Best Films When You Need a Good Cry

Chris Gardner is a struggling salesman in San Francisco in the early 1980s. His wife leaves. He loses his apartment. He ends up homeless with his five-year-old son, sleeping in shelters and public bathrooms while competing for an unpaid internship that may or may not lead to a job. Will Smith gives the performance of his career — restrained, specific, never asking for sympathy — and the film earns its ending because it never softens what comes before it. Based on a true story. The real Chris Gardner built a brokerage firm worth millions. The film makes you believe it.

Lee Chandler is a janitor in Boston when his brother dies and leaves him legal guardian of his teenage nephew. The film moves between the present and Lee's past in a small Massachusetts town — and what happened there, what he did and what it cost him — with a patience and honesty that is almost unbearable. Casey Affleck won the Oscar. Kenneth Lonergan's screenplay is the finest American script of the last twenty years. This is not a film about redemption. It is a film about a man who carries something that cannot be put down, and what that looks like from the outside.

The first ten minutes of Pixar's Up — a wordless montage of a marriage, an entire life together compressed into four minutes of film — is the most emotionally efficient sequence in the history of animation and one of the most moving in all of cinema. The rest of the film is a funny, warm adventure about an old man, a young boy, and a house lifted by balloons. It is also entirely about grief and the question of what we do with the life that remains after we lose the person we built it for. Do not be deceived by the talking dogs.

In 1986, a five-year-old boy named Saroo falls asleep on a train in India and wakes up 1,500 kilometres from home. He eventually ends up adopted by an Australian couple in Tasmania. Twenty-five years later, he uses Google Earth to search for the village he came from. Dev Patel plays the adult Saroo with extraordinary vulnerability, and Nicole Kidman gives one of her finest performances as his adoptive mother. Based entirely on a true story. The reunion at the end — which you know is coming, which changes nothing about its impact — is one of cinema's great emotional gut-punches.

Rudy Ruettiger grows up in a working-class family in Indiana dreaming of playing football for Notre Dame. He has no money, mediocre grades, and is too small. He goes anyway. Anspaugh's film is the defining sports underdog story — not because of what happens on the field but because of what it costs Rudy to get there, and what it means to the people around him who stopped believing in things. Sean Astin plays Rudy with complete sincerity. The final scene, in Notre Dame Stadium, still produces goosebumps on the tenth viewing.

An American doctor learns that his estranged son has died on the first day of walking the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage route across northern Spain. He flies to France to collect the body, and instead decides to walk the route himself — carrying his son's ashes the entire 800 kilometres to Santiago de Compostela. Martin Sheen plays the father with a quietness that earns every emotion the film asks of you. Written and directed by his son Emilio Estevez. The Camino itself — the landscape, the other pilgrims, the cumulative physical and spiritual weight of the walk — is rendered with complete authenticity.

Homer Hickam grows up in a West Virginia coal mining town in 1957, the year Sputnik goes up. He decides he wants to build rockets. His father — the mine superintendent — thinks he should go down the mine. Based on Homer Hickam's memoir Rocket Boys, this is one of the finest coming-of-age films ever made: specific, honest, and genuinely moving about the distance between a father and a son who love each other and cannot understand each other. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Homer at 19. Chris Cooper plays his father. The relationship between them is the whole film.

Brian Piccolo and Gale Sayers are Chicago Bears running backs competing for the same position who become best friends — the first interracial roommates in NFL history. When Piccolo is diagnosed with cancer at 26, Sayers stays by him until the end. Originally made for television, Brian's Song became one of the most watched films of 1971 and one of the most enduring sports films ever made. James Caan and Billy Dee Williams are both exceptional. It is unapologetically emotional and entirely earns it. If you have ever loved a friend, this film will undo you.

A washed-up boxer living in Florida with his devoted young son attempts a comeback. Jon Voight plays the father, Ricky Schroder plays the boy, and the final scene — filmed in a single long take — is one of the most studied emotional sequences in film history. Psychology researchers have used it in studies of grief response because it is so reliably devastating. Zeffirelli remade King Vidor's 1931 original and, remarkably, improved on it. Know what you're getting into. This is a film that does not apologise for what it makes you feel.