Ranking all of Stanley Kubrick’s endings from worst to best
There are countless strings that make up the impressive bow that is the filmography of the timeless filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. Mastering almost every single cinematic genre, Kubrick can stand tall as one of the greatest directors of all time, rubbing shoulders only with such greats as Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa, Steven Spielberg, Yasujirō Ozu, Alfred Hitchcock and Paul Thomas Anderson.
A master craftsman, Kubrick toiled over the creation of each and every one of his movies, spending hours planning out storyboards before meticulously recreating every film with painstaking attention to detail. As a result of his perfectionism, the director is known for several moments of cinematic history, such as when he became the first-ever filmmaker to capture a sequence under only the glow of candlelight during the making of 1975’s Barry Lyndon.
Cinematographers look upon his work with reverence; screenwriters study each beat of his films, and filmmakers have long respected his directorial style, with Kubrick subsequently becoming one of the most influential cinematic creatives of all time. One thing he was particularly proficient at, was knowing how to end his films, with almost each and every one ranking highly among the greatest movie finales of all time.
Look at how we rank each of Kubrick’s movie endings in our definitive list below.
Ranking all of Stanley Kubrick’s endings
13. Killer’s Kiss (1955)
Stanley Kubrick’s second feature film reaches its peak in a sequence crackling with suspense and fear. The movie’s washed-up boxer protagonist, Davey Gordon, faces off with a gangster in an eerily deserted mannequin factory. With its uncanny array of lifeless figures, the setting adds an extra layer of unease to the unfolding events.
Despite the intense violence, Kubrick ends on a slightly hopeful note. After overcoming and killing the gangster, Gordon returns with the police to free his old flame, Gloria. Gordon then buys a solo train ticket, assuming he won’t be joined, but at the last minute, Gloria turns up, and they kiss. Compared to the rest of the endings of Kubrick’s films, this one feels like the most sickly-sweet, Hollywood-ised of them all.
12. Fear and Desire (1952)
Many people include Stanley Kubrick among the exclusive group of filmmakers who have never made a bad movie, yet such fans forget about the beginning of the director’s career. Every director needs time to find their feet, and such is true for Kubrick too, with his first film, 1952’s Fear and Desire, lacking the fine-tuning of his later works, telling the story of four soldiers trapped behind enemy lines who are forced to face up to their mortality.
A little melodramatic, the film ends with two of the lead characters, Fletcher and Corby, philosophising about the folly of war before they discover two of their friends floating downriver on a raft. Lacking oomph and creativity, it’s definitely not one of Kubrick’s best.
11. Lolita (1962)
Possibly Kubrick’s most controversial movie came in 1962 with the release of Lolita, adapted from the book of the same name by the Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov. Telling the story of a middle-aged college professor, played by James Mason, who becomes obsessed with a 14-year-old girl (Sue Lyon), the director somehow managed to adapt the un-adaptable, making a palatable drama from a complex novel.
However, one downside to the somewhat impressive film is its ending, with Kubrick unusually opting for a happy conclusion, rather than the one the book intended. At the end of the novel, Lolita dies in childbirth, however, in Kubrick’s film, protagonist Humbert travels to Quilty’s house, the abuser of the titular character, before intertitles state that the former dies whilst awaiting a murder trial for the killing of Quilty. It’s a bit of a damp squib, really.
10. Spartacus (1960)
Only the director’s fifth feature film, 1960’s Spartacus, was a significant step up for the then 30-year-old, director. Brought onto the project well into its production, Kubrick wasn’t given the time and space to develop his own ideas with the project, a fact that no doubt led to it being considered among his worst films. Based on the 1951 novel of the same name by Howard Fast, the film starred Kirk Douglas as a slave and gladiator who led a revolt against the Roman Republic.
Using some religious imagery, Kubrick finishes the film with Spartacus on a cross, being punished for his crimes, whilst his family is sneaked out of the city. Passing beneath his feet, they thank him for their freedom and future. It’s a touching climax that undoubtedly lacks the panache of his later movies.
9. Full Metal Jacket (1987)
In a perfect encapsulation of the utter insanity that comes with war, Kubrick’s Vietnam War epic quickly juxtaposes an execution of an injured soldier with a group of men singing a children’s song. After deciding to end the life of a Vietnamese sniper, Joker’s transformation from a somewhat innocent young man to a dehumanised soldier is finally complete.
We then see the soldiers marching through a burning urban hellscape while eerily singing the Mickey Mouse Club theme song, underscoring the limitless levels of derangement that armed combat subjects people to. Passing through desolate flaming buildings and charred debris, the soldiers’ march onwards whilst Joker’s calm yet manic narration scores the ending. Reflecting on things like “the great homecoming fuck fantasy”, we realise just broken Joker’s psyche is. But, as he puts it rather cynically, “I’m in a world of shit, yes, but I am alive.”
8. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
We’ve already talked about Kubrick’s 1962 movie Lolita being his most controversial, but 1971’s A Clockwork Orange comes in a close second. Adapted from the novel of the same name by Anthony Burgess, the story is a complex dystopian drama that follows Alex, played by Malcolm McDowell, the leader of a sadistic gang who is eventually caught by the government and forced to endure experiments that will manipulate his behaviour.
Attempting to commit suicide due to the torment of the mind-altering experiments, Alex later wakes up in the hospital. No longer having aversions to sex and violence, Alex is left to think freely once more, with Kubrick demonstrating that nothing can stop the free will and determination of the individual against the state. “I was cured, all right!” Alex thinks to himself in a powerful closing statement.
7. The Killing (1956)
Kubrick’s classic noir, The Killing, concludes with a cruel twist of fate that renders the best-laid plans completely pointless. Having planned and successfully executed the heist of a racetrack, Johnny Clay feels like he’s on the brink of beginning his new life. Accompanied by his beau, Fay, he arrives at an airport with a huge suitcase stuffed full of cash. Waiting to board the plane, however, the case falls off the luggage cart and opens, and the two watch as all their winnings fly away – billowing notes of cash that are whipped up and blown away by the plane’s propellor.
In a wonderfully tragic finale, Fay urges Johnny to make a run for it before the police arrive. Exhausted, physically and emotionally, he refuses, accepting the ironic futility of it all. “Eh,” he mutters. “What’s the difference?” Two police officers approach him, and it’s clear that Johnny’s end is near. Relentlessly bleak yet blackly comic, Kubrick’s film shows that destiny has a funny way of overturning even the most water-tight scheme.
6. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Kubrick’s final film, 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut was considered to be very worst in the years that followed his death in the same year. Yet, time has been very kind to the movie, which is now seen as something of an eerie exploration of post-modern America. Starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, the story follows a Manhattan doctor who heads out on a night of self-discovery after his wife admits sexual unfulfillment.
With both central characters having experienced significant sexual and personal liberation, the married couple comes together at the film’s end to go Christmas shopping. Apologising to each other for their harsh words and actions, the duo agreed that they should “Fuck” as soon as possible, with the film’s themes coming full circle. Or, is the ending really this simple? Browsing the toy store at the time, it appears as if their daughter goes missing in the film’s final moments, despite having pestered her parents before. The rabbit hole deepens.
5. The Shining (1980)
The Shining provides one of the most iconic and perplexing endings in cinematic history, let alone the horror genre. After the grizzly image of Jack Torrence’s corpse, frozen in an icy and cross-eyed mask of death amid the labyrinthine maze, Kubrick teases the audience with a final frame that completely upheaves any previous theories or notions you might have had about the film.
The image of Jack smiling in a 1921 photograph inside the Overlook Hotel prompts infinitely more questions about the nature of the hotel and its horrifying history than it provides answers, and its ambiguity has fuelled discussions and theories among fans for decades. Upon dying, was Jack ensnared by the psychic trap of the hotel and forced to live forever in that frozen, infinite moment in history? Or is it that Jack and the hotel had a connection long before he, Wendy and Danny set there in the first place? You’ll have to decide for yourself.
4. Barry Lyndon (1975)
After three-and-a-half hours of an epic saga chronicling the rise and fall of the titular 17th-century man, Barry Lyndon concludes with a sobering reflection on the fleeting nature of life and the emptiness of ambition. With Barry left legless and living in destitution, the audience faces a stark epilogue; a dark reminder of our mortality that underscores the futility of earthly ambitions – rich or poor, everyone meets the same fate.
We watch Barry, “utterly baffled and beaten”, as he hobbles his way towards a horse and carriage that will take him back to Ireland – right back to the beginning, after his carefully constructed life in England crumbles underneath him. Emphasising the entirely pointless nature of living, the narrator leaves us with a final nugget of information: Barry “resumed his former profession of a gambler, without his former success.”
3. Paths of Glory (1957)
Having failed to prevent the execution of three soldiers, which our main character Colonel Dax has spent the entire film desperately trying to do, Kubrick delivers a final blow to an audience no doubt convinced that it can’t get any worse. Dax’s men have been ordered by the high command to return to the front – effectively, it’s a death sentence.
As Dax’s soldiers convene in a local inn, drinking away their sorrows, a captive German girl is ushered onto the stage, where she’s forced to sing. She begins a haunting Germanic folk song, which the soldiers slowly fall entranced by and join in with the singing. In an incredible sequence that still feels modern nearly 60 years later, we see close-ups of the subdued faces of all these soldiers singing – a harrowing humanisation of the armed forces and an utter rebuke of the military’s depiction of soldiers as cold machines. Not wanting to spoil the moment, Dax walks away without informing them of their orders, and we’re left with a haunting tableau of what are ostensibly dead men singing.
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Known as one of the greatest movie endings of all time for good reason, the finale to Kubrick’s 1968 epic 2001: A Space Odyssey is a glorious symphony of sound and vision. Adapted from the book of the same name by Arthur C. Clarke, the movie tells the story of the discovery of a mysterious relic buried beneath the surface of the moon, leading two men to travel to Jupiter alongside a supercomputer named H.A.L. 9000 to discover its origins.
To explain the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey is to remove the mystery at the heart of the sci-fi classic, but essentially, it ends with the protagonist being placed in a human zoo where intelligent beings study him. Explaining the ending in his own words, Kubrick once stated: “When they get finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of superbeing and sent back to earth… It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, that was what we were trying to suggest”.
1. Dr. Strangelove (1964)
In Kubrick’s satirical masterpiece, the audience is dealt a final blow that brings the film’s chilling narrative to a mind-boggling conclusion. Major Kong, a spirited bomber pilot, successfully delivers a nuclear warhead to a Soviet target – despite the entire efforts throughout the film to stop it. As Kong rides the bomb like a cowboy, an unnerving blend of joy and terror grips the audience. Combined with Kong’s triumphant whooping, this iconic image is absurdly humorous yet simultaneously grim. Then comes the coup de grace: a montage of mushroom clouds set to Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’.
Kubrick presents an ending that is essentially the end of the world. Having affirmed the concept of mutually assured destruction throughout, the montage of mushroom clouds blossoming and sprouting suggests a global annihilation yet to come, but absolutely guaranteed due to Kong’s payload. If ever there was a film that conveyed the pure and utter absurdity and farce of war, particularly nuclear war, it’s this film. And if there was ever a single image that encapsulated the existential insanity of splitting the atom, it’s Kong riding the warhead like a bucking bronco. Sadly, the ending is as relevant today as 50 years ago.
