Best New Year's Eve movie scenes - amazing end-of-year movie moments
Amp up your New Year celebrations with one of these classic movies
New Year’s Eve has always been cinema catnip. It’s the perfect narrative pressure point: one foot in the past, one eye on the future, emotions running high and clocks ticking loudly in the background. A built-in deadline, a natural sense of reflection, and the promise that everything might change at the stroke of midnight? Directors dream of this stuff.
Some films use New Year’s Eve for romance, kisses as fireworks crackle overhead, missed connections finally found, love declared with seconds to spare. Others lean into the chaos: drunken decisions, existential dread, parties teetering on the brink, or characters realising (often far too late) that they need to get their act together before the year runs out. When it works, a New Year’s Eve scene can feel electric – a moment where hope, regret, optimism and panic all collide at once.
These scenes stick because they tap into something universal. We’ve all watched the countdown with a strange mix of excitement and unease, wondering what the next year might hold and whether we’ll be any better prepared for it than the last. Cinema just knows how to bottle that feeling and turn it into something unforgettable.
So whether it’s joyous, messy, romantic or quietly devastating, these are the best New Year’s Eve movie scenes, end-of-year moments that make you want to toast the future, cringe at the past, and maybe text someone you probably shouldn’t.
10. Trading Places
We're really enjoying the Eddie Murphy resurgence right now - with Dolemite Is My Name and his stint on SNL, but this is still one of the funniest lines from the days when Eddie Murphy was consistently incredible.
9. Ghostbusters II
All of the Ghostbusters sequel's finale is set on New Year's Eve, as spooky, painting-dwelling ghost Vigo attempts to return to the mortal world. But the best scene is this sequence in which the scourges of spirit kind hitch a lift on the Statue of Liberty and ride her to glory through the streets of New York, starting a party as they go.
8. Snowpiercer
On first watch, the New Year scene in Snowpiercer may seem flat-out incongruous. The masked axe men suddenly stop their slaughter to count down to the new year. But it's an off-kilter representation of the deranged culture that has developed on the train. Plus, it feeds into the film's general sense of dark strangeness.
7. Boogie Nights
Signalling the end of the year, the decade and an era of unbridled hedonism for the adult movie stars in Paul Thomas Anderson's astonishing drama, one character sees in the New Year with the end of his life.
6. The Gold Rush
One of the most famous moments in cinema occurs during a scene in which a lonely gold prospector (Charlie Chaplin) fantasises about hosting a New Year's Eve party for the woman he loves. Then he amuses them with an elegant little dance with bread roll feet. But then he wakes up alone...
5. Sunset Boulevard
Faded silent movie star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) slowly loses her marbles in Billy Wilder's grand drama.
Her slipping grip on sanity and dignity is particularly highlighted in a scene where she invites accidental house guest Joe (William Holden) to a New Year's Eve party, then reveals that they're the only guests. A romantic end is tragically unlikely.
4. The Godfather, Part II
One of the saga's pivotal moments takes place on the cusp of a new year. At the President's New Year celebration, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) lets his brother Fredo (John Cazale) know that he knows he is the man who's trying to have him killed. Then he seals his fate with a kiss
3. When Harry Met Sally
Come midnight on New Year's Eve, many of us are struggling to string a coherent sentence together. In Rob Reiner's majestic romantic comedy, Harry (Billy Crystal) waits until the stroke of midnight to tell Sally (Meg Ryan) everything he's felt about her for years but never quite said. And it's one of the best speeches in cinema.
2. The Apartment
Another romantic comedy that concludes at the beginning of a new year. Makes sense, really. New beginnings. New loves. Booze. In this, Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine) realises at a New Year party that her affair with a married man is never going to be fulfilling and runs all the way to CC Baxter (Jack Lemmon), the office drone who's been providing a flat for the adulterous relationship. The final line is still a killer.
1. Phantom Thread
PT Anderson does it again when it comes to the New Year. While Boogie Nights showed a night of debauchery, The Phantom Thread shows a night that's all about being ostentatious. The result is one of the most stunning-looking scenes in cinema history.
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