Spiritual Trilogy recap: the story so far

No. 01 · 1960 · Film

L'Avventura recap

Anna, her lover Sandro and her friend Claudia join a group of wealthy Romans on a yacht trip to the Aeolian Islands. On a bare rocky island Anna tells Sandro she is unhappy, he brushes her off, and soon after she cannot be found. The group, the police and Anna's father search the island without result. Sandro and Claudia carry on looking for her across Sicily, following a rumour planted in a newspaper and a chemist's story that Anna passed through on her way to Noto. Along the way Sandro kisses Claudia, follows her onto a train, and the two become lovers while Claudia feels guilty about her missing friend. Sandro proposes and she turns him down. They end up at a hotel in Taormina where Sandro's employer is throwing a party. Monica Vitti stars in all three films of Antonioni's Alienation Trilogy, each about couples who cannot reach each other in postwar Italy.

How L'Avventura ends

Anna is never found and the film never says what happened to her. At the Taormina hotel Claudia admits she is afraid Anna will come back and take Sandro, and is relieved to think she might be dead. In the early morning she finds Sandro on a couch with Gloria Perkins, a young woman who sells herself to rich men. Claudia runs out to a terrace. Sandro follows, sits on a bench and cries. After a long pause Claudia puts her hand on his head and strokes his hair as they look out toward Mount Etna.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 02 · 1961 · Film

La Notte recap

In Milan the novelist Giovanni Pontano and his wife Lidia visit their friend Tommaso, who is dying in a hospital. Lidia leaves upset; Giovanni lingers and is pulled into a kiss by a disturbed young patient, which he later tells Lidia about and she shrugs off. That afternoon Giovanni attends a launch for his new book while Lidia wanders the city alone, through the outskirts where they used to live. In the evening they go to a nightclub, and Lidia keeps hinting there is something she needs to say. They move on to an all-night party at the villa of the industrialist Gherardini, who offers Giovanni a well-paid job. Giovanni flirts with and kisses Gherardini's daughter Valentina; Lidia learns by phone that Tommaso has died and drives off with another guest, Roberto, but refuses his kiss. As in the rest of Antonioni's Alienation Trilogy, the plot is a slow drift through one relationship that has quietly stopped working.

How La Notte ends

The marriage ends the film in a sand trap on the golf course, unresolved. At dawn Lidia tells Giovanni that Tommaso loved her, that she once chose Giovanni, and that she no longer loves him. Giovanni says the marriage has failed but insists he still loves her. Lidia reads aloud a love letter, and Giovanni does not recognise it as his own, written to her years earlier. She tells him they do not love each other anymore. He pulls her down into the bunker and keeps kissing her while she resists, and the camera pulls away.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 03 · 1962 · Film

L'Eclisse recap

In Rome in the summer of 1961, the translator Vittoria leaves her fiance Riccardo after a long, exhausted night of talking. She goes to the Rome Stock Exchange to find her mother, who gambles on shares, and meets her mother's young broker Piero, a restless man who lives for the trading floor. Vittoria spends an evening with her neighbours, including a woman back from Kenya. The market then crashes and her mother loses a large sum; Piero walks Vittoria home and tries to kiss her. While they talk below her window, a drunk steals Piero's sports car, and it is later pulled from a lake with the thief dead inside, which bothers Piero mainly because of the dented bodywork. The two start an affair in his parents' empty flat and in his office, though Vittoria tells him she wishes she did not love him, or loved him more. It closes Antonioni's Alienation Trilogy, again with Monica Vitti as a woman unsure what she feels.

How L'Eclisse ends

Neither lover turns up for their date. After a last meeting in Piero's office, Vittoria and Piero promise to meet that evening at their usual corner near a building site. The film then leaves them entirely. For the last several minutes it watches the empty street corner as evening falls: places and passers-by seen earlier in the film, a water barrel, a bus stop, a nurse with a pram, the unfinished building. The streetlights come on and the film ends on a close-up of a lamp, with no sign of either of them.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 04 · 1964 · Film

A Fistful of Dollars recap

A nameless drifter, called Joe by the undertaker, rides into the Mexican border town of San Miguel, which is split between two smuggling families, the Rojos and the Baxters. After shooting four Baxter men who mocked him, he hires on with the Rojos, then sells information to both sides. When Ramon Rojo massacres a troop of Mexican soldiers to steal their gold, the stranger props two of the dead in a cemetery so each gang believes the other has a witness, and the families fight it out. He then frees Marisol, a woman Ramon keeps as a prisoner, and sends her away with her husband and son. The Rojos catch him, beat him badly, and burn out the Baxters while he crawls away to hide in a mine, nursing his hands. This is the first of Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy, three films with Clint Eastwood as a laconic gunman in a poncho, scored by Ennio Morricone.

How A Fistful of Dollars ends

The stranger returns and kills Ramon and the rest of the Rojos. When the Rojos string up the innkeeper Silvanito, the stranger walks out through dynamite smoke. Ramon, who boasts that a rifle shot to the heart always kills, keeps hitting him in the chest, and he keeps standing up: he is wearing a steel plate under his poncho. He shoots the rifle out of Ramon's hand and challenges him to reload faster than he can, then kills him. Silvanito shoots the last Rojo, and the stranger rides out of town.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 05 · 1965 · Film

Repulsion recap

Carol Ledoux, a young Belgian manicurist in London, shares a flat with her older sister Helen. Carol is withdrawn and repelled by men: she flinches from a polite suitor, Colin, and is disgusted by Helen's married boyfriend Michael, his razor in the bathroom and the sounds of their lovemaking through the wall. When Helen and Michael leave for a holiday in Italy, Carol is alone in the flat and starts to come apart. She stops going to work, leaves a skinned rabbit to rot on the counter, sees cracks split open the walls, and imagines a man breaking in to rape her at night. Hands reach out of the corridor walls. Colin forces open the door to tell her he loves her, and she kills him with a candlestick and leaves him in the bath. This is the first of Roman Polanski's Apartment Trilogy, three films where a home becomes the setting for a character's mental collapse.

How Repulsion ends

Carol kills a second man, and Helen comes home to find her catatonic under a bed. The landlord lets himself in to collect the rent, sees the wrecked flat, and tries to force himself on Carol; she cuts him to death with Michael's razor. Helen and Michael return to the barricaded flat, find Colin's body in the bathtub, and discover Carol lying under the bed, unresponsive. Neighbours gather as Michael carries her out. The camera settles on a family photograph in which young Carol stares at an older man, hinting at abuse the film never states.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 06 · 1965 · Film

For a Few Dollars More recap

Two bounty hunters work the same territory: Monco, a young drifter, and Colonel Douglas Mortimer, an older former officer with a collection of long-range guns. Both are after El Indio, a murderous bandit freed from prison by his gang, who carries a musical pocket watch and is haunted by a woman he assaulted years ago. Indio plans to rob the bank of El Paso, which hides its money in a disguised safe. After sizing each other up with a hat-shooting contest, the two hunters agree to split the reward. Monco joins Indio's gang from the inside, but the robbery goes ahead and the gang escapes to Agua Caliente with the safe. Mortimer talks his way into the gang too; when the two hunters are caught trying to steal the money, Indio has them beaten and then lets them escape, planning to set his men against them. It is the middle chapter of Leone's Dollars Trilogy, with Eastwood again as the unnamed gunman.

How For a Few Dollars More ends

Mortimer kills Indio in a duel, avenging his sister. Monco and Mortimer pick off the gang in Agua Caliente. Indio disarms Mortimer and starts his watch chiming for a duel, but Monco steps in with a second, matching watch and gives Mortimer his gun back. When the music stops Mortimer shoots Indio. The watches reveal that the woman Indio raped, who killed herself, was Mortimer's sister. Mortimer leaves his share of the bounty to Monco, who loads the bodies onto a cart, recovers the bank money, and rides off.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 07 · 1966 · Film

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly recap

During the American Civil War, three gunmen chase a cache of stolen Confederate gold. Angel Eyes, a mercenary, learns of it while carrying out killings for pay. Blondie and the bandit Tuco run a scam in which Blondie turns Tuco in for the reward and then shoots through his hanging rope; when Blondie abandons him, Tuco marches him across a desert for revenge. A dying soldier, Bill Carson, tells Tuco the gold is buried in Sad Hill Cemetery and tells Blondie the name on the grave, so the two must keep each other alive. Captured while wearing Confederate uniforms, they land in a Union prison camp run in part by Angel Eyes, who tortures Tuco and takes Blondie along to find the gold. The rivals reunite, cross a bridge battle between armies, and blow up the bridge. The last of Leone's Dollars Trilogy, it is set earlier than the other two and is often read as a prequel showing how the gunman gets his poncho.

How The Good, the Bad and the Ugly ends

Blondie wins a three-way duel and leaves Tuco with half the gold and a noose. At Sad Hill, Blondie writes the real grave's name on a stone and sets up a standoff with Tuco and Angel Eyes. Blondie shoots Angel Eyes; Tuco finds his gun was unloaded the night before. The gold lies in the unmarked grave next to Arch Stanton's. Blondie makes Tuco stand on a cross with a noose round his neck, rides away with his share, then shoots the rope from a distance, leaving Tuco to curse him over his bags of gold.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 08 · 1968 · Film

Rosemary's Baby recap

Rosemary Woodhouse and her husband Guy, a struggling actor, move into the Bramford, an old Manhattan apartment building with a dark history. Their elderly neighbours Minnie and Roman Castevet befriend them, and Guy spends more and more time with them. After a young woman staying with the Castevets falls to her death, Guy suddenly lands a big part when the rival actor goes blind. On the night they plan to conceive, Rosemary eats a strange dessert from Minnie, passes out, and dreams of being raped by an inhuman creature while the Castevets and others watch. She becomes pregnant, suffers constant pain and grows gaunt, under the care of Dr. Sapirstein, the Castevets' friend. Her old friend Hutch, who distrusts the building, falls into a coma and dies after leaving her a book on witchcraft. It is the second film in Polanski's Apartment Trilogy, where the walls of a home hide a threat no one will believe.

How Rosemary's Baby ends

Rosemary gives birth to the son of Satan and agrees to mother him. Convinced her neighbours are a coven who want the child, she runs to another doctor, who hands her back to Guy and Sapirstein. She is sedated, gives birth, and is told the baby died. Hearing a cry through the wall, she enters the Castevets' apartment through a hidden door with a kitchen knife and finds the coven around a black cradle. The baby has his father's eyes. Roman asks her to be a mother to him, and she begins to rock the cradle.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 09 · 1971 · Film

Klute recap

Tom Gruneman, an executive from a Pennsylvania chemical company, disappears, and the only lead is an obscene letter he apparently wrote to Bree Daniels, a New York call girl. Months later his colleague Peter Cable hires John Klute, a small-town detective and family friend, to find him. Klute rents a basement flat in Bree's building, taps her phone and follows her as she meets clients and goes to acting auditions. Bree tells her therapist her work gives her control but her life feels empty. She says a client once beat her, and Klute traces that man through her old pimp Frank Ligourin to two other women: Jane McKenna, who apparently killed herself, and Arlyn Page, who became an addict. Klute and Bree grow close. Arlyn is found dead in the river, and Klute realises someone is killing the women. It opens Alan J. Pakula's Paranoia Trilogy, three 1970s thrillers built on surveillance, tapes and hidden watchers.

How Klute ends

Cable is the killer, and he falls to his death attacking Bree. Klute traces the letters to Cable's typewriter and baits him with talk of a client book. Cable corners Bree after hours in a garment-district office, admits he was the man who beat the women, killed Jane and Arlyn, and framed Gruneman, then plays her a tape of Arlyn's murder. Klute arrives and Cable goes through a window. Bree packs up her flat. In voiceover she tells her therapist a settled life would drive her mad, then tells a client on the phone she is leaving New York and walks out with Klute.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 10 · 1974 · Film

The Parallax View recap

Senator Charles Carroll is shot dead at the top of Seattle's Space Needle. A committee rules that a lone gunman did it, but over the next three years six witnesses die. One of them, the TV reporter Lee Carter, begs her ex-boyfriend Joe Frady, a newspaper reporter, for help, and is soon found dead of an apparent overdose. Frady digs into the death of another witness in a small town, is held at gunpoint beside a dam by a sheriff, who drowns when the floodgates open, and finds papers from the Parallax Corporation, which recruits security staff through a personality test. A professor tells him the test screens for violent misfits. Frady takes it with answers designed to pass, and Parallax brings him in. He fakes his own death, watches a disturbing montage meant to condition recruits, and follows a Parallax operative who plants a bomb on a plane. The middle chapter of Pakula's Paranoia Trilogy, it turns the assassination thriller into a study of an organisation no one can see.

How The Parallax View ends

Parallax kills Frady and frames him for a senator's murder. Following the operative, Frady slips into an arena where Senator George Hammond is rehearsing for a rally. Hammond is shot from the catwalks above. Frady finds himself up there near a dropped rifle as security rushes in, realises he has been set up as the assassin, and runs for a doorway, where a figure shoots him dead. Six months later the same kind of committee announces that Frady acted alone, closing the case.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 11 · 1976 · Film

The Tenant recap

Trelkovsky, a shy clerk of Polish origin, rents a Paris apartment whose last tenant, Simone Choule, threw herself out of its window. He visits her in hospital, where she lies bandaged and lets out a terrible scream, and meets her friend Stella there. Simone dies. The neighbours and the landlord, Monsieur Zy, complain about every noise he makes and press him to join a petition against another tenant. He finds a tooth in a hole in the wall and sees neighbours standing motionless in the shared toilet across the courtyard. A local cafe insists on serving him Simone's usual order and her brand of cigarettes. After a burglary, Trelkovsky grows feverish and paranoid, wakes wearing makeup, buys a wig and shoes, and begins dressing in Simone's clothes, convinced the building is turning him into her so he will kill himself too. Roman Polanski plays Trelkovsky in the final chapter of his Apartment Trilogy.

How The Tenant ends

Trelkovsky jumps from the window twice and ends up bandaged in Simone's hospital bed. Dressed as a woman, he leaps from the window as he imagines the neighbours watching like a theatre audience. He survives, crawls back upstairs and jumps again. In hospital, wrapped in bandages exactly as Simone was, he sees himself and Stella arrive at his bedside, and lets out the same scream she did, closing a loop in which he has become the tenant before him.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 12 · 1976 · Film

All the President's Men recap

In June 1972 five men are arrested breaking into the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate building. Bob Woodward, a young reporter at the Washington Post, is sent to cover the arraignment and finds one burglar has ties to the CIA. He is paired with Carl Bernstein, and the two chase the story through phone calls, doorstep visits and library records, tying a check in a burglar's bank account to the Committee to Re-elect the President. Woodward meets a secret source, nicknamed Deep Throat, in a parking garage, who tells him to follow the money. Executive editor Ben Bradlee demands better sourcing while letting them keep going. A bookkeeper and the campaign treasurer Hugh Sloan help them confirm a secret fund controlled by top Nixon aides. When they name Bob Haldeman and a source seems to back away, the White House attacks the paper. It closes Pakula's Paranoia Trilogy, this time with the conspiracy taken from the real record.

How All the President's Men ends

The film ends with the reporters still typing as the story leads to Nixon's fall. Deep Throat warns Woodward that lives may be in danger and that the cover-up reaches the highest levels. Bradlee tells them to keep going. On January 20, 1973, a television shows Nixon taking the oath for his second term while Woodward and Bernstein type in the newsroom. A teletype then prints the headlines of the following months: convictions of Nixon aides and, finally, Nixon's resignation.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 13 · 1982 · Film

The Thing recap

In the winter of 1982, a Norwegian helicopter chases a sled dog into an American research station in Antarctica, firing at it until the Norwegians die. Helicopter pilot R.J. MacReady and the station doctor find the Norwegian camp burned out, with a twisted half-human corpse. Back at base the dog transforms into a mass of tentacles in the kennel. The biologist Blair works out that the creature is an alien that absorbs and copies any living thing, and that it could take over the world within years. He wrecks the radio and vehicles to keep it from escaping. The twelve men no longer know who is still human. MacReady takes charge and makes everyone give blood, then tests each sample with a hot wire, since every piece of the creature reacts on its own. It is the first film in John Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy, three films about forces that could end humanity.

How The Thing ends

The station is destroyed, and MacReady and Childs sit in the snow, unsure which of them is human. MacReady finds that Blair has been taken over and is building a small craft under the floor. He sets explosives through the base, faces the creature in its largest form, and blows it up with dynamite. As the station burns, Childs walks back out of the dark, saying he got lost chasing Blair. MacReady hands him a bottle of whisky, and the two wait together for the cold to take them.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 14 · 1984 · Film

Amadeus recap

In 1823 Antonio Salieri, once court composer in Vienna, cuts his throat and is taken to an asylum, where he tells a young priest his story. As a young man he promised God his chastity in return for musical fame. Then Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart arrives at the court of Emperor Joseph II, crude and childish but able to write perfect music without effort. Salieri decides God is mocking him through Mozart and turns against him, blocking his chances while secretly worshipping his scores. Mozart marries Constanze, spends beyond his means, and struggles after the death of his father Leopold, whose stern image appears in his opera Don Giovanni. Disguised in a mask like the one Leopold wore at a party, Salieri commissions a Requiem from Mozart, planning to have him die writing it and to pass the work off as his own at Mozart's funeral. It begins the Obsessed Artist Trilogy, a fan grouping of films about the price of chasing greatness.

How Amadeus ends

Mozart dies while dictating the Requiem to Salieri, and is buried in a pauper's grave. Sick and exhausted, Mozart collapses during a performance of The Magic Flute. Salieri takes him home and writes down the Requiem as he dictates. Constanze returns, locks the score away and sends Salieri off; Mozart is dead by morning, and his body goes into a common grave. Back in 1823, Salieri tells the priest God destroyed Mozart rather than let Salieri share his glory, and as he is wheeled through the asylum he absolves the mediocre people around him.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 15 · 1987 · Film

Prince of Darkness recap

When the last member of a secret Catholic order dies, a priest finds the key to the basement of an old Los Angeles church, where a huge canister of swirling green liquid has been kept for centuries. He asks the physicist Professor Birack to study it, and Birack brings a team of graduate students. Their tests show the canister is millions of years old and the liquid inside is alive. Ancient texts found with it say it holds Satan, the son of a greater Anti-God trapped on the far side of reality, and that Jesus was a visitor who came to warn humanity. Homeless people gather outside and kill anyone who tries to leave. The liquid sprays into one student, Susan, and possesses her, and she spreads it to others. The survivors share the same dream, a broadcast from the future showing a dark figure in the church doorway. It is the second film in Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy.

How Prince of Darkness ends

Catherine sacrifices herself to seal the portal, and the survivors are left fearing mirrors. Possessed student Kelly becomes Satan's body and reaches into a full-length mirror to pull the Anti-God through. Catherine tackles her into the mirror, and the priest shatters the glass with an axe, trapping both on the other side. The possessed die and the crowd outside disperses. Later Brian dreams that the figure in the doorway is Catherine, wakes in fear, and reaches toward his bedroom mirror as the film ends.

No. 16 · 1990 · Film

Days of Being Wild recap

In Hong Kong in 1960, Yuddy, a handsome idler, charms Su Li-zhen, who works a counter at a sports stadium, by asking her to remember one minute they spent together. He then drops her and takes up with Mimi, a cabaret dancer. His friend Zeb loves Mimi without hope. Yuddy fights with his adoptive mother Rebecca, a former courtesan who will not tell him who his birth mother is. Heartbroken, Li-zhen talks through the night with Tide, a lonely police officer on patrol who tells her to call a public phone he passes each night. Tide later leaves the police after his mother dies and goes to sea. Rebecca finally tells Yuddy his mother is in the Philippines; he leaves without telling Mimi and finds his mother's house, but she refuses to see him. It opens Wong Kar-wai's Love Trilogy, set in the same 1960s Hong Kong as In the Mood for Love and 2046.

How Days of Being Wild ends

Yuddy is shot dead on a train in the Philippines. Tide, now a sailor, finds him drunk in Manila and helps him. Yuddy tries to buy a fake passport, stabs a man in a dispute, and the two flee onto a train. Yuddy admits he remembers Li-zhen but tells Tide to say he forgot. Moments later he is shot dead on the train. In Hong Kong the phone Tide gave Li-zhen rings with no one to answer, and in a final scene a stranger in a low room dresses carefully to go out.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 17 · 1993 · Film

Three Colours: Blue recap

Julie survives a car crash that kills her husband Patrice, a famous composer, and their young daughter. In hospital she tries to swallow a handful of pills and cannot. Back home she destroys the score of the unfinished piece Patrice was writing to celebrate European unity, sleeps once with his assistant Olivier, who has long loved her, and leaves. She sells the house and moves anonymously into a Paris flat, taking only a mobile of blue glass beads. She tries to live without attachments, but fragments of the music keep returning to her. She refuses to sign a petition to evict Lucille, a neighbour who works as a stripper, and the two become friends. Her mother, who has dementia, mistakes her for her own sister. Then Olivier says on television that he means to finish the concerto, and the broadcast shows photos of Patrice with a woman Julie does not know. Blue, standing for liberty, opens Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours Trilogy, named for the French flag.

How Three Colours: Blue ends

Julie finishes the concerto with Olivier and lets herself love again. She finds Patrice's mistress, a lawyer named Sandrine, who is pregnant with his child, and gives her the family house and Patrice's name for the baby. She then works on the score with Olivier, who refuses to finish it unless she is credited. She calls him and goes to him. As the chorus sings the finished piece, the film passes over the people her life has touched, and Julie, crying, starts to smile.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 18 · 1994 · Film

In the Mouth of Madness recap

John Trent, an insurance investigator, is dragged into an asylum and tells a doctor how he got there. A publisher had hired him to find Sutter Cane, a best-selling horror novelist who vanished just before delivering his new book, after Cane's agent attacked Trent with an axe. Trent decides the disappearance is a publicity stunt and spots a map of New Hampshire hidden in Cane's book covers, pointing to Hobb's End, the town in Cane's stories. He drives there with Cane's editor Linda Styles, and the road starts to misbehave. Hobb's End exists exactly as Cane wrote it. Linda admits the disappearance began as a hoax, but finds the town turning into Cane's horrors and the people into monsters. Cane, writing in the town church, tells them his readers' belief is making his fiction real and opening the way for ancient beings. It ends Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy, after The Thing and Prince of Darkness.

How In the Mouth of Madness ends

The world ends the way Cane wrote it, and Trent laughs as he watches his own story in a cinema. Cane tears himself open to unleash the creatures, and Trent escapes. Back in New York, he learns he already delivered the manuscript months ago, the book is out, and a film is being made. He kills one of Cane's readers and is committed. One morning his cell is open and the asylum is empty; the radio describes mass madness. He walks into a cinema showing In the Mouth of Madness, sees himself on screen, and breaks into hysterical laughter.

No. 19 · 1994 · Film

Three Colours: White recap

Karol Karol, a Polish hairdresser in Paris, is divorced by his French wife Dominique because he has been unable to consummate the marriage. He loses the salon, his money and his passport, and when she frames him for setting the salon on fire he ends up busking in the Metro. There he meets Mikolaj, a Pole who smuggles him home inside a suitcase. Thieves at the Warsaw airport steal the case, beat Karol and dump him on a rubbish tip. He returns to his brother Jurek's salon, then takes a job guarding a currency exchange and learns his employers are buying up land a company plans to develop; he buys the plots first and gets rich. Mikolaj had asked Karol to kill a man who wants to die. The man is Mikolaj himself, and Karol fires a blank at him, after which he decides to live and becomes Karol's partner. White, for equality, is the comic middle film of Kieślowski's Three Colours Trilogy.

How Three Colours: White ends

Karol fakes his death, Dominique is jailed for his murder, and the two seem to love each other again. Karol leaves his fortune to Dominique and stages his funeral with a corpse bought for the purpose. She comes to Warsaw, finds him alive in her hotel room, and this time they sleep together successfully. In the morning he is gone and the police arrest her. Karol later stands below her prison window. She sees him and signs that she will marry him again when she is free, and he cries.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 20 · 1994 · Film

Three Colours: Red recap

Valentine, a student and model in Geneva, runs over a pregnant dog named Rita and takes it to its owner, Joseph Kern, a retired judge who does not seem to care. She has the dog treated and keeps it, and Kern sends money to cover the vet. When Rita runs back to his house, Valentine finds he spends his days listening in on his neighbours' phone calls. She is disgusted, but they keep talking, and he begins to change; he reports himself to the police and his neighbours sue him. Living near Valentine, unseen by her, is Auguste, a young law student whose life closely mirrors Kern's youth: he passes his exams, then catches his girlfriend Karin with another man. Kern tells Valentine about the woman he loved who betrayed him and later died, and she invites him to her fashion show before she leaves for England by ferry. Red, standing for fraternity, ends Kieślowski's Three Colours Trilogy.

How Three Colours: Red ends

The ferry sinks and seven people survive, among them the leads of all three films. Valentine sails for England, with Auguste on the same boat. A storm sinks the ferry. Watching the news, Kern sees the survivors: Julie and Olivier from Blue, Karol and Dominique from White, a barman, and Auguste and Valentine, pictured side by side. A freeze frame of Valentine matches the large advertising photo of her seen earlier in Geneva.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 21 · 1996 · Film

The Rock recap

General Francis Hummel, a decorated Marine angry that his men who died in covert missions were never honoured, steals rockets loaded with VX nerve gas, takes 81 tourists hostage on Alcatraz, and demands 100 million dollars for the families of the dead. The FBI's chemical weapons specialist Stanley Goodspeed is sent in with a Navy SEAL team, guided by John Mason, a British former SAS man held without trial for decades because he once stole secret government microfilm, and the only person ever to escape Alcatraz. Hummel's men ambush the SEALs in the shower room and kill all but Goodspeed and Mason. Mason slips away to see his daughter, Goodspeed recovers him, and the two disable rockets one by one while the government readies an air strike on the island with thermite. Nicolas Cage's turn as an action lead begins the Cage Uncaged Trilogy, a fan name for his three back-to-back action hits of 1996 and 1997.

How The Rock ends

Goodspeed stops the last rocket and waves off the air strike, and Mason goes free. Hummel aborts his last launch and refuses to kill civilians; his own officers shoot him. Goodspeed and Mason fight the remaining men, and Goodspeed kills the last of them, stabbing atropine into his heart after a VX sphere breaks near him. He lights green flares as the jets arrive, and one plane drops its bombs into the sea. Goodspeed tells his bosses Mason died. Mason tells him where the microfilm is hidden, and Goodspeed later goes to recover it with his girlfriend Carla.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 22 · 1997 · Film

Con Air recap

Cameron Poe, a decorated Army Ranger, kills a man in a bar fight while defending his pregnant wife Tricia and serves eight years. Paroled, he is flown home on a prison transport plane carrying the country's worst convicts, including the mastermind Cyrus Grissom, the black militant Diamond Dog, and the quiet serial killer Garland Greene. Cyrus's men take over the plane. Poe could walk away but stays, partly to protect a guard and his diabetic cellmate Baby-O, and partly because he will not leave his daughter's birthday gift, a stuffed rabbit. On the ground, US Marshal Vince Larkin works out Poe's role, while a DEA agent pushes for a harder response. The plane lands at a desert airfield to pick up a cartel boss and change planes, Poe signals Larkin, and the authorities set up an ambush. The second of the Cage Uncaged Trilogy, it again casts Nicolas Cage as an outsider forced to save the day.

How Con Air ends

The plane crash-lands on the Las Vegas Strip and Poe kills Cyrus, then meets his daughter. During a chase through Las Vegas, Poe and Larkin catch Cyrus and the last convicts as they flee on a fire engine. Cyrus is crushed by a pile driver. Poe meets Tricia and his daughter Casey for the first time and hands her the rabbit. Elsewhere, Garland Greene, the serial killer, sits at a casino craps table, gambling and free.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 23 · 1997 · Film

Face/Off recap

FBI agent Sean Archer has hunted the terrorist Castor Troy for six years, ever since Troy, aiming for Archer, killed his young son. Archer finally captures Troy, leaving him in a coma, but learns Troy has planted a bomb somewhere in Los Angeles. To get the location from Troy's brother Pollux, Archer has Troy's face surgically attached to his own and goes into a high-security prison as Troy. Troy wakes, forces the surgeon to give him Archer's face, kills everyone who knows about the operation, and moves into Archer's life, his job and his family. Archer, trapped as Troy, breaks out of prison and joins Troy's gang, where he meets Sasha, the sister of Troy's drug-dealing friend, who has a son, Adam, by Troy. Each man now lives as the other. Nicolas Cage and John Travolta play both roles in the third film of the Cage Uncaged Trilogy.

How Face/Off ends

Archer kills Castor Troy in a speedboat chase, gets his face back, and brings Troy's son Adam home. After a church shootout in which Sasha dies, Archer promises to look after Adam. Archer's wife Eve learns which man is her husband from his blood type. The fight moves to boats on the harbour, and Archer kills Troy with a speargun. Archer has his face restored, then comes home with Adam, whom his family takes in.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 24 · 2000 · Film

In the Mood for Love recap

In Hong Kong in 1962, the journalist Chow Mo-wan and the secretary Su Li-zhen, known as Mrs. Chan, move into neighbouring rooms in the same crowded building on the same day. Their spouses are rarely home. From a handbag and a tie, the two realise their husband and wife are having an affair with each other. They meet in noodle stalls and act out how the affair might have started, and how Su might confront her husband, promising each other they will not become like them. Chow asks Su to help him write martial arts serials and rents a hotel room, number 2046, so they can work away from the neighbours' gossip. They grow close but hold back. Chow takes a job in Singapore and asks her to come; she reaches the room too late. It is the middle film in Wong Kar-wai's Love Trilogy, with Tony Leung's Chow carrying on into 2046 and Maggie Cheung's character named after a woman in Days of Being Wild.

How In the Mood for Love ends

The two never get together, and Chow whispers his secret into a wall at Angkor Wat. In Singapore, Su secretly visits Chow's room and calls without speaking. Years later she moves back into the old building with a young son; Chow visits his former landlady next door, and neither knows the other is nearby. In 1966, in Cambodia, Chow whispers into a hole in a ruined wall at Angkor Wat and seals it with mud, following an old story about keeping a secret, while a young monk watches.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 25 · 2000 · Film

O Brother, Where Art Thou? recap

In 1930s Mississippi, the talkative Everett McGill escapes a chain gang with Pete and Delmar, promising them a share of buried loot before a valley is flooded for a dam. A blind prophet on a railway handcar tells them they will find treasure, but not the one they seek. They pick up a young guitarist, Tommy Johnson, who sold his soul to the devil, and record a song for cash as the Soggy Bottom Boys; unknown to them, it becomes a radio hit. They ride with the bank robber Baby Face Nelson, wake to find Pete apparently turned into a toad by three river sirens, and are beaten by a one-eyed Bible salesman. Everett's real goal is to stop his wife Penny from remarrying, and he admits there is no treasure. A governor's race between Pappy O'Daniel and reformer Homer Stokes runs alongside them. It opens the Coen Brothers' Idiot Trilogy, three films in which George Clooney plays a fool.

How O Brother, Where Art Thou? ends

The three are pardoned, saved from hanging by the valley flood, and Everett wins back Penny. At Homer Stokes's Klan rally they rescue Tommy, then perform as the Soggy Bottom Boys at Pappy's campaign dinner. Stokes reveals himself as the Klansman and is run out, and Pappy pardons the three. Sheriff Cooley still means to hang them at the valley, but the flood released by the new dam washes everything away. Everett hands Penny the ring he went back for, and she says it is the wrong one; the right ring was in the cabin, now under the lake.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 26 · 2000 · Film

Cast Away recap

Chuck Noland, a FedEx systems engineer who lives by the clock, proposes to his girlfriend Kelly at Christmas just before flying out on a cargo plane. The plane crashes into the Pacific in a storm and Chuck washes up alone on an uninhabited island. He opens some of the FedEx packages that wash ashore, using ice skates as tools and a volleyball as a companion he names Wilson after painting a face on it in his own blood. One package with angel wings painted on it he leaves sealed. He struggles to make fire, pulls out an infected tooth with a skate blade, and learns to fish. Four years later, a sheet of plastic washes up that he can use as a sail, and he builds a raft. It begins the Alone Trilogy, a fan grouping of films where one person survives in total isolation with only themselves to talk to.

How Cast Away ends

Chuck is rescued but has lost Kelly, and he delivers the last package himself. On the raft he loses Wilson in the ocean and is picked up by a cargo ship. Back in Memphis, Kelly is married with a daughter; they admit they still love each other, and part. Chuck drives to Texas to drop off the winged package, with a note saying it saved his life. At a crossroads, the woman who sent it, Bettina, gives him directions, and he watches her truck go, its tailgate painted with the same wings.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 27 · 2002 · Film

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance recap

Ryu, a deaf factory worker, needs a kidney for his sister, but his blood type does not match. After he loses his job, he trades one of his own kidneys and his savings to black-market organ dealers, who take both and vanish. A legal donor then appears and Ryu cannot pay. His girlfriend Yeong-mi, an anarchist, persuades him to kidnap Yu-sun, the young daughter of Park Dong-jin, the factory owner. The child is treated kindly and they get the ransom. But Ryu's sister learns how the money was raised and kills herself. While Ryu buries her by a river, Yu-sun slips into the water and drowns. Dong-jin, grieving, sells his company to fund his own investigation and traces the kidnappers. Ryu kills the organ dealers. Dong-jin tortures Yeong-mi to death with electricity. It is the first film in Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy, three films about revenge and the damage it does to everyone in its path.

How Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance ends

Dong-jin drowns Ryu in the river, and then Yeong-mi's comrades kill Dong-jin. Dong-jin rigs Ryu's apartment, knocks him out, and takes him to the river where Yu-sun died. He cuts Ryu's Achilles tendons in the water and lets him drown, then cuts up the body. Members of Yeong-mi's group arrive, stab Dong-jin, pin a note to his chest, and leave him to die.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 28 · 2003 · Film

Oldboy recap

In 1988 Oh Dae-su, a drunk businessman, is snatched off a street and locked in a hotel-like cell for fifteen years without being told why. Through the television he learns his wife has been murdered and he is the suspect. He trains, digs at the wall, and is released in 2003, just before he breaks through. He meets Mi-do, a young sushi chef, who takes him in, and the two become lovers. Tracing the dumplings he ate in prison, he finds the private jail and fights his way down a corridor full of guards with a hammer. His captor, Lee Woo-jin, a rich man, gives him five days to discover the reason. Dae-su learns they went to the same school, where he saw Woo-jin with his sister Soo-ah and spread gossip that drove her to suicide. The second film in Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy, it again shows revenge consuming the person who carries it out.

How Oldboy ends

Dae-su learns Mi-do is his daughter, cuts out his tongue, and tries to forget. In Woo-jin's penthouse he finds out that Woo-jin used hypnosis to make Dae-su and Mi-do fall in love. Dae-su begs and cuts out his tongue to keep Woo-jin from telling her. Woo-jin then shoots himself. Later, in the snow, a hypnotist helps Dae-su split from the part of him that knows the truth. Mi-do finds and hugs him, and his face twists between a smile and grief.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 29 · 2003 · Film

Intolerable Cruelty recap

Miles Massey, a top Los Angeles divorce lawyer and inventor of the Massey prenup, which no one has ever broken, is bored with winning. He represents Rex Rexroth, a real estate developer caught on video cheating by the private investigator Gus Petch, hired by Rex's wife Marylin, a beautiful woman who marries rich men and divorces them for money. Miles is attracted to Marylin, but in court he calls a Swiss concierge who testifies she asked for help finding a rich, foolish man to marry; she gets nothing. Marylin then marries an oil tycoon, Howard D. Doyle, and makes a show of insisting on the Massey prenup, which he tears up. They soon divorce and she becomes rich. At a lawyers' convention in Las Vegas, Miles falls for her and marries her, without a prenup, then learns Doyle was a soap actor paid to play the part. It is the second film in the Coen Brothers' Idiot Trilogy, with Clooney again as a vain man outwitted.

How Intolerable Cruelty ends

Miles signs away his assets, Marylin tears up the prenup, and they stay married. Fearing he will lose everything, Miles hires an asthmatic hitman, Wheezy Joe, to kill Marylin; then Rex dies and leaves her his fortune, so Miles tries to call it off. Marylin offers Joe more to kill Miles instead, but Joe mistakes his gun for his inhaler and shoots himself. Miles gives up his assets in a new contract, and Marylin rips it up. Gus becomes the host of a TV show about divorce videos.

No. 30 · 2004 · Film

Shaun of the Dead recap

Shaun, a 29-year-old electronics shop worker in North London, spends every night at his local pub, the Winchester, with his slacker flatmate and best friend Ed. His girlfriend Liz dumps him for never changing. Hungover and miserable, Shaun walks to the corner shop the next morning without noticing that the dead have risen around him. When he finally does, he and Ed make a plan: rescue Shaun's mother Barbara and his stepfather Philip, collect Liz and her flatmates David and Dianne, and hide in the Winchester until it all blows over. Philip turns out to have been bitten and dies on the way. The group fights its way through gardens and streets, imitates zombies to slip past a crowd, and gets to the pub, where zombies surround them. Barbara is revealed to have been bitten. It begins Edgar Wright's Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, each film featuring a different flavour of Cornetto ice cream.

How Shaun of the Dead ends

Shaun and Liz survive; Ed is turned, and ends up living in Shaun's shed. In the pub, Shaun shoots his turned mother, David is torn apart, and Dianne goes outside after him. Ed is bitten. Shaun and Liz reach the cellar, and Ed stays behind. The army arrives and rescues them. Six months later, Shaun and Liz live together, the zombies are used as cheap labour and game show contestants, and Shaun visits Ed, now a zombie, chained in the garden shed, to play video games.

No. 31 · 2004 · Film

2046 recap

In late 1960s Hong Kong, Chow Mo-wan, back from Singapore, is a writer of pulp fiction and a womaniser who keeps his feelings to himself. He takes a room in a hotel next to room 2046, the number of the hotel room where he once met Su Li-zhen. In it he sees a string of guests, among them Bai Ling, a nightclub hostess who falls for him while he treats their affair as casual and pays her each time, and Wang Jing-wen, the owner's daughter, who loves a Japanese man her father opposes. Chow writes a science fiction story, 2046, about a train to a place where people go to recover lost memories, casting Jing-wen's boyfriend and an android modelled on her. He also remembers a gambler in Singapore, also named Su Li-zhen, who would not go with him. The last film in Wong Kar-wai's Love Trilogy, it follows Chow from In the Mood for Love after his time with Su.

How 2046 ends

Chow ends the film alone, deciding at last to let go of Su. Jing-wen gets engaged to her Japanese boyfriend, and Chow's hopes of her fade. The night before Bai Ling leaves for Singapore, he has dinner with her, and she pays with the $10 notes he gave her, one for every night they spent together. She begs him to stay; he says he cannot and leaves in a taxi.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 32 · 2005 · Film

Lady Vengeance recap

Lee Geum-ja leaves prison after thirteen years for the kidnapping and murder of a five-year-old boy, Won-mo. Inside she was known as a kind, devout woman, but her good works were a way to collect favours from fellow inmates for a plan. She takes a job at a bakery, gets a gun, and goes looking for the daughter she gave up. Flashbacks show the truth: as a pregnant teenager she lived with Mr. Baek, a teacher who kidnapped Won-mo, killed him, and forced her to confess by threatening her baby. Geum-ja finds her daughter Jenny in Australia, adopted by a couple, and brings her back to Korea. With help from former inmates, she captures Baek and finds a phone charm with Won-mo's marble on it, next to trinkets from other children. It is the last film in Park Chan-wook's Vengeance Trilogy, the one that asks whether revenge can bring redemption.

How Lady Vengeance ends

The families of Baek's victims kill him together, and Geum-ja is left with her guilt. Geum-ja finds videotapes of Baek torturing other children for ransom. She and the detective who wrongly convicted her bring the victims' families to an empty school, show them the tapes and let them choose; they kill Baek one by one and bury him. In the snow Geum-ja sees Won-mo as a young man and cannot speak. She gives Jenny a white cake for a pure life and buries her face in it, sobbing, as Jenny holds her.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 33 · 2007 · Film

Hot Fuzz recap

Sergeant Nicholas Angel is so good at his job in the Metropolitan Police that his superiors send him to the sleepy village of Sandford to stop him making them look bad. He is paired with PC Danny Butterman, an action film fan and son of the friendly Inspector Frank Butterman. Sandford has won the Village of the Year award for years. Then several villagers die in apparent accidents, including an actor beheaded after a play and a journalist killed by a falling church spire. Angel suspects murder and the supermarket manager Simon Skinner, but no one at the station listens. He finds the real truth: the Neighbourhood Watch Alliance, a group of village leaders including Frank, has been killing anyone who might spoil the village's image. Danny is ordered to stab Angel but fakes it, and drives him out of town. The second film of Wright's Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy, with Pegg and Frost again, has a blue Cornetto for the police.

How Hot Fuzz ends

Angel and Danny bring down the Alliance in a shootout across the village. Angel returns armed to the teeth, and he and Danny fight the Alliance through the village, ending at a model village where Skinner is impaled. Frank crashes and is arrested. Back at the station, a surviving member pulls a gun, Danny takes the bullet, and a naval mine in the evidence room explodes. Danny survives, and he and Angel go on policing Sandford together.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 34 · 2007 · Film

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford recap

In 1881, nineteen-year-old Robert Ford, who grew up reading dime novels about Jesse James, joins the gang for its last train robbery. Jesse, now living under false names in Missouri with his wife and children, is moody and suspicious, and starts killing members of his own gang he thinks may turn on him. Bob and his brother Charley stay with Jesse, but Jesse's contempt and the threats to the gang drive Bob to the other side. After Bob and Dick Liddil kill Jesse's cousin Wood Hite in a fight, Bob makes a secret deal with Missouri's governor to capture or kill Jesse for a reward and a pardon. Jesse takes Bob and Charley to his home in St. Joseph, apparently knowing what they plan. It begins the 2007 Western Trilogy, a fan name for three American films released that year that rework the Western.

How The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford ends

Bob Ford shoots Jesse James in the back of the head and becomes despised for it. Jesse takes off his gun belt and stands on a chair to dust a picture; Bob shoots him. The Fords restage the killing on stage hundreds of times, but the public calls Bob a coward. Charley, tormented, kills himself. Bob runs a saloon in Creede, Colorado, where Edward O'Kelley shoots him dead in 1892.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 35 · 2007 · Film

There Will Be Blood recap

Daniel Plainview, a silver prospector, strikes oil in 1898 and builds a drilling business, adopting the infant son of a worker killed on his rig, H.W., as a front for his deals. In 1911 a young man named Paul Sunday tells him of oil under his family's farm in Little Boston, California. Daniel buys up the land and locks horns with Paul's twin Eli, a preacher who wants money for his church. A gas blowout leaves H.W. deaf, and Daniel sends him away. A man claiming to be Daniel's half-brother Henry joins him; when Daniel finds he is an impostor, he kills him. To get a pipeline across a holdout's land, Daniel lets Eli baptise him and publicly confess abandoning his son. He grows rich, brings H.W. back, and drinks himself into isolation in a mansion. It is the second of the 2007 Western Trilogy, its frontier a California oilfield.

How There Will Be Blood ends

Daniel beats Eli to death with a bowling pin in his mansion. In 1927 H.W. marries Eli's sister Mary and plans to drill in Mexico; Daniel tells him he was a foundling and disowns him. Eli, broke after the crash, comes asking Daniel to drill a property; Daniel makes him say he is a false prophet, then says he has already drained the oil from beside it. He chases Eli round the bowling alley and kills him. Asked by his butler, Daniel says he is finished.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 36 · 2007 · Film

No Country for Old Men recap

In West Texas in 1980, the welder and Vietnam veteran Llewelyn Moss finds the scene of a drug deal gone wrong, a pickup full of dead men, and two million dollars, which he takes. He comes back at night with water for a dying man and is chased off by the cartel, who identify his truck. He sends his wife Carla Jean to her mother's. The killer Anton Chigurh, who flips coins to decide who lives, is hired to find the money and tracks Moss through a transponder in the case. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, near retirement, follows a trail of bodies. Carson Wells, a hired man sent to recover the cash, offers Moss protection and is killed by Chigurh. Moss is wounded in a gunfight and hides in Mexico, then arranges to meet Carla Jean in El Paso. The third of the 2007 Western Trilogy, it carries the Western into a modern border drug war.

How No Country for Old Men ends

Moss is killed offscreen, Chigurh walks away from a car crash, and Bell retires. Mexicans kill Moss at a motel before Bell gets there. Chigurh comes back that night for the money. After her mother's funeral, Carla Jean finds Chigurh waiting, refuses to call his coin toss, and is implied to be killed. Driving away, Chigurh is hit by a car, breaks his arm, buys a boy's shirt for a sling, and limps off. Bell, retired, tells his wife about two dreams of his late father.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 37 · 2007 · Film

I Am Legend recap

In 2009 a genetically engineered cure for cancer mutates into a virus that kills most of humanity and turns most survivors into hairless, light-sensitive predators called Darkseekers. Three years later, Robert Neville, a US Army virologist who is immune, lives alone in Manhattan with his German Shepherd Samantha. By day he hunts deer, collects supplies, broadcasts radio messages and talks to mannequins; by night he hides in his fortified townhouse and runs experiments to find a cure, testing on infected rats and a captured Darkseeker. Flashbacks show the city being evacuated and his wife and daughter killed in a helicopter crash. The Darkseekers turn out to be more intelligent than he thought, and their leader sets a trap. Samantha is bitten and Neville has to kill her. He tries to drive into a Darkseeker pack and is saved by a survivor, Anna, and a boy, Ethan. It is the second of the Alone Trilogy, three films of one person cut off from everyone else.

How I Am Legend ends

Neville finds the cure and blows himself up to save Anna and Ethan, who carry it to a survivors' colony. The Darkseekers attack the house and corner the three in Neville's lab, where he sees his captured subject is returning to human. He draws a vial of her blood, gives it to Anna, and hides her and Ethan in an old coal chute. Then he sets off a grenade, killing himself and the attackers. Anna and Ethan reach a walled survivors' town in Vermont, and Anna says Neville's cure makes him a legend.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 38 · 2008 · Film

Burn After Reading recap

CIA analyst Osborne Cox quits when he is demoted for his drinking and starts writing a memoir. His wife Katie, who is having an affair with Harry Pfarrer, a married Treasury marshal, copies Osborne's files onto a disc while planning a divorce. Her lawyer's assistant leaves the disc at a gym, where employees Linda Litzke, who wants money for cosmetic surgery, and Chad Feldheimer, a cheerful dimwit, decide it is secret intelligence. They try to blackmail Osborne for a reward, then offer it to the Russian embassy. Linda dates men she meets online, including Harry, who is paranoid that he is being followed. Chad sneaks into the Cox house to find more files and hides in a wardrobe when Harry comes in. Harry, who has carried a gun for twenty years without firing it, panics and shoots him. Osborne is thrown out by Katie and goes after the person he thinks is behind it. The last of the Coen Brothers' Idiot Trilogy, Clooney's Harry is another fool.

How Burn After Reading ends

Chad and Ted die, Osborne is shot by the CIA, and the agency covers it all up. Linda's gym manager Ted breaks into the Cox house and is killed by Osborne with a hatchet. A CIA officer shoots Osborne, who falls into a coma. Harry tries to flee to Venezuela and is detained. Linda agrees to stay quiet in return for the agency paying for her surgery. At headquarters, a CIA director and an officer cannot say what any of it meant, and resolve not to do it again.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 39 · 2010 · Film

Black Swan recap

Nina Sayers, a dancer in a New York City ballet company, lives with her controlling mother Erica, a former dancer. Director Thomas Leroy pushes out the aging star Beth and casts Nina as the Swan Queen in a new Swan Lake, but tells her she is perfect for the White Swan and lacks the sensuality for the Black Swan. A new dancer, Lily, is relaxed and free on stage, and Thomas suggests Nina study her. Nina starts seeing her double, scratching her back raw, and imagining a rash of feathers. She goes out with Lily, takes drugs, and either has or imagines a night with her. Waking late, she finds Lily dancing in her place and believes Lily wants the role. Beth, now injured, stabs her own face with a nail file when Nina visits. On opening night Nina is late, Erica tries to keep her home, and she fights her way to the theatre. The Obsessed Artist Trilogy places it as a portrait of an artist destroyed by perfection.

How Black Swan ends

Nina performs the ballet perfectly while bleeding to death from a wound she gave herself. At the interval she finds Lily in her dressing room as the Black Swan, fights her, and stabs her with a shard of mirror, hiding the body. She then dances the Black Swan as if transformed. Lily turns up alive to congratulate her, and Nina sees the glass is in her own stomach. She finishes the ballet, falls onto the mattress, and tells Thomas she was perfect as the screen goes white.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 40 · 2010 · Film

Inside Job recap

Charles Ferguson's documentary, narrated by Matt Damon, sets out how the 2008 financial crisis happened. It opens in Iceland, where deregulation and privatised banks led to a collapse, then moves to the United States in five parts. It traces decades of deregulation, from the savings and loan crisis to a 2000 law that kept derivatives out of reach of regulators. It explains how mortgages were pooled into securities that ratings agencies rated AAA, how banks bet against products they sold, and how insurers like AIG wrote credit default swaps they could not cover. It covers the failure of Lehman Brothers, the AIG rescue and the bank bailout, and the job losses that followed. Ferguson interviews economists, officials and financiers including George Soros, Paul Volcker, Barney Frank and Christine Lagarde, and presses academics about paid consulting work they did not disclose. It begins the Wall Street Trilogy, three films about finance and the 2008 crash.

How Inside Job ends

The film concludes that the crisis came from an industry that captured its regulators, its academics and its ratings agencies, and that almost no one was held responsible. Executives kept their fortunes and no senior figure was prosecuted. Economists who argued for deregulation had undisclosed financial ties. The final section argues that the reforms passed afterward were weak and that many officials from the years before the crash returned to power under the new administration, so that the system remains largely unchanged.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 41 · 2013 · Film

The World's End recap

Gary King, a man in his forties who never grew up, talks his old school friends Andy, Steven, Oliver and Peter into coming back to their hometown of Newton Haven to finish a pub crawl they failed at in 1990: twelve pubs ending at The World's End. The others now have careers and families; Andy, Gary's former best friend, has not drunk in years after a car crash Gary left him in. The town feels oddly changed. In a pub toilet Gary fights a teenager whose head comes off, revealing blue blood and a robot body. The friends learn most of the town has been replaced by these Blanks, copies made by an alien Network. They decide to keep drinking to avoid giving themselves away. Oliver and Peter are replaced, and Gary admits his life fell apart and that he tried to kill himself. The final film of Wright's Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy, with a mint Cornetto, after Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.

How The World's End ends

Gary insults the alien Network until it leaves Earth, which sends the world back to the Stone Age. Gary reaches the twelfth pub, The World's End, and finds a hidden lair where the Network's voice explains its plan to civilise humanity. Gary and Andy argue that people would rather be free and flawed. The Network gives up and leaves, destroying technology on its way out. In a ruined Britain, Andy tells survivors the story; Gary, with the young robot versions of his friends, walks into a pub that refuses to serve them, and fights.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 42 · 2013 · Film

The Wolf of Wall Street recap

Jordan Belfort, a young stockbroker in New York, loses his first job on Black Monday in 1987 and finds work at a Long Island firm selling penny stocks for huge commissions. He sets up his own firm, Stratton Oakmont, with his neighbour Donnie Azoff, training a group of friends to push worthless stocks with high-pressure phone pitches, and runs pump-and-dump schemes. The firm grows rich and wild. Jordan leaves his first wife for Naomi, hides money in Swiss bank accounts through Naomi's aunt, and lives in a haze of drugs and parties. FBI agent Patrick Denham starts looking into him. After Naomi's aunt dies, Jordan sails to Italy to fix things; his yacht sinks in a storm. Arrested, he agrees to wear a wire. It is the second of the Wall Street Trilogy, the fraud and excess that the other two films describe from outside.

How The Wolf of Wall Street ends

Jordan informs on his colleagues, serves a short sentence, and becomes a sales trainer. While wearing a wire, he warns Donnie with a note, which the FBI finds, so Jordan is thrown out of his cooperation deal. He is arrested again. Naomi leaves him, and in a drug haze he crashes his car with his daughter in it. He then testifies against his colleagues, serves 36 months in a comfortable prison, and later runs sales seminars, asking audience members to sell him a pen.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 43 · 2014 · Film

Whiplash recap

Andrew Neiman, a 19-year-old drummer at Shaffer Conservatory in New York, wants to be one of the great jazz musicians. Terence Fletcher, the school's most feared bandleader, brings him into his studio band, then throws a chair at him and slaps him for being off tempo. Andrew practises until his hands bleed, breaks up with his girlfriend Nicole to focus, and wins the core drum chair. Fletcher keeps setting drummers against each other. On the way to a competition, Andrew's bus breaks down; he rents a car, forgets his sticks, gets them back, and is hit by a truck. Bloody, he crawls to the stage, plays badly, and attacks Fletcher when he dismisses him. Andrew is expelled, and he gives evidence that a former student of Fletcher's killed himself after years of abuse. Fletcher is fired. The Obsessed Artist Trilogy places it alongside Amadeus and Black Swan as a story of art pursued at any cost.

How Whiplash ends

Andrew plays an extended solo at a festival that wins Fletcher's approval. Months later Fletcher invites Andrew to drum in his band at the JVC jazz festival. On stage Fletcher reveals he knows Andrew testified and starts a piece Andrew has not been given. Andrew walks off, then returns, cuts Fletcher off and starts Caravan. He keeps playing past the end, with Fletcher drawn in to conduct him, and finishes as the two lock eyes and Fletcher nods.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 44 · 2015 · Film

Sicario recap

FBI agent Kate Macer leads a raid on a house in Arizona that turns out to hold dozens of bodies hidden in the walls, and two officers die in a booby trap. She is recruited by Matt Graver, a Department of Defense adviser, onto a task force against the Sonora cartel. With his mysterious partner Alejandro, they cross into Juarez to extract a cartel figure, Guillermo, and kill gunmen at the border crossing. Kate learns the operation is meant to push the cartel boss Manuel Diaz into contact with his superior, Fausto Alarcon. She is nearly strangled by a corrupt police officer set up through a bar date, and finds Matt is using her because the CIA needs an FBI agent present to work at home. The team raids a smuggling tunnel, where Alejandro grabs a Mexican cop, Silvio, and goes into Mexico. It begins Taylor Sheridan's Frontier Trilogy, three films he wrote about violence and lawlessness on the American frontier today.

How Sicario ends

Alejandro kills the cartel boss Alarcon and his family, and forces Kate to sign off on the operation. Alejandro uses Silvio to reach Diaz, kills him, and finds Alarcon at dinner with his family. Alejandro, a former prosecutor whose wife and daughter Alarcon had murdered, shoots Alarcon's family and then Alarcon. He then finds Kate and makes her sign a statement that the operation was legal. As he leaves she aims her gun at him and cannot fire. In Mexico, Silvio's son's football game pauses for distant gunfire.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 45 · 2015 · Film

The Martian recap

During a storm on Mars, botanist Mark Watney is hit by debris and left for dead when his crewmates, led by Commander Melissa Lewis, evacuate and fly home. He wakes alone, pulls the antenna out of his side, and works out he must survive four years until the next mission. He grows potatoes in the base using the crew's waste and makes water from rocket fuel. NASA notices him in satellite photos. He drives to the old Pathfinder probe and uses its camera to talk to Earth. NASA rushes a supply rocket, which explodes on launch. A NASA astrodynamicist finds a way to send the crew's ship, Hermes, back to Mars for him, and China lends a rocket for supplies. The crew agrees. Watney drives across Mars to the landing site for the next mission and strips down its ascent vehicle to reach orbit. It is the third of the Alone Trilogy, after Cast Away and I Am Legend.

How The Martian ends

Watney is rescued in orbit and goes home to teach. His ascent vehicle reaches orbit too far from Hermes. Lewis flies out on a tether as the crew blows a hole in their own ship to slow down, and Watney punctures his suit glove to steer himself toward her. She catches him. Back on Earth, he teaches would-be astronauts about survival, and the next Ares mission launches.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 46 · 2015 · Film

The Big Short recap

In 2005, Michael Burry, an eccentric hedge fund manager, finds the US housing market rests on bad mortgages that will fail, and bets against them by buying credit default swaps from banks that think he is mad. Trader Jared Vennett hears about it and pitches the trade to Mark Baum, a short-tempered fund manager who investigates Florida housing and meets lenders, strippers with multiple mortgages, and a CDO manager. Two young investors, Charlie Geller and Jamie Shipley, get in through a retired banker, Ben Rickert. The film breaks the fourth wall, with celebrities explaining financial terms. As defaults rise, the banks refuse to mark down the mortgage bonds, and the investors fear fraud is hiding the losses. A visit to a ratings agency shows they rate bonds AAA to keep the banks' business. Burry's investors revolt and he freezes withdrawals. It is the third film of the Wall Street Trilogy, the crash told by the few who bet on it.

How The Big Short ends

The bets pay off when the housing market collapses, and few are punished. Bear Stearns falls, and Lehman Brothers goes under. Baum sells his swaps for a fortune. Geller and Shipley profit too but Rickert tells them their win means people lose their homes and jobs. Burry closes his fund and moves into water investments. Closing text says the banks were bailed out, one banker went to prison, and banks went back to selling similar products years later.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 47 · 2016 · Film

Hell or High Water recap

In West Texas, divorced father Toby Howard and his ex-convict brother Tanner rob small branches of the Texas Midlands Bank early in the morning, taking only loose bills. Their late mother's ranch is about to be foreclosed by the same bank, and oil has been found on it. Toby wants to pay off the loan with the bank's own money and leave the land in trust for his sons. Near-retirement Texas Ranger Marcus Hamilton and his partner Alberto Parker take the case. Marcus works out their pattern and stakes out a likely target. Tanner, who enjoys it, robs a bank on his own without warning Toby. The brothers launder the cash through an Oklahoma casino. On their last robbery a crowd of armed townspeople chases them, and Tanner shoots one. The brothers split up. It is the second of Taylor Sheridan's Frontier Trilogy, written by him and directed by David Mackenzie.

How Hell or High Water ends

Tanner dies after killing Alberto, and Toby keeps the ranch for his sons. Tanner draws the posse into the hills and shoots Alberto from a ridge. Marcus kills Tanner with a hunting rifle. Toby, with no evidence against him, pays off the loan and puts the land in a trust. Months later Marcus, now retired, visits Toby at the ranch. Each knows what the other did. Toby offers to settle it; Marcus says they will meet again some other day.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.

No. 48 · 2017 · Film

Wind River recap

Cory Lambert, a US Fish and Wildlife tracker on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, finds the frozen body of Natalie Hanson, an eighteen-year-old Arapaho woman, barefoot in the snow miles from any house. FBI agent Jane Banner, young and from Las Vegas, arrives alone. The autopsy shows Natalie was raped and died when the freezing air burst her lungs, so it cannot be classed as a homicide and Jane gets no backup. Cory tells her his own daughter Emily died the same way, a case never solved. Natalie's brother leads them to her boyfriend Matt, a security guard at a drilling site, and they find his body in the snow. Jane, the tribal police chief and officers go to the drilling site and face off with the guards. A flashback shows what happened: guards attacked Matt and Natalie in Matt's trailer, beat him to death, and a guard named Pete raped her before she ran. It ends Taylor Sheridan's Frontier Trilogy, and he directed it himself.

How Wind River ends

Cory kills the guards and leaves Pete to die in the cold the way Natalie did. A gunfight breaks out at the trailer; the tribal officers die and Jane is wounded. Cory shoots the guards from a ridge and catches Pete. On a mountain, Pete confesses, and Cory makes him run barefoot through the snow; his lungs fail. Cory visits Jane in hospital, then sits with Natalie's father in grief. A title card says no statistics exist for missing Native American women.

Post-credits scenes

No. There is no post-credits scene.