Best Twist Endings - SPOILERS!

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A good twist ending takes everything you've learned from the story and turns it on its ear. Some are shocking, some thought provoking. This is your last spoiler warning, I WILL ruin the endings if you haven't seen the films before.

10. ARRIVAL - 2016

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Arrival appears to be an alien invasion film like Independence Day, but it forgoes the violence and takes a very cerebral approach to the sci fi material. Amy Adams plays linguistic expert Louise Banks. When mysterious spacecrafts appear all over the world, the US military asks Louise to help communicate with the aliens. Throughout the film we see clips of scenes in which Louise has a young daughter who gets sick and dies. Eventually Louise makes successful contact with the aliens and they teach her their complicated language. It is revealed that this was the point of their visit as learning the language allows one to see the past, present and future at the same time. The aliens needed us to learn the language so we could help them in the future. Louise then contacts a Chinese general in the Future and gets him to help her convince his past self to call off an attack on the aliens. It is also revealed that the scenes of her daughter were not flashbacks, but flash forwards, and that she would have to raise her knowing that she will die and there's nothing she can do to stop it. It's a surprisingly heady ending that takes a couple viewings to really grasp. I love the aliens which they've named Abbott and Costello which are squid like creatures that communicate by spraying ink into symbols.

9. ATONEMENT - 2007

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Atonement is the story of Briony Tallis and how she deliberately sabotaged her sister Cecilia's relationship with Robbie Turner. When she was 13, out of jealousy and spite Briony accused Robbie of taking advantage of her underage cousin, knowing full well that it was another man who did it. This event separates Robbie and Cecilia until she  helps bring them back together during the war years later. But in the last few minutes of the movie we see Vanessa Redgrave as a much older Briony, giving an interview about the book she wrote about Cecilia and Robbie. We soon realize that everything we have seen has been an adaptation of her book which was a fictionalized version of events. In reality Cecilia and Robbie were never reunited and they both died during the war. Briony explains that this was her way of atoning for ruining their lives. It's hard to watch a film that completely negates itself, but here it works because of the focus on perspective and the power of writing.

8. ANGEL HEART - 1987

Angel Heart is a chilling and rather confusing film from director Alan Parker. It would be rather difficult to explain the entire labyrinthine plot here, so I'll give you the reader's digest version. Mickey Rourke plays private investigator Harry Angel who is hired by the ultra creepy Louis Cypher (Robert De Niro) to track down a musician named Johnny Favorite. Harry heads down to New Orleans and practically every person who brings him closer to finding Johnny winds up brutally murdered. After becoming involved with a young woman named Epiphany, he finally finds out the true identity of Johnny. Harry Angel is really Johnny Favorite and he had sold his soul to Cypher who is actually the devil. As perplexing as it is, it's worth watching for the powerful performances of Rourke, De Niro and Lisa Bonet. It also has a unique scene of De Niro evilly eating a hard boiled egg.

7. FIGHT CLUB - 1999

Fight Club from director David Fincher, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk is an unusual satire about anarchy, repressed anger and mental instability. We follow Edward Norton's unnamed narrator, an office worker suffering from insomnia whose only relief is attending various support groups for illnesses he doesn't have. Eventually he meets charismatic soap salesman Tyler Durden (a dynamic Brad Pitt). Together they start Fight Club, where men can take out their repressed anger by beating the snot out of each other. This evolves into Project Mayhem, in which the men stage elaborate pranks, culminating in a plot to destroy the credit card companies. As things start to unravel, the narrator realizes that Tyler Durden is just a figment of his imagination and the film ends with him destroying the part of his brain where Tyler resides. It's a manic film, edited in a stream of consciousness type style. This one is definitely worth watching multiple times as there are lots of hidden clues throughout.

6. PSYCHO - 1960

Alfred Hitchcock's now classic film has two major plot twists. The first occurs about a third of the way into the film. We follow Janet Leigh as Marion Crane who is attempting to leave town after stealing money from her employer. In her escape, she makes her way to an isolated motel off the main highway. There she meets the shy manager Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins in a brilliantly layered performance) who lives in the adjacent house with his controlling mother. Then Marion takes a shower and is stabbed to death by the mother. The rest of the film follows Norman as he cleans up the crime and is questioned by a private investigator, who also gets murdered by the mother. Then Marion's boyfriend and sister arrive only to discover that Mrs. Bates has been long dead and Norman has been assuming her personality and murdering people. At the time of its release, this was quite the shocking revelation which has somewhat softened due to our violence obsessed popular culture, but Hitchcock's film is still a masterpiece of cinema.

5. MEMENTO - 2000

This is another film that is quite difficult to describe the complex plot in full detail. It follows Leonard Shelby(Guy Pearce in a complicated performance), a man searching for his wife's killer who also suffers from short term memory loss and can only recall the distant past or the last five minutes. He uses photographs, notes and elaborate body tattoos to remind himself of his mission. The story is told chronologically backward and follow Leonard down his dark path to discovery. It is eventually revealed that Leonard accidentally killed his wife himself, suppressing the memory and ultimately killing someone else for the crime. This film demands multiple views to comprehend the complex turns of the plot and the backwards structure.

4. VERTIGO - 1958

In this Hitchcock classic, James Stewart Plays Scotty Ferguson whose vertigo and agoraphobia led to a friend's death and his retirement from the police force. He is hired as a private investigator by a friend to follow his wife Madeline played by Kim Novak. Scotty falls in love with the troubled Madeline who jumps to her death and Scotty paralyzed by fear is unable to stop it. Scotty goes into a deep depression and is hospitalized. When he gets out, he meets a young woman who looks similar to Madeline named Judy, also played by Novak. Scotty spends all his time trying to physically convert Judy into looking like Madeline. It is finally revealed that Judy was the same woman who Scotty thought was Madeline, but had just been a pawn in an elaborate plan to cover up the real Madeline's death. When an angry Scotty forces her to admit the truth, she accidentally falls to her death. This is a disturbing complex tale of obsession and features career best performances from Novak and Stewart.

3. THE USUAL SUSPECTS - 1995

This suspense film from writer Christopher McQuarrie and director Bryan Singer won two Oscars for McQuarrie's script and for the performance by Kevin Spacey. Spacey plays Verbal Kint, a soft spoken, disabled convict being questioned by the police. He recounts his story of how he met four other thieves in a criminal lineup and took part in an elaborate heist that went horribly wrong. The heist was sabotaged by the mysterious mastermind Keyser Soze whom nobody has ever seen. Verbal finishes his story and is released from custody when it is finally revealed that Verbal had made up the majority of the story, is not disabled, and is in fact actually Keyser Soze himself. The film is carried by the magnificent performance by Spacey and the rest of the talented cast, Gabriel Byrne, Stephen Baldwin, Kevin Pollak, Benicio Del Toro, Chazz Palminteri, and Pete Postlethwaite.

2. THE SIXTH SENSE - 1999

The Sixth Sense is about Dr. Malcom Crowe, a child psychologist who was shot by one of his former patients that he tried to help . After this incident he becomes estranged from his wife And began to doubt his strength as a psychologist.
He starts working with a young boy named Cole Sear who says that he is able to see the dead.Malcom helps Cole accept his gift and better relate to his loving mother, sensitively played by Toni Collette. In turn Cole helps Malcom come to the realization that... He's a ghost. Turns out that Malcom didn't survive the gunshot at the beginning of the film. The way the movie handles this allows you to watch the movie in a whole new light on multiple viewings. This was the film that popularized the twist ending in modern films, although not many have come close to this one.

1. PLANET OF THE APES - 1968

Yes my top pick is Charlton Heston and those damn dirty apes. A group of astronauts awake from cryo sleep too early as their ship crash lands on a planet. Heston's George Taylor explores his new surroundings, only to be captured by a race of talking humanoid apes. They imprison him and assume he can't speak like the other humans on the planet. Eventually he regains his voice and is befriended by two ape scientists. The film ends with the apes letting him free, when he discovers... The Statue of Liberty. So apparently humanity blew up civilization as we know it on Earth and evolution led to this new race of apes on planet Earth. The ending has since been parodied to death, most notably in Mel Brooks' Spaceballs, but the twist was shocking when the movie came out and it still works watching it today. It should be noted that Rod Serling (creator of the twist friendly Twilight Zone) worked on the screenplay.