Best Final Lines in Movies

Ten movies that knew exactly when to stop talking, plus one that should have stopped sooner.

Entries
10
Category
Film
Updated
  1. A stainless steel gull-wing sports car lifting off a suburban driveway, its wheels folded flat, leaving a trail of fire.

    10. Back to the Future

    Robert Zemeckis · 1985

    Marty frets that there isn't enough road to hit 88. Doc: "Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads." Ronald Reagan quoted it in the 1986 State of the Union, which is the most 1985 sentence possible.

  2. A shattered white porcelain coffee cup on a police station floor, a bulletin board crowded with notices behind it.

    09. The Usual Suspects

    Bryan Singer · 1995

    Kujan drops his coffee cup, Kevin Spacey's limp straightens, and the voiceover finishes the trick: "And like that, he's gone." Christopher McQuarrie won the Oscar for the script. Rewatching it now has its own twist.

  3. A row of 1930s biplanes circling the tip of the Empire State Building, a single torn ribbon fluttering on the spire.

    08. King Kong

    Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack · 1933

    Carl Denham over the body on Fifth Avenue: it wasn't the airplanes, "it was beauty killed the beast." The planes did, in fact, do most of the work. Denham is a showman and he is not about to credit the Navy.

  4. A colossal rusted crown and torch half-buried in the sand of a desolate beach at sunset, horse hoofprints leading up to it.

    07. Planet of the Apes

    Franklin J. Schaffner · 1968

    Charlton Heston on his knees before a half-buried Statue of Liberty, damning everyone to hell. Rod Serling's twist survived every rewrite of the script he co-wrote with Michael Wilson. The Twilight Zone guy, ending something on a twist. Unthinkable.

  5. An empty wheelchair rolled away from a giant round war room table under a ring of lights, mushroom clouds on the wall map screens.

    06. Dr. Strangelove

    Stanley Kubrick · 1964

    Peter Sellers rises from the wheelchair: "Mein Führer, I can walk!" Then the bombs, and Vera Lynn. Kubrick cut the planned pie fight in the War Room as too farcical. The apocalypse was fine, the pie was too much.

  6. A deck of playing cards fanned on a small table beside a freshly popped champagne bottle and a tennis racket used as a spaghetti strainer.

    05. The Apartment

    Billy Wilder · 1960

    Jack Lemmon finally tells Shirley MacLaine he adores her. She hands him the cards: "Shut up and deal." The film won Best Picture and Wilder took director and screenplay. Three Wilders in a top five is not bias. It is arithmetic.

  7. A grand curving staircase in a decaying Hollywood mansion, newsreel cameras on tripods at the bottom, a swimming pool glowing outside.

    04. Sunset Boulevard

    Billy Wilder · 1950

    Gloria Swanson, a real silent star, plays a fictional one gliding down the stairs toward newsreel cameras she thinks are a film crew: "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up." Cecil B. DeMille appears earlier, as himself. Wilder again.

  8. An abandoned 1930s sedan with its horn stuck, parked on a dark street under Chinese lanterns, a broken pair of eyeglasses on the pavement.

    03. Chinatown

    Roman Polanski · 1974

    "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown." Joe Mantell's Walsh says it over the wreck. Robert Towne wanted Evelyn to survive; Polanski wrote the final scene himself days before shooting and killed her. Nobody forgot it, Jake.

  9. A foggy airport runway at night, a propeller plane taking off, a trench coat and a bottle of Vichy water dropped in a wastebasket.

    02. Casablanca

    Michael Curtiz · 1942

    "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." Producer Hal Wallis picked it from two options in a telegram, and Bogart came back to dub it a month after shooting wrapped. The best line in the movie was a pickup.

  10. A blond wig lying on the seat of a motorboat speeding across a sunlit bay toward a yacht.

    01. Some Like It Hot

    Billy Wilder · 1959

    Jack Lemmon pulls off the wig and announces he's a man. Joe E. Brown, as Osgood Fielding III: "Well, nobody's perfect." Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond wrote it as a placeholder until something better came along. Nothing did.

Honorable mentions

  • Two figures' worth of snow boots by a dying fire at a burned-out Antarctic research station, a whiskey bottle in the snow.

    The Thing

    John Carpenter · 1982

    MacReady and Childs sit by the burning camp, and MacReady suggests they just wait a while and see what happens. Kurt Russell says he pitched that ending to Carpenter. Forty-some years later, everyone is still waiting.

Dishonorable mentions

  • Two lightsaber hilts wrapped in cloth and half-buried in desert sand outside a domed adobe hut under twin suns.

    Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

    J.J. Abrams · 2019

    A trilogy built on the idea that a hero can come from nowhere ends with a stranger on Tatooine asking her name, and her answering "Rey Skywalker." She was a Palpatine. She took the in-laws' name. Galaxy-wide, nobody asked.

Every list.
On tap.

No newsletter. Point your AI at our public MCP server, or follow the RSS feed. New lists show up in both.

Get the MCP RSS