10 Films to Make You Cry

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Some people don’t cry during movies, but if you’re the type who isn’t opposed to a good cry, and you’re moved by the power of cinema, these films will likely have you shedding at least a tear or two. Some will have you reaching for a tissue simply because they’re so unbelievably sad, while others are more likely to overwhelm because their combination of images and sounds matched with a dark subject matter. Enjoy.

The Elephant Man (1980, dir. David Lynch)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye4YTZOq2fk

Aside from Dune, The Elephant Man might be the closest David Lynch has ever come to directing a mainstream film with a wide appeal (it was nominated for eight Academy Awards, although it didn’t win any). It’s also generally considered one of the more depressing films out there, and its depiction of cruelty towards John Merrick, the Elephant Man, is sure to move a sensitive soul to tears. Lynch’s use of the “Adagio for Strings” by Samuel Barber (later made famous in Platoon) is classic, and surely goes a long way in tugging our heart strings. The only other Lynch film that comes close to being as sad is 1999’s The Straight Story, which tells the story of an elderly man driving a tractor across the Midwest to visit his estranged brother who recently suffered from a stroke.

Paris, Texas (1984, dir. Wim Wenders)

Wim Wender’s most acclaimed and well-known film tells the story of Travis, a man who estranged himself from his wife and son for four years. Travis, after reconnecting with his young son, embarks on a journey to find the boy’s mother, and this forces him to confront a troubled, tumultuous past. Besides the fact that it features beautiful, sparse guitar music by Ry Cooder and great images by Wender’s long-time cinematographer Robby Muller, it’s a moving film because it shows that no matter how much two people might love each other, sometimes they just can’t be together. Scenes most likely to provoke tears include Travis’ confrontation with his wife and the final scene, where we hear Travis’ goodbye message to his son that he recorded on a tape.

Grave of the Fireflies (1988, dir. Isao Takahata)

Films about WWII are, inevitably, at least somewhat depressing. Grave of the Fireflies is probably one of the saddest, and it shows just how affective animation can be. It depicts the lives of a young brother and sister forced to fend for themselves after their family is killed when their city is bombed. Things don’t turn out so well for them, and when I saw it in school for a course on Japanese cinema, we were all thoroughly bummed out.

Maborosi (1995, dir. Hirokazu Koreeda)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbO3gxzUYbA

Admittedly, you probably have to be of a certain temperament to be moved to tears by Koreeda’s first feature film – some might find it too cerebral or slow or lacking in action – but it’s unquestionably sad and its music and images certainly get me going. It tells the story of a woman, Yukimo, plagued with death in her life. As a young girl, she is unable to prevent her grandmother from wondering off to die; then, years later, a newly wed and a new mother, her husband mysteriously jumps in front of a train and kills himself. When Yukimo asks her second husband – who she marries seven years later – why her first husband killed himself, he explains that maybe he saw a “Maborosi,” or a mysterious light. It’s not actually an explanation, and that’s the point.

Dancer in the Dark (2000, dir. Lars von Trier)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6Oc3Oe_LpQ

The films of Lars von Trier are not for everyone, including Dancer in the Dark. For me, it is a rare example of a film that made me so emotional that I can’t even say if it was technically good. It’s pretty straight forward why it’s so sad: a lot of really awful shit happens to Björk, and when you think it can’t get worse, it does. Certainly part of the appeal is the film’s Dogme 95 or cinema verité style, which adds a register of realism to a story that is actually unrealistic, sentimental, and fantastical.

Yi-Yi (2000, dir. Edward Yang)

Yang’s film, much like Maborosi, makes me emotional more because it seems to touch on truths about life, and not so much because it reaches dramatic pitches. It shows that life by its very nature is disappointing, whether or not anything really awful happens – even though awful things do happen in the periphery of Yi-Yi. It’s the kind of movie that will make you cry at the very end because you will realize you witnessed something massive and great.

Rachel Getting Married (2008, dir. Jonathan Demme)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tIvMUy8UDs

If there’s a theme that ties together many of these films, it’s that they’re filmed with an eye towards realism – the closer a film’s depiction of events approximates our own experience of reality, the greater the film’s emotional import. This also goes for Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married, which looks like a really nice, well-edited home movie (some shots are from the perspective of characters with hand held cameras). It documents Kym’s (Anne Hathaway) brief time away from an in-patient rehab facility while she visits with her family to celebrate the wedding of her older sister. Kym proceeds to fuck shit up, and a lot of baggage is dredged up. The fact that the whole thing feels kind of like you’re actually there – or were there and are watching someone’s hand held camera footage – makes it incredibly powerful, and if you’re like most people and your family has some dirt in the closet, you’re likely to reminded of that.

The Wrestler (2008, dir. Darren Aronofsky)

Despite my inability to take Darren Aronofsky very seriously, not only did I really like The Wrestler, but I even shed a few tears. In a less radical way than Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, its raw, gritty style helps along what otherwise might be a standard plot that we’ve all seen before. The main reason the film is so moving is that Randy “the Ram” Robinson, played by Mickey Rourke, is such a believable, human figure, and life hasn’t been to kind to him. It’s not easy to watch “an old, broken down piece of meat,” as Randy describes himself, go through a lot of unhappy, depressing stuff.

Biutiful (2010, dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdWz1IFEv4k

Iñárritu makes depressing films, but in the past I’ve felt like they were too heavy-handed to actually move me – both 21 Grams and Babel felt like they were trying way too hard to bring me down. With Biutiful, Iñárritu actually succeeded, to the point that my friend got pissed off at me for blowing my nose the whole time. Javier Bardem plays a man diagnosed with terminal cancer who organizes illegal immigrant labor in Spain. With the knowledge of his impeding death, he attempts to turn his life around by reuniting with his mentally ill wife and behaving in a more upright way in his shady dealings. Biutiful knocks you down on the ground, and proceeds to kick you repeatedly for its whole duration. Some people, including myself of course, actually gasped at a certain scenes because they were so unbelievably tragic.

Rabbit Hole (2010, dir. John Cameron Mitchell)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9iJH2P96dM

I saw an afternoon show of Rabbit Hole at NYC’s Landmark Sunshine. I sat by a guy my age, and on our way out we both admitted that we had been crying practically the whole time. In John Cameron Mitchell’s latest film, Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart star as a coupling grieving the loss of their young child. As the film progresses, their relationship deteriorates. Rabbit Hole was based on an award winning play by David Lindsay-Abaire of the same name, and while Mitchell’s adaptation is never overly stagy, it does reveal its origins in theater with its brilliant dialogue. Part of the film’s ability to induce tears is that, while it does have a few comedic moments, it rarely has quiet, uncharged moments, and just when I thought that, perhaps, the tears would relent, I was hit with yet another compelling scene.

image – Rabbit Hole