Smash hit

15 Gone With the Wind
Victor Fleming, 1939

Boasting a double-whammy of iconic endings, this Civil War epic closes with the destitute heroine Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) being dumped by husband Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) with the immortal lines: “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.” The feisty Scarlett regroups and, within 50 seconds of screen time, faces the camera for that classic tear-stained close-up, announcing: “I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.” KM Read the Times review

14 Doctor Strangelove
Stanley Kubrick, 1964

This comedic countdown to nuclear apocalypse concludes in appropriately bombastic style, with Peter Sellers’ eponymous, wheelchair-bound strategist suddenly finding the use of his legs and Slim Pickens’s bomb commander riding an ICBM, rodeo style, out of a plane. Kubrick’s masterstroke was following such outrageousness with a michievously serene montage of explosions set to Vera Lynn’s We’ll Meet Again. EP Read the Times review

13 Les Diaboliques
Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1955

Forget the so-so American remake – the black-and-white French original has one of the most shocking denouements in screen history. The illtreated wife and the mistress of a cruel provincial head-master are conspiring to kill him, and appear to have done so. Until his “corpse” rears up out of the bathtub, sending his wife into terminal cardiac arrest. Just as her plotting husband and his mistress had hoped. EP Read the Times review

12 The Wizard of Oz
Victor Fleming, 1939

The prototype twist ending has Dorothy Gale (Judy Garland) waking up back in drab and dreary Kansas and realising that the previous 90 minutes of multicol-oured action adventure were only part of a fever dream. Bummer. Farm hands Hunk (Ray Bolger), Zeke (Bert Lahr) and Hickory (Jack Haley) gather round Dorothy’s sickbed, invoking their counterparts from Oz – Scarecrow, Lion and Tinman respectively. Dorothy decides that, despite the allure of faraway lands, “There’s no place like home”. KM Read the Times review

11 Thelma & Louise
Ridley Scott, 1991

In this outlaw chick-flick Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis are on the lam in a Ford Thunderbird convertible. After a truck-stop altercation turns deadly, the two women flee across the US. Eventually they are cornered by the police, but Sarandon floors the accelerator and sends the car hurtling over a cliff. Part exploitation movie, part cri de coeur for abused women, this film let its girls go down gloriously unrepentant. WI

10 The Sixth Sense
M. Night Shyamalan, 1999

The twist to end all twists. Try as he did in subsequent movies such as Signs and The Village, Shyamalan has failed to trump his debut film’s climax. Malcolm Crowe, Bruce Willis's child psychologist is making good progess with a troubled boy who can “see dead people” (Haley Joel Osment), until it dawns on Crowe that he himself is a ghost. The genius of the ending was not just its unexpectedness, but the way it forced a reevalution of the film’s previous events – “So that’s why his wife was ignoring him!” EP

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