10 Greatest Cut To Black Movie Endings EVER
When a movie ends at JUST the right moment.
How a movie ends is so, so important, because it'll have a huge impact on how an audience member regards the entire experience. After all, last impressions count for a lot.
There are countless ways to end a film of course, but smash-cutting to black is an extremely common technique given its tendency to give a movie's final moments an added punchiness, especially if set to a well-suited piece of music.
As film fans we've all surely seen thousands of cut-to-black endings at this point, so it takes something truly special to stick in the mind and create a lasting memory.
But these 10 movies, each of them masterful works of cinema in their own right, knew precisely when and how to wrap things up, concluding on a genius cut to black which provided the perfect final jolt the film needed.
These films were all going to be great regardless of exactly how they ended, but these expertly conceived and edited final moments placed a bow on everything that led up to it.
From shocking final shots to deeply thought provoking and even hilarious ones, all were punctuated by a note-perfect cut to black...
10. The Usual Suspects
The Usual Suspects executes one of the most brilliantly impactful cut-to-black endings of all time by tethering it to one of the most mind-melting twist endings in movie history.
Bryan Singer's mastery mystery-thriller concludes by revealing that con artist Kerbal Kint (Kevin Spacey) was actually the shadowy crime lord known as Keyser Söze all along.
More to the point, the convoluted yarn Kint had unspooled to Agent Dave Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) was largely a heap of bulls**t cobbled together on-the-fly, using random objects around the office as inspiration.
And so, Kint/Söze gets away as Kujan attempts to track him down, all while quotes from earlier in the movie are replayed with their shocking new context.
This glorious montage climaxes with a clip from earlier in the movie, where Kint tells Kujan, "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist. And like that... he's gone."
As Kint says, "He's gone," the movie smash cuts to black, providing a jaw-dropping exclamation point for what remains one of the most ingenious movie twists ever.