THE END

The final scenes of a movie can make or break an entire picture. However good the previous couple of hours, if the last five minutes go spectacularly wrong, you could be looking at the difference between a classic and an also-ran. The best movie endings should feel consistent with what’s come before and emotionally satisfying.

You can have the credits roll after a massive cliffhanger, have your heroes going down in a blaze of glory, let the bad guys win, or make the audience question everything they’ve just seen with a killer twist. All of the above – and many more – are represented in our list of the best movie endings of all time.

Spread across 80 years of cinema history, the 25 movies are listed chronologically, rather than being ranked – frankly, putting them into a countdown would have melted our minds. How do you decide whether the twist ending of The Usual Suspects is better than the emotional close of Casablanca? Or if Planet Of The Apes’ big reveal trumps The Italian Job’s literal cliffhanger?

And with this being a list of the best movie endings, it should go without saying that we’re going to be telling you what happens at the close of a lot of films, so there are many, many spoilers ahead. You have been warned…

Casablanca 1942

Arguably the greatest propaganda film of all time – if you’re ever in any doubt about doing the right thing in wartime, just think, ‘What would Rick Blaine do?’ – also has one of the best movie endings. Rick could have Ilsa, the love of his life, stay in Casablanca with him, but instead he sacrifices his happiness to make sure she boards a plane bound for Portugal with her husband, resistance fighter Victor.

Rick’s bittersweet farewell speech is one of the most quoted of all time – “You’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life”; “We’ll always have Paris”; ”Here’s looking at you, kid” – and has made generations of viewers weep. At least Rick gets the consolation of hanging out with