Collider dropped a ranking Monday of what it calls the ten most perfect movie endings of the 2020s, and the list reads less like a consensus and more like an argument you'd have at 1 AM with someone who's seen everything twice.

Five of the ten are named in the material available to us. The site opens its case with Florian Zeller's The Father, the 2020 psychological drama where Anthony Hopkins plays a man losing his grip on reality, only for the ending to reveal he's been in a nursing home the entire time and not his own flat. Collider calls it one of the heaviest films of the last 25 years. Fair enough, that final scene isn't something you shake off on the drive home.

Celine Song's Past Lives makes the cut too, for the street-corner goodbye between Nora and Hae Sung while his Uber idles nearby. No shouting, no grand gesture. Just two people quietly accepting a life that could have gone differently and won't now. Collider's word for it is subdued, and that's about right.

The bigger swings

Then there's Oppenheimer, which Collider frames as one of the scariest non-horror endings ever made, built entirely on a remembered conversation between Oppenheimer and Einstein about a chain reaction that can't be stopped. No explosion on screen. Just dread, delivered in dialogue. The site leans on that as proof nuclear anxiety hasn't gone anywhere since 1945, and it's hard to argue when the scene still gets discussed in film circles years after release.

Anora gets its own entry for Ani breaking down in a henchman's car after the marriage to a Russian oligarch's son collapses around her. Collider calls it a study in the limits of transactional affection, which is a fancy way of saying it hurts more than the film lets on until that last minute.

And then the piece pivots into something closer to a personality quiz, pointing readers toward Parasite as the answer for anyone drawn to films that quietly swap genres mid-stream, and toward Everything Everywhere All at Once for anyone who wants a movie that refuses to pick a lane at all. The copy we have cuts off mid-sentence right as it starts building the case for Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's multiverse family drama, so whatever argument Collider makes there is one we haven't seen in full.

What's notable is the spread. A 2020 pandemic-era chamber piece sitting next to a three-hour Oppenheimer biopic and a genre-hopping A24 sex-comedy about a stripper's marriage annulment. No shared decade trend, no single studio, no single country even, since Past Lives and Parasite both draw from South Korea in different ways.

Collider hasn't published the remaining five entries in what we've seen so far, which means the back half of the list, and whatever film it eventually crowns as the single most perfect ending of the decade, is still an open question for anyone tracking the piece as it rolls out in full.