The 10 Most Perfect Movie Endings of the 2020s, Ranked

Image via A24 Published Sep 7, 2026, 8:09 PM EDT Diego Pineda has been a devout storyteller his whole life. He has self-published a fantasy novel and a book of short stories, and is actively working on publishing his second novel. A lifelong fan of watching movies and talking about them endlessly, he writes reviews and analyses on his Instagram page dedicated to cinema, and occasionally on his blog. His favorite filmmakers are Andrei Tarkovsky and Charlie Chaplin. He loves modern Mexican cinema and thinks it's tragically underappreciated. Other interests of Diego's include reading, gaming, roller coasters, writing reviews on his Letterboxd account (username: DPP_reviews), and going down rabbit holes of whatever topic he's interested in at any given point. Sign in to your Collider account Throughout the 2020s, the world has been treated to several movie endings so phenomenal that they're bound to go down in history as some of the 21st century's best. There are multiple ways for a film ending to be exceptional, depending on what the film itself demands. Whether they're slow-paced or explosive, poignant or joyful, shocking or gratifying, the best movie endings of the decade are all undoubtedly fantastic in every way that matters. But it's one thing for a movie ending to be great, and a wholly other deal for it to be downright perfect—a rare phenomenon that the last six years have only seen on a handful of occasions. From horror spectacles like Obsession to indie gems like Past Lives, the most flawless film endings of the 2020s are proof that it's perfectly possible to bring an exceptional movie to a conclusion that's nothing short of perfect. There are spoilers ahead! 10 'The Father' (2020) Image via Lionsgate Directed by Florian Zeller and based on his 2012 play Le Père, the French-British co-production The Father is one of the greatest psychological dramas of the decade so far. For quite obvious reasons, 2020 as a whole didn't see a large volume of films, but there were ones that were released during the COVID-19 pandemic which were nothing short of masterful. Case in point: The Father, a mostly single-location film about an 80-year-old Londoner named Anthony, who refuses help from his daughter as he ages while suffering from rapidly-advancing dementia. All in all, it's one of the heaviest movies of the last 25 years, since Zeller places the viewer entirely within the protagonist's shoes with a level of commitment and gravitas that Anthony Hopkins sells like an absolute pro. Never is The Father a sadder film, however, than during its conclusion, where Anthony is revealed to be living in a nursing home rather than his own apartment, having fully succumbed to his condition. It's an absolutely gut-wrenching conclusion, anchored by some of the best acting Hopkins has ever delivered on the big screen. 9 'Past Lives' (2023) Image via A24 Romantic dramas can at times feel a bit trite, since they tend to rely on predictable formulas and artificial emotions rather than genuine honesty. Celine Song's semi-autobiographical directorial debut, Past Lives, is entirely different. It's one of the best romantic dramas of the decade so far, about two childhood friends from South Korea who reconnect years later, grappling with the choices that have gotten them to where they are in life. It's a premise that Song handles with refreshing emotional maturity and sincerity, talking about the bittersweet realities of love, connection, and growing up. A big part of why it's one of the most perfect A24 movies ever is its ending, where Nora and Hae Sung say goodbye on the street while waiting for his Uber, quietly accepting what could have been but never will be—at least not in this lifetime. Poignant and beautifully subdued, it's proof that subtlety can go a long way in making a romantic drama feel like no other film audiences have ever seen. 8 'Oppenheimer' (2023) Image via Universal Pictures Going into the 2020s, Christopher Nolan was already firmly established as one of Hollywood's current blockbuster filmmaking kings. For Oppenheimer, however, he went all the way back to his roots: a fully character-driven drama, but equipped with every artistic skill he had acquired throughout the 21st century—and the high budget that came with that trajectory. This biopic following the life and work of J. Robert Oppenheimer ended up quickly becoming one of the highest-grossing R-rated movies of all time. Oppenheimer is a resounding masterpiece for a wide variety of reasons, not least of which is its powerhouse conclusion, one of the scariest non-horror movie endings of all time. Nolan ends the movie by revealing what was said during a conversation between Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein, the father of the atomic bomb revealing to his colleague that he believes his invention had truly started an unstoppable chain reaction that would destroy the world. Nuclear paranoia has been a constant theme across all of cinema since 1945, and the emotional and thought-provoking power of that theme is what makes Oppenheimer's ending so unshakable. 7 'Anora' (2024) Image via A24 It's no wonder why Sean Baker's Anora made its way to becoming a five-time Oscar winner, seeing as it is one of the best romantic movies of the last five years. Largely bolstered by Mikey Madison's Oscar-winning tour-de-force lead performance, this romantic dramedy follows a young Brooklyn sex worker who impulsively marries the spoiled son of a wealthy Russian oligarch, which changes her life forever. In Anora's final scene, Ani breaks down in tears in the arms of one of the oligarch's henchmen, after a failed attempt at physical intimacy in his car. Like all of film history's most perfect endings, Anora's is wonderfully complex, layered, and infinitely analyzable. The scene as a whole is an incredibly powerful examination of the limits of transactional affection and the tragedy of not knowing how to receive genuine kindness, an ending that is itself as thematically nuanced as many entire romance films from the 2020s. Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best PictureIs Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one. 🪜Parasite 🌀Everything Everywhere ☢️Oppenheimer 🐦Birdman 🪙No Country for Old Men FIND YOUR FILM → 01 What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don't just entertain — they leave something behind. ASomething that pulls the rug out — that makes me think I'm watching one kind of film and then reveals I'm watching another entirely. BSomething overwhelming — funny, sad, absurd, and genuinely moving, all at once. CSomething grand and weighty — a film that makes me feel the full scale of what I'm watching. DSomething formally daring — a film that pushes what cinema can even do. ESomething lean and relentless — pure tension with no wasted frame. NEXT QUESTION → 02 Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What's yours? AClass, inequality, and what people are willing to do when desperation meets opportunity. BIdentity, family, and the chaos of trying to hold your life together when everything is falling apart. CGenius, moral responsibility, and the catastrophic weight of a decision you can never take back. DEgo, legacy, and the terror of becoming irrelevant while you're still alive to watch it happen. EEvil, chance, and whether moral order actually exists or if we just tell ourselves it does. NEXT QUESTION → 03 How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means. AGenre-twisting — I want it to start in one lane and migrate into something completely different. BMaximalist and genre-blending — comedy, action, drama, sci-fi, all in one ride. CEpic and non-linear — cutting between timelines, building a mosaic of cause and consequence. DA single unbroken flow — I want to feel like I'm living it in real time, no cuts to safety. ESpare and precise — every scene doing exactly what it needs to do and nothing more. NEXT QUESTION → 04 What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you? AA system — invisible, structural, and almost impossible to fight because it has no single face. BThe self — the ways we sabotage, abandon, and fail the people we love most. CHistory — the unstoppable momentum of events that no single person can stop or redirect. DThe industry — the machinery of culture that chews up talent and spits out irrelevance. EPure, implacable evil — a force so certain of itself it becomes almost philosophical. NEXT QUESTION → 05 What do you want from a film's ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like? AShock and inevitability — a conclusion that recontextualises everything that came before it. BEarned emotion — I want to cry, laugh, and feel genuinely hopeful, even if the world is a mess. CDevastation and grandeur — an ending that makes me sit in silence for a few minutes after. DAmbiguity — something that leaves enough open that I'm still thinking about it days later. EBleakness — an honest refusal to pretend the world is tidier than it actually is. NEXT QUESTION → 06 Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what's even possible. AA gleaming modern city with a hidden underside — beauty masking rot, wealth masking desperation. BA collapsing suburban life that opens onto something infinite — the multiverse of a single ordinary person. CThe corridors of power and science at a world-historical turning point — where decisions echo for decades. DThe grimy, alive chaos of New York and Hollywood — fame as both destination and trap. EVast, indifferent landscape — desert and highway where violence arrives without warning or reason. NEXT QUESTION → 07 What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable. AProduction design and mise-en-scène — every frame composed to carry meaning beneath the surface. BEditing and tonal control — the ability to move between registers without losing the audience. CScore and sound design — music that becomes inseparable from the dread and awe of what you're watching. DCinematography as performance — the camera not recording events but participating in them. ESilence and restraint — what's left unsaid and unshown doing more work than any dialogue could. NEXT QUESTION → 08 What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you. ASomeone smart and resourceful who makes increasingly dangerous decisions under pressure. BSomeone overwhelmed and ordinary who turns out to be capable of something extraordinary. CA brilliant, tortured figure whose gifts and flaws are inseparable from each other. DA self-destructive artist whose ego is both their superpower and their undoing. EA quiet, principled person trying to make sense of a world that has stopped making sense. NEXT QUESTION → 09 How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately. AI love a slow build when I know the payoff is going to be seismic — patience for a devastating reveal. BGive me relentless momentum — I want to feel breathless and emotionally spent by the end. CEpic runtime doesn't scare me — if the material demands three hours, give me three hours. DI want it to feel propulsive even when nothing is technically happening — restless energy throughout. EDeliberate and unhurried — I want dread to accumulate in the spaces between the action. NEXT QUESTION → 10 What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want? AUnsettled — like I've just seen something I can't fully explain but can't stop thinking about. BMoved and energised — like the film reminded me what actually matters and gave me something to hold onto. CHumbled — like I've been in the presence of something genuinely important and overwhelming. DExhilarated — like I've just seen cinema doing something it's never quite done before. EHaunted — like a cold, quiet dread that stays with me for days. REVEAL MY FILM → The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works. ParasiteYou are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho's Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it's ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image. Everything Everywhere All at OnceYou want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels' Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn't want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it's about. OppenheimerYou are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort. BirdmanYou are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it's about. Alejandro González Iñárritu's Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor's ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn't be possible. Michael Keaton's performance and Emmanuel Lubezki's restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all. No Country for Old MenYou are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be. ↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ 6 'Project Hail Mary' (2026) Image via Amazon MGM Studios Based on Andy Weir's 2021 novel of the same name, truly one of the greatest hard sci-fi books the world has seen in many years, Project Hail Mary is fittingly also one of the best hard sci-fi movies of the entire 21st century. At the very least, it's one of the most beloved sci-fi movies of the 21st century, audiences around the world really having resonated with its story about a man who wakes up aboard an interstellar spaceship with a mission to save the universe, unable to remember how he got there. The entire film then unravels as Grace's journey of recalling his life on Earth while trying to accomplish his mission, accompanied by an alien he has newly befriended. This leads to the story's ending, where Grace sacrifices his chance to return to Earth in order to save Rocky. Though many of the 2020s' most perfect endings have either been tragic, or at least profoundly poignant, Project Hail Mary's conclusion blends its poignancy with a beautifully heartwarming sense of joy and peace that's inevitably contagious. 5 'The Holdovers' (2023) Image via Focus Features Christmas movies, in their efforts to be deeply heartwarming, can at times feel cheaply sentimental or clichéd. Not Alexander Payne's The Holdovers. Though this has become an un-missable Christmas classic since its release in 2023, it avoids the usual forced cheer of the genre while still managing to be surprisingly heartwarming. It follows a cantankerous classics teacher, a grieving school cook, and a troubled student who are forced to spend the Christmas break together at a New England prep school in 1970. Proof that a film can be largely poignant and still be beautifully life-affirming. It's one of the most perfect movies of the last five years, proof that a film can be largely poignant and still be beautifully life-affirming. Nowhere is that emotional balance clearer than in its ending, where Paul sacrifices his teaching position to save Angus from being sent away to a military school, the two sharing a warm farewell handshake before Paul leaves. Surprising in its emotional restraint yet undeniably bittersweet, it's a conclusion that's impossible not to love. 4 'Obsession' (2026) Image via Focus Features The 2020s have thus far seen a surprising amount of YouTubers deliver surprisingly high-quality films, and Curry Barker's Obsession is probably the most noteworthy example. One of the 2026 movies that blindsided the box office, this smash hit is one of the scariest and most creative horror movies of the past six years, about a young man who uses a wish-granting device to make his crush fall in love with him against her will. It's a simple enough premise, but the terrifying wonders that Barker and his team pull off with it as their basis are often downright jaw-dropping. Case in point: Obsession's ending, where Bear overdoses on pills in the bathroom in an effort to cancel out his wish. Before he has a chance to vomit the pills back out, Nikki breaks a second One Wish Willow to make him love her back before he dies, freeing Nikki. Inde Navarrette and Michael Jonston act the living hell out of the scene, and Barker's writing and direction further elevate it into being one of the most memorable horror endings of the last decade. 3 'Dune: Part Two' (2024) Image via Warner Bros. For the longest time, no one would have blamed any fan of Frank Herbert's Dune for assuming that it was simply impossible to make an adaptation of the book series that truly lived up to its tremendous legacy. In came Denis Villeneuve to prove the naysayers wrong. His Dune was incredible, but Dune: Part Two? This continuation of Paul Atreides' journey to get revenge for his father's murder is the sort of transcendental sci-fi epic that's bound to be remembered as one of the genre's best outings forever. Indeed, Dune: Part Two can already be counted among the best sci-fi movies in film history; and like all the best sci-fi movies, it has an ending that's nothing short of perfect. Paul defeats his enemies, seizes the Imperial throne, and unleashes a devastating Holy War across the galaxy. Villeneuve perfectly understands and captures the complexity of such a moment: On the one hand, it feels like a triumphant victory for the film's protagonist. But on the other hand, it's also quite clear that Paul has crossed the point-of-no-return in becoming the sort of dangerous messianic leader that audiences should not be rooting for. 2 'Aftersun' (2022) Image via A24 The A24 masterpiece Aftersun is another one of the best directorial debuts of the 2020s so far, a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama by Charlotte Wells that's one of those movies that can change your life. It chronicles a summer in the life of the Scottish girl Sophie, who's spending a holiday on a Turkish resort with her young father, Calum, on the eve of his 31st birthday. Aftersun is the sort of movie that shines entirely thanks to its quiet, subtle, and incredibly understated nature. It's never loud or showy about any of its themes, messages, or emotional beats, and that continues all the way until its gut-wrenching ending. An adult Sophie is watching old camcorder footage of her and Calum saying goodbye as she flies back home from Turkey. As Calum walks into a surrealist dark room, Wells suggests—without actually having to say anything outright—that this was the last time Sophie saw her dad. 1 'Perfect Days' (2023) Image via NEON German auteur Wim Wenders has been one of the greatest and most important European filmmakers of his generation for years, and the Japanese-German drama Perfect Days further displays all the reasons why. It's one of the most heartwarming slice-of-life movies of the last few decades, about a middle-aged man living a quiet life in Tokyo, working as a public restroom cleaner. Perfect Days isn't a movie made for those who prefer films that are heavier on plot or primarily focused on being traditionally entertaining. This Wenders masterpiece is remarkably slow-burning, intentionally uneventful, and all about how beautiful routine, mindfulness, and the mundanity of day-to-day urban life can be when seen from the right angles. Perfect Days' conclusion is the most perfect of any film from the 2020s precisely thanks to its simplicity, as Wenders follows Hirayama driving to work while listening to Nina Simone's "Feeling Good" and feeling a wave of emotions flow into him. Joyful yet poignant, this undeniably gorgeous ending is one of 21st-century cinema's best. Perfect Days Release Date December 22, 2023 Runtime 124 Minutes