Best Twist Endings (Entertainment Weekly)
Posted on June 13, 2008 at 8:18 am
In honor of M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie The Happening, Entertainment Weekly has prepared a list of the all-time best movies with twist endings. Don’t worry — the twists will not be revealed unless you ask for them. It’s a great list: “Psycho,” “Diabolique,” “Fight Club,” “The Usual Suspects,” and more classics. But they left out one of my favorites, an underrated gem with more than one twist about a high-stakes poker game in the wild west with a powerhouse cast including Henry Fonda, Jason Robards, and Joanne Woodward:
My high school English teacher used to say that the measure of a good book or movie with a surprise ending is that even after you know the surprise ending, you can read the book or see the movie again and still draw fresh enjoyment from it. (O’Henry and Saki were both such writers). Some of the movies on this list flunk that test, but others (such as 12 Monkeys) have a lot of nutritional content after the initial shock value subsides.
I wsa disappointed that Brazil was not on the list. That was a better movie, and a better twist, than most of the others on the list.
Several of the entries were unreadable on my screen – perhaps they were white text on a white background. Very frustrating!