ok for those who cried....

I don't think any movie has ever left me emotionally shattered in quite the way that Life is Beautiful did. I was fine through the whole thing, and then the little boy is reunited with his mom, and he's so happy that he "won the game" and has a tank now... he has *ZERO* clue yet that his father is dead, and that he died having gotten his boy through the Holocaust without the slightest notion of what was actually going on all around him... it is SUCH a powerful story of human triumph in the face of overwhelming adversity that at THAT moment in the film, almost out of the blue, I just totally lost it. Broke down and bawled uncontrollably straight through the end credits, and kept crying long after I'd turned off the TV and rewound that old VHS. I don't think any other movie has ever hit me so hard.

Others have generated lots of tears, though...

I think Dead Poets Society was the first movie I ever saw that made me lose it at the end. I cried a lot when Robin Williams got so unfairly canned and all his students stood on their desks in tribute to him.

Titanic... wow. The first time I saw it, I was merely in awe of the technical achievement from a filmmaking perspective. The second time I saw it, I was in floods of tears for probably at least the entire last half-hour. Funny how the human tragedy escaped me the first time because I just couldn't stop wondering how they'd managed to put this on film, but the second time, the emotional aspects hit me like a ton of bricks. The "Near My God to Thee" sequence was particularly crushing, and the final shots in the movie just laid me out, too. This movie, coincidentially, marks the only time in my life that I can recall having seen my father cry, too. :D

Schindler's List... need anyone say more? The ghetto liquidation sequence with the little girl in the pink coat is, I think, universally devastating. Honestly, all the sequences of Nazi brutality are. Like Ralph Fiennes shooting at the messenger boy until he hits him in the back of the head, or the old men who are so casually killed for being too feeble to work. But for me, it's that prolonged memorial sequence at the end featuring all the real Holocaust survivors that Oskar Schindler saved... that always just destroys me.

Contact made me cry a lot. Especially the scene when Ellie's father dies. Beautifully filmed; very powerful. Also the moment when Ellie gets a firsthand look at the galaxy and all her scientific brainpower goes out the window in sheer awe of what she's seeing, and she can't stop marveling at how they should've sent a poet because she had "no words" for this. That gets me every time, too.

Braveheart. Cried my eyes out through William Wallace's execution (particularly when Murron appears) all the way through that triumphant ending with the Scots charging the English army. James Horner's score worked wonders for that one. That movie is just awesome.

And as a previous poster said... never underestimate the emotional punch of animated movies. I bawled like a baby at the beginning of Up, when Carl loses Ellie... that was devastating. I also cried straight through the end of Toy Story 3, such a beautiful conclusion to that trilogy... my wife laughed at me, but she NEVER cries at movies. :) I cried at the end of Finding Nemo when father and son finally reconcile. I cried at the end of Mosters, Inc. when Sully gets to reunite with Boo. Oh hell, just choose a Pixar movie. It probably made tears spill from my eyes. Their movies are just beautiful.

But also Lilo & Stitch... for some reason that one was always a huge emotional roller coaster for me, and I cried a lot at the end of that one, too (although those were happy tears). Even that beautiful musical number during the opening credits put tears in my eyes. Good ol' Alan Silvestri!

Tangled, too... everyone I talk to cried at that movie. For me, in particular, as the father of a young daughter... it's the scene near the end when the king and queen are about to release the first lanterns to mark Rapunzel's birthday, and the king is crying because he misses his daughter so much. I totally lost it, right there.

Bridge to Terabithia... now there's one I didn't see coming at all. That moment in act three when it's revealed out of nowhere that a really beloved character has died, it literally took my breath away. I cried uncontrollably, even long after the movie had ended. I feel so bad for that movie because it was so terribly marketed as a poor man's Narnia, but it wasn't remotely like that at all. What it WAS was one of the most touching and wonderful stories of friendship and loss that I have EVER seen.

I guess I just cry a lot at movies. But my favorites are always the ones that tap into the emotional core of what it is to live the human experience. I'm sure there are many more, but these are the ones I think of first.