Last week I wrote an (already belated) post on the London Times's exceptionally lame list of best movie endings, citing The Third Man as an obvious omission and Monster's Inc. as a somewhat less obvious one. I included a YouTube of the former but couldn't find one of the latter at the time. Well, I subsequently stumbled across one here and found it as ineffably sweet as remembered. (It's a long clip; you can skip from about the one-minute mark, after Sully has delivered Boo to her room, to the five-minute mark, when he gets to go back.)
Also, as long as I'm on the subject, another film I should have mentioned (I may roll out one or two more as they occur to me) is The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. One of the unlikeliest masterpieces in cinematic history, Jacques Demy's 1964 musical beautifully transposed the the bleak and humdrum into color and song. For those unfamiliar with the film: Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) and Genevieve (Catherine Deneuve, in her breakthrough role) were young lovers. When he was sent off to Algeria to fight, she discovered she was pregnant and was pressured by her mother to marry an older man. The conclusion is their first meeting after his return (he, too has married and had a child), and is undoubtedly the most moving scene ever set in a gas station:
--Christopher Orr