10 Movies Where The Last Scene Is The Best
6. There Will Be Blood
The final 15 minutes of Paul Thomas Anderson's masterful There Will Be Blood offer up career-best work from basically everyone involved.
In 1927, oil man Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) is drunk at his lush mansion when he's visited by a former associate, preacher Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), who wishes to sell him some land.
Plainview only agrees if Sunday will denounce his faith and deem himself a "false prophet," which he does. However, Plainview then reveals that he's already drained the oil reservoirs on that land and so has no interest in buying it.
As Eli becomes increasingly agitated, Plainview refuses to let up, calling him an "afterbirth" and drunkenly shouting at him.
After dropping the immortal "I drink your milkshake" line, Daniel begins assaulting Eli, and after chasing him around the bowling alley in his mansion, beats him to death with a bowling pin.
Daniel's butler then comes downstairs to check on him, at which point Daniel tells him, "I'm finished," and hilariously upbeat classical music plays us out.
There are many, many scenes in Anderson's film that could compete for the best of the lot, but the climax so brilliantly pays off the movie's themes - greed, ambition, power, the American Dream - in one blisteringly intense and totally unexpected final confrontation.
Daniel Day Lewis likely already had the Best Actor Oscar won by this point in the movie, but that final scene was the absolute clincher.