(Continued)

"Popeye" (1980)
There probably aren't many people out there, even hard-core Robert Altmaniacs, who will stand up to defend the director's problematic 1980 musical version of the famous comic strip and cartoon figure. The film has charmingly deranged performances (Robin Williams hasn't been as good since, Shelley Duvall was born to play Olive Oyl), some fine songs (courtesy of Harry Nilsson) and an overarching air of unlikeliness that keeps things breezing along nicely ... until the last 15 minutes, when the money ran out and what began as a left-wing weirdo musical comedy with dance numbers winds up as a pseudo Ed Wood production with Popeye 'rassling underwater with a big fake rubber octopus off the coast of Malta. Blow me down indeed.

"Titanic" (1997)
A decade later, can you all just admit that this mega-Oscar-winning, billion-dollar profit center of a movie straight up sucked? The writing, the acting, the plot, the subplots, the dialogue, the sentiments, the framing device, the music, the EVERYTHING? No? OK. Well, at least admit that the ending is garbage. Kate Winslet's sell-out letting go of Leonardo DiCaprio's hand? The ludicrous dumping of the diamond into the sea? The millionth reprise of "My Heart Will Go On"? COME ON! How can everyone, how can anyone have liked stupid, horrible "Titanic" to begin with? Especially with an ending like that?

"Bowling for Columbine" (2002)
Michael Moore's reputation as a petulant, childish muckraker can probably be traced to the big ending of this misguided tract about gun control. Though many of the film's arguments about America's obsession with weaponry are sound and admirable, the presentation is smug, the humor is corny and small-minded and the presence of Moore is both annoying and unnecessary -- and never more so than when he confronts honorary NRA chairman/figurehead Charlton Heston, a confused and doddering old man whose appearances at NRA events, however deplorable, are hardly the real issue. It would be like opposing police brutality by confronting Robocop at a sci-fi convention: useless, meaningless but self-satisfied all the same.

"Million Dollar Baby" (2004)
What begins as a sharp, surprising, cryptofeminist yarn about an unlikely female boxing prodigy and her grizzly old trainer takes a jagged left turn and becomes a bedside melodrama, dripping with bathos, corny caricature (at what "Hee Haw" stage show did they find the actors who played Hilary Swank's family?) and the deeply frustrating experience of watching the movie you want to see turn into something only a dumb Academy voter or credulous movie critic could get behind.

"Broadcast News" (1987)
Director James L. Brooks has a rare gift for unlikely love stories, crackling dialogue and the unabashed heart of gold that lurks in even the meanest of characters. And never mind what your mom tells you about "Terms of Endearment" or your dirty old grandpa says about "As Good as It Gets," "Broadcast News" is Brooks' masterpiece. Holly Hunter, Albert Brooks and William Hurt are perfect as the three sides of a truly misshapen triangle set against the backdrop of television journalism's sharply declining standards. Then Brooks makes the mistake of not letting the story end when it wants to; he insists on an epilogue to let us know that, a few years later, everybody really is OK. It only dilutes the drama (and the comedy) that comes before and strips the characters of all their charm, wit and -- in Hunter's case -- good hair.

Special Prize: Steven Spielberg
"War of the Worlds" (2005)
"Schindler's List" (1993)
"Saving Private Ryan" (1998)
"Minority Report" (2002)
"AI" (2001)

I'm not one of those Spielberg bashers. In fact, I have good things to say about every single one of the above movies -- right up until their endings. Seems that in recent years, Spielberg has developed a bad case of anticlimactitis, an alarmingly common affliction among pop-culture artists that causes them to either (a) overstate the themes of the film in case anyone in the audience had missed them ("Minority Report"); (b) chicken out and deliver an unearned feel-good ending ("War of the Worlds"); (c) allow the film to drag on for an additional 45 minutes beyond its organic, satisfying ending and into a protracted, agonized, unconvincing epilogue that turns everything that came before into a pseudo-Freudian nightmare ("AI"); and worst of all (d) take all the artfulness out of a powerful piece of fiction and transform it into a weirdly ritualized, lily-gilding present day with real people doing real things like lighting candles and saluting gravestones, just to underline the film's nobility ("Schindler's List," "Saving Private Ryan"). It's a frustrating trend, one that makes it harder to defend one of cinema's most maligned directors. It also makes you long for the sight of Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider paddling for shore on the splinters of a blown-up fishing boat, great white shark guts bobbing in their wake. Now that's an ending.

What is the worst ending of all time? Write us at heymsn@microsoft.com.

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Sean Nelson is a Seattle-based writer and musician. He is the author of "Court and Spark," a book about Joni Mitchell, published by Continuum Books.