Inspired by the thread that bemoans pesky endings to otherwise excellent movies, I thought I'd start one to celebrate movies that really landed the ending with style, much better than anticipated, and sometimes against steep odds. Sure, there are some obvious ones—Citizen Kane, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Usual Suspects, or the first (and only clever one) Saw—but what are the more unexpected ones?
Obviously, *SPOILERS* ensue.
Recently, The Lego Movie is a perfect example. It was truly surprising to me how clever this movie was, given that I thought it was going to be little more than a product-placement-driven fiasco, but even as I was enjoying it all the way through, I never saw its sweet, poignant and oh so satisfying conclusion coming. When it topped that with yet another funny, adorable parting joke, it won me over as probably the best ending of any movie in 2014.
But, I'd also add: Jean-Pierre Melville's endlessly cool, neo-noir classic Le Samouraï, which succeeded both in the leads' wordless final exchange and the opening of the revolver after the final shootout; Carol Reed's nearly perfect The Third Man, whose brilliant cold-shoulder ending is sometimes eclipsed by its legendary mid-movie entrance; whimsical, meta-gem Stranger Than Fiction, which allows its characters a sweetly happy ending even as it questions the storytelling integrity of doing so, and it's all the better for both; the double, bittersweet gut-punch of "I"'s leaving his best friend to grow up and get on with his adult life and Richard E. Grant's exceptional Hamlet soliloquy in Bruce Robinson's hilarious cult classic Withnail & I; and the nightmarish ending to George Sluizer's 1988 horror-thriller The Vanishing (not the spineless English-language 1993 remake from the same director).
However, top of the pile, with an ending that turned a still-stellar B-movie classic into a bona fide juggernaut of horrors and biting social critique, and made all the more excellent by one massively fortuitous accident of casting, George Romero's inceptional zombie flick Night of the Living Dead.