I'm preaching to the choir here, but nobody did this better than Billy Wilder. He's not usually thought of as a visual storyteller, which shows just how good he is as a visual storyteller.

My favorite visual ending: the composition of the final frames of Tender Mercies, with the predominant sky sheltering Robert Duvall and the boy (no coincidence that Bruce Beresford is Australian), to suggest that the protagonist has finally found a home.