great choices.

The closing scene of Nights of Cabiria is also my favorite Giulietta Masina scene, and it made me think of how Bob Fosse ended the same story with Sweet Charity, which gets loads of hate, but i love both the film and the scene so much I think I balance it out for the rest of the world.

When the flower children come across a devastated Charity, they offer her a daisy, the same flower she is still wearing in her hair from her failed wedding, that she might think is a symbol of humiliation and hopelessness, and in fact, we’re not sure which way she’ll go as her face vacillates. Like Massina in Cabiria, this is my favorite Shirley MacLaine scene.

The flower children could represent her lost youth and the elderly couple her dashed dreams for the future, but her resolve proves stronger than ever.

I had a friend who hated the movie because of the sad ending, but I don’t think it’s a tragic one, as it closes on a note of gentle kindness inspiring hope.

Life is Sweet. Two young sisters sitting in their backyard- just being.

Six Feet Under for sure.

Don’t Look Now.

A seventies Sutherland twofer along with In asio. Of the Body Snatchers.

For me, the praising of Fellini endings is incomplete without the mention of I Vitelloni.

The movie was about the aimless drifting of postwar young men in a small Italian town.

At the end of the movie, one of the guys (perhaps representing the director himself) decides he has to leave town. Initially as the train begins to depart the station, Fellini cuts back & forth between closeups of the guy and what the guy is looking at. Initially we see the train station receding from view, but then in a genius move, Fellini cuts to shots of the guy's parents in bed and his hungover friends in their respective homes (with the camera roving as if the train is passing them by as well).

It manages to be both sad and exhilarating at the same time.