Movies That Save The Best For Last

An ending can make or break a movie. An otherwise entertaining film that ends on a false note can leave the audience wondering whether the whole experience was worth their time. On the other hand, a great ending can elevate a good movie to a great one, an okay movie to a good one, or even add some redeeming value to what would otherwise have been a disaster.

We're here to celebrate those endings that force you to reevaluate a movie in a positive light. Whether they're the result of clever twists, powerful emotional catharsis, or unexpected changes from formula, these endings are the best scenes of their respective films. The quality of these movies varies greatly, ranging from all-time classics to laughable duds, but the common thread between them is that they all save the best for last and send audiences home on a high note.

This article contains spoilers for all of the movies discussed..

In many ways, "Doctor Strange" is one of the more formulaic Marvel origin stories, with Stephen Strange's character arc having a lot in common with that of Tony Stark's in the first "Iron Man" movie. What a relief it is, then, when the climax of "Doctor Strange" breaks significantly from the standard Marvel Cinematic Universe formula. Whereas most MCU entries build up to giant fight scenes between the heroes and villains, Scott Derrickson's 2016 film finds a more clever, less combative method for the Sorcerer Supreme to save Earth from the cosmic terror of Dormammu.

Strange's strategy initially appears to be an attempt at diplomacy — he announces his intention to "bargain" with Dormammu, at which point the Dark Dimension ruler promptly kills him. It soon becomes clear, however, that Strange's true strategy isn't one of diplomacy but one of annoyance: He's trapped both himself and Dormammu in a time loop where Strange keeps coming back to be killed again and again and again. Eventually, Dormammu gets so sick of the loop that he agrees to Strange's terms to leave Earth alone. More superhero movies could benefit from the kind of inventive use of superpowers displayed in this unique "battle."

Many of Pixar's movies, from "Toy Story 3" to "Coco" to "Turning Red," save their most emotional moments for the end. The ending of "Monsters University," the 2013 prequel to "Monsters Inc.," stands out for elevating what's otherwise a cute but unexceptional parody of college movies into something that lives up to Pixar's general high standard of quality.

There are many family movies about following your dreams, but "Monsters University" is one of the few to acknowledge that dreams can fail and change. No matter how hard he tries, Mike Wazowski realizes he's never going to be scary. That's okay, because he finds there are other things he's good at, specifically working as a scare assistant. Both Mike and Sully end up expelled for all the trouble they cause, but they find they don't need to follow the set path of academia to succeed — they apply for jobs in the mailroom at Monsters Inc. and the credits sequence shows them gradually working their way up the corporate ladder. It's an unusual but positive message of flexibility.

Before Hayao Miyazaki came out of retirement, 2013's "The Wind Rises" was set to be the master animator's final feature film. An unusually realistic and adult-oriented anime compared to his other works, "The Wind Rises" is a fictionalized biopic of Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer who designed the Zero fighter planes used by Japan in World War II. As you might expect, this story doesn't have a happy ending, and the final scene of the movie would have been an incredible final statement by Miyazaki.

"The Wind Rises" ends with Jiro dreaming of himself in the land of the dead alongside the ruins of his planes, destroyed in suicide bombings, and the ghosts of his engineering hero Caproni and his deceased wife Nahoko. It's the existential nightmare of acknowledging one's life's work has been used for evil. According to the documentary "The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness," the film's ending was almost even darker, with Jiro actually dead and unable to go to heaven. Even in its softened-down state, however, the struggle of having to keep living with one's sins is unusually heavy stuff for a filmmaker best known for family-friendly fantasies.

At the start of 1973's "F for Fake," filmmaker Orson Welles assures the audience, "During the next hour, everything you hear from us is really true and based on solid facts." He spends the next hour talking about various real life hoaxes, from art forgeries to the fictional news broadcasts in his own 1938 "War of the Worlds" radio drama. But "F for Fake" runs longer than an hour, and in its final 28 minutes, it becomes one of the very "fakes" the first hour was documenting.

Welles is honest about his fakery, of course. All his assurances of truth at the beginning were clearly stated to last just one hour, and at the end of the film, he openly admits to "lying my head off" during the 17-minute story about his partner and co-writer Oja Kodar modeling for and swindling Picasso. In an era of "fake news," Welles' trolling deconstruction of the documentary format is more relevant than ever.

In contrast to the nonstop narrative propulsion of his 2015 breakout hit "Tangerine," Sean Baker's 2017 feature "The Florida Project" is a much slower-paced, episodic story. Set in a motel outside of Disney World, the film centers around Moonee, a six-year-old girl having fun with her friends while her loving but neglectful single mother, Halley, struggles to make ends meet. It's a movie that's repetitive by design to best get across the reality of life in poverty, but the ending shakes up this repetition in ways both heartbreaking and absolutely stunning.

Eventually, things get bad enough that child services comes to take Moonee away from Halley. In this moment of deep pain, Moonee and her friend Jancey escape and run away to the Magic Kingdom. People can debate whether the Disney World scene, which was shot in secret, is meant to be real or the children's fantasy, but however you interpret it, the conclusion makes the film as a whole far more memorable than it would have been without it.

You can debate which "Monty Python" movie is the funniest, but "Monty Python's Life of Brian" is definitely the one with the strongest story, which leads to the strongest ending. This irreverent, oft-censored 1979 comedy follows Brian, a "very naughty boy" living in proximity to Jesus who is accidentally mistaken for the Messiah. At the end of the film, Brian has been sentenced to death by crucifixion, and all attempts to save him go horribly awry.

Unable to do anything to escape his slow and painful death, other crucified men cheer Brian up by singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." Optimistic, nihilistic, absurdist, extremely British — there are lots of ways one can describe the comedic juxtaposition of Eric Idle's silly, upbeat song with the direness of its context. Whatever you want to call it, it struck a chord. In 2014, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" became the most frequently requested funeral song in the United Kingdom.