I think the sheer number of times people have gone back and forth on Blade Runner in this thread alone qualifies it as an ambiguous ending, regardless of what was said to whom.
The Conversation
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Zodiac
Deckard’s a replicant if Greedo shot first.
Kevin Spacey is on your side.
Yeah. Why would she smile? Unless he told it like a joke or something. But that would only be funny to the actress, not the character, so we’d have to take it as just goofing off and irrelevant to what “actually” happened.
The Sopranos ended with a cut to a black screen with no audio, not static. After about 10 seconds of black, they did indeed simply roll the credits. So either your cable/satellite went out and came back with incredible timing, or you’re just remembering wrong after 6 years.
I haven’t watched the book, but in the movie there is no ambiguity -
The hotel is haunted.
And the kid has powers - as does Halloran
One that’s been discussed here before is the ending to A League of Their Own -
Did Big Sis drop the ball on purpose of by accident?
I’m sure you’re aware that King has written a sequel, Dr. Sleep.
Wasn’t aware -
but now I am going to have to look for it.
Two-Lane Blacktop springs to mind - the entire second half is essentially a long, ambiguous ending. It’s a metaphor for America or something. I suppose for an ambiguous ending to work, the rest of the film has to give the impression that it’s building up to something. Otherwise I could pick e.g. Fellini’s Satyricon, which is two hours of ambiguity. The ending is ambiguous, but no more so than the rest of the film. Robert Altman’s films often had ambiguous endings - Nashville, Short Cuts, 3 Women etc - but really they didn’t have endings, they just stopped.
When I think of ambiguous endings I think of New Hollywood, Five Easy Pieces and so forth. Deliverance is another one that comes to mind, although it wasn’t quite New Hollywood. Did they kill one of the assailants, or just a random mountain man? Is his body going to float up to the surface of the lake, just like in the dream, or not? Manhattan and Annie Hall both come to a stop, but there’s a sense that the characters continue to live and develop beyond the end of the film. Will Woody Allen hook up with Muriel Hemingway when she gets back from Yerp? In lots of films it feels that the characters were conjured purely to tell a single story, and are disposable once the story is told, whereas in the cinema of Woody Allen and Robert Altman we’re watching a small slice of people’s lives.
THX 1138, there’s another one. Robert Duvall escapes, but to what? Strictly speaking The Empire Strikes Back has an ambiguous ending, although of course all was resolved in Return of the Jedi. Look, here’s Wikipedia’s list of New Hollywood films, they all have ambiguous endings. Rosemary’s Baby,
At the back of my mind I’m thinking “these people have picked Blade Runner twelve times and The Shining six times and Lost in Translation three times and have they seen any more films?”, and another voice is saying “don’t be a film snob, these people are probably too busy raising a family and getting by in a cruel harsh world to watch lots of films”, and also “you haven’t even seen Firefly, perhaps it really is that good”, and “you shouldn’t call them QUOTE these people UNQUOTE because it’s dehumanising”, so I forgive you, Straight Dope. You’re individual human beings with lives and feelings like my own, not just evil robots. I guess you have to have a little faith in people.
I’m tempted to leave this post with an ambiguous ending. You know, Siouxsie Sioux looks absolutely gorgeous in the video for “Kiss Them For Me”. Close-up on Avon, as Federation troopers surround him; he smiles, raises his gun; cut to black, the sound of gunfire.
Don’t be ridiculous. Of course we’re evil robots.
Also: if you’re going to define ‘ambiguity’ as something like *‘lack of certain knowledge of the course the lives of the characters will take after the story ends’ *then you’re going to end up classifying most stories told since (at least) the Industrial Revolution as having ambiguous endings. The ancient Greeks may have declared that Hero A was raised to eternal life on Mount Olympus, and the brothers Grimm may have assured readers that Heroine B was “granted happiness for her whole life”…but since the invention of the novel, such ironclad resolutions are few and far between.