The final scenes of a movie are particularly important in how it is perceived by the audience; those closing images will likely linger in the mind longer than any others, and if they're not right, boy, is the film going to suffer for it. Most viewers will let a couple of crappy scenes go if they occur during the middle of an otherwise great film, but when it's the finish line where filmmakers stumble, it can outright deny a movie classic status, instead relegating it to "nice try, but no cigar". No matter how superb the acting, how potent the writing is up to that point, these 10 films could not overcome the dreadful endings they tried to get away with. Be it annoying open-endedness, a movie that never seems to end (I think you know which film I'm talking about) or a straight-up cop-out, here are 10 near-classic movies ruined by terrible endings...
10. I've Loved You So Long
Kristin Scott Thomas gives the performance of her life in this riveting drama about Juliette (Thomas), a woman who has spent 15 years in prison for murdering her young son. It's a ripe, provocative premise for a film, as it attempts to get us to sympathise with a seemingly monstrous figure, who we come to learn
isn't all that bad by way of a tacked-on ending. One of the great things about 99% of this film is its crushing ambiguity; we've never told much about why Juliette did what she did, and instead it focuses itself as an intense character study. This is all thrown completely out the window, then, when in the final minutes of the film, we learn that her son was suffering from a terminal illness, and she killed him to spare him pain. Furthermore, she refuses to state this at her trial because she felt that she should have been punished for bringing him into the world - and therefore making him suffer through his life - in the first place. It's too sudden, too contrived, and completely upends what was a daring and very courageous movie up to that point.