Movies can make us tear up for all sorts of reasons. It could be an especially moving score, or the sheer spectacle of a scene, or an evocative depiction of generational trauma. And just as often, movies will make us cry when they’re not available to stream when you want to watch them. Fortunately for you, we’ve done the work and found 20 weep-worthy movies that are on major streaming services at this very moment. Grab a blanket and soft-sob, ugly-weep, or single-tear your way through these films in your soon-to-be-wet living room.
Hulu
10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
The ’90s were a golden time for teary Shakespearean adaptations; think of that choked-back sob all-time crier Claire Danes gives at the end of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet or the agonized scream Laura Fraser’s Lavinia would give if her rapists hadn’t also cut out her tongue in Titus. These are tragedies, after all. Yet the poem scene in the decidedly comic Taming of the Shrew remake 10 Things I Hate About You is sublimely sappy thanks to so much damn earnestness: Heath Ledger’s wide-eyed, wounded gaze; director Gil Junger’s push on Julia Stiles as she reads her titular poem in front of the class; Stiles’s defensive façade crumbling first a little bit, and then all at once. It’s a perfectly paced minute that honors all the uncontrollably sincere feelings of adolescent love and pushes them upon us, too. Ledger’s death in the years since only amps up the wistfulness. — Roxana HadadiÂ
50/50 (2011)
Have you ever cried so hard that you started making strange noises and couldn’t figure out how to stop? That is what happened to me while watching the scene in 50/50 where Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) cries in the arms of his mother (Anjelica Huston) just as he is being wheeled away to undergo a risky surgery. 50/50 isn’t this gut-punching in every scene. For a movie about a young man diagnosed with cancer and based loosely on the experiences of screenwriter Jonathan Levine, it’s hardly a relentless downer. Parts of the movie could be classified as a downright buddy comedy as it focuses on Adam’s relationship with his best friend Kyle (Seth Rogen), who tries his best to support his buddy through a potentially fatal illness. But it’s the movie’s mix of tones that makes the really dramatic scenes, like the one pre-surgery, work as well as they do. In the midst of life, those moments pop up and serve as a reminder that Adam is in real danger of losing his own. —Jen Chaney
The Notebook
In the mid-aughts, there was perhaps no movie better suited to leave an entire slumber party crying than The Notebook. If the phrase “based on a Nicholas Sparks novel†isn’t enough of a description for you, here’s a quick rundown of just some of the tear-inducing triggers found in this 1940s-set romance: young lovers of different social classes torn apart by disapproving parents; a pivotal secondary character killed in World War II; declarations of longing in the rain; a cute elderly couple dancing; a grand gesture featuring real estate; so, so many passionate kisses. Sure, it’s all a bit cliché, but with Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling acting circles around the canned dialogue and delivering undeniable chemistry, it’s impossible not to get swept up in the emotions. —Tolly Wright
Netflix
Lady Bird
Sorry to Barbie and its monologues, but Greta Gerwig’s best, tear-jerkiest movie is the one for which she got a Best Director nomination. Lady Bird has so many different types of cries: the cry of recognition at the titular teen’s (Saoirse Ronan) awkward attempts at self-determination; the cry of frustration as Lady Bird and her mom (Laurie Metcalf) take their anxieties out on each other; the cry of relief when Lady Bird calls to apologize. After your tears dry, call your mom and say you’re sorry. For anything. For everything! —Emily Palmer Heller
Minari
A family of Korean immigrants moves from California to Arkansas in 1983 to follow patriarch Jacob Yi’s (Steven Yeun) American Dream in this beautiful drama. The Yis struggle to put down roots in their new home, both literally and figuratively, as Jacob’s farm faces a series of setbacks and the family acclimates to life in a remote, rural community. The hardships are devastating, but it’s the relationship between the young son David (Alan Kim) and his grandma Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung, who won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress) that really gets those waterworks going. If only Jacob could use our tears for his crops. —Tolly Wright
Max
Kiki’s Delivery Service
The waterworks begin almost immediately. The Miyazaki movie opens with a 13-year-old girl named Kiki leaving home to hang her own shingle as a resident witch elsewhere. The opening scenes make it clear not just that she has magic powers, a spunky attitude, and a strong sense of independence, but also that she is loved. The more I rewatch this movie, which piles emotionally devastating obstacles in Kiki’s path once she leaves, the more acute the end of her childhood feels. This is a movie about moving away from home, financial instability, career frustration, and ultimately physically aching, bedridden depression. I cry as she lifts off the ground in that opening scene because Miyazaki’s storyboarding and direction make her perseverance through all of that feel uncannily real. I’m lamenting her childhood, but also overcome by how much the cheering crowd wants her to flourish, because I want the same. Then she hits a tree on her way up. Attagirl! —Eric Vilas-Boas
Rookie of the Year
Rookie of the Year is not the movie in which celestial beings help the Angels win the pennant — that would be Angels in the Outfield. Rookie of the Year is the movie in which a 12-year-old with a freak arm injury helps the Cubs win the pennant, and real heads know that it’s the superior ’90s children’s baseball offering. It also, and I’m only mildly embarrassed to admit this, is guaranteed to get me welling up thanks to its ending. Henry Rowengartner (Thomas Ian Nicholas) has been recruited to the Major League thanks to a broken arm that healed in a way that allows him to throw a blistering fastball. But during the final game of the season, Henry falls and undoes whatever anatomical miracle enabled his sports superpower, and is left to face down a bruiser of a Yankees slugger with nothing more than a little-leaguer’s skill. He’s out of options and at a loss for what to do, and then! He looks down at the glove his mother Mary (Chicago theater legend Amy Morton) gave him, the one she said belonged to the father who actually abandoned her when she was pregnant, and peels away some tape to find her name there instead. It wasn’t his absentee dad who loved baseball, it was his mom, who mouths from the stands that he should “float it.†The look on Morton’s face, and the way the movie creates this private conversation between the two characters in the middle of this massive stadium, is totally affecting. Rookie of the Year is a goofy movie, but it never fails to get to me, the idea of this woman giving away a part of herself to make Henry feel like he had someone to look up to, when she’s been there the whole time. —Alison Wilmore
Prime Video
Fruitvale Station
Ryan Coogler’s directorial debut is based on the actual death of Oscar Grant, a Black San Francisco man murdered at a BART station by overzealous subway police officers. That fact alone gives Fruitvale Station an immediate, wrenching power. As the film tracks the last day Oscar (Michael B. Jordan) spends alive, you already know what’s going to happen to him and you know you can’t stop it. You also know that Oscar’s story won’t be the last one that involves a young Black man losing his life simply by inadvertently crossing paths with the wrong cop. But the part of this movie that will just destroy you is the scene where Oscar’s mother, played by Octavia Spencer, breaks down in a flurry of guilt and sorrow while identifying his body. The first time I saw that scene and this movie, I was still sobbing so hard when I left the parking garage that I thought the attendant might send me directly to a therapist. —Jen Chaney
It’s a Wonderful Life
Every year around Christmas, I watch it; every year, it reduces me to a puddle. You’d think I would be desensitized to it by now, but the intensity only grows as I’ve grown older and more familiar with the problems George Bailey faces in his hardscrabble existence. You’ve heard the story: Practically broke and potentially going to prison after his uncle and business partner loses $20,000, George contemplates ending his life when an angel visits him and shows him, through flashback, just how valuable he is to society. It’s a persuasive parable that culminates with Jimmy Stewart jubilantly reasserting his love for his miserable life, his crummy town, and his beautiful adoring family. But the line that sends me over the edge is from George’s brother Harry, who has finally returned home after years of fighting in World War II. Harry proposes a toast: “To my big brother George: the richest man in town.†I lose it completely — harder and harder every year — because the older I get, the more important it feels to tell people how much you care about them while you can say it and they can hear it. —Eric Vilas-Boas
Knock at the Cabin
M. Night Shyamalan’s obsession with aging and fatherhood may have peaked in absurdity with (the beach that makes you) Old, but Knock at the Cabin brings his grimly optimistic perspective on parental sacrifice to a more thoughtful conclusion. Perhaps the climax of the film, in which Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge) are finally convinced that the literal apocalypse will occur if they don’t sacrifice someone in their family, doesn’t hit quite as hard if it’s not your first time back in a movie theater after giving birth, and you’ve spent most of the run time surreptitiously checking your phone for an emergency call from the babysitter. But who can say? —Emily Palmer Heller
Disney+
Avatar: The Way of Water
THEY TARGET THE MOTHER WHALES BECAUSE THEY SWIM SLOWER BECAUSE THEY DON’T WANT TO LEAVE THEIR BABIES BEHIND!!! ARE YOU KIDDING ME???? —Emily Palmer Heller
Big Hero 6
Much has been said about the opening sequence of Up, but if old man Fredricksen thinks his parable is as sad as it gets, he needs to (sorry) come back down to earth. In fact, it’s not even the saddest origin story among animated Disney films released in the Obama years, thanks to Big Hero 6. In the imagined futuristic city of San Fransokyo (so basically Tokyo, but they speak English and have a red bridge), orphaned brothers Hiro and Tadashi Hamada live with their Aunt Cass while Tadashi attends the San Fransokyo Institute of Technology and younger brother Hiro gets up to no good (mainly participating in illegal underground robot battles). Tadashi, attempting to get his brother off the streets, inspires Hiro to join him at the university to study robotics, where Tadashi himself has been developing a health-care robot named Baymax. But before Hiro is able to do so, tragedy strikes — there is a fire at the university campus, and Tadashi is killed attempting to save his mentor, Callaghan. In painful slo-mo, we see Hiro become the last surviving member of his nuclear family. Later in the film, in a pivotal moment of frustration fueled by grief, Hiro stumbles upon video footage of his brother developing Baymax in the lab. A touching final moment of connection between brothers plays out while tears stream down Hiro’s face, and anyone in the audience who has ever loved and lost is reaching for a tissue. —Anusha Praturu
Pete’s Dragon (2016)
Disney’s live-action remakes are not particularly emotional affairs. Achievements in costume design (Maleficent and Cinderella), paltry steps forward in LGBTQ+ representation (Beauty and the Beast), and regurgitations of Orientalism (Aladdin), sure. But most of them share an uncanny-valley quality that keeps us at a distance, with a notable exception: David Lowery’s beautifully reimagined Pete’s Dragon. The original 1977 musical centers the friendship between the orphan Pete and the clumsy dragon Elliott, and it’s a bit like the same-year release The Rescuers in that a human-animal bond ends up teaching both species about kindness and compassion. Lowery’s remake doesn’t lose sight of that. It instead jettisons some of the goofier aspects of the original for a more somber exploration of what loneliness feels like, both on a micro-familial level and a macro-environmental level, and Bryce Dallas Howard and Oakes Fegley make for a lovely mother-son pair. The film’s finale hits all the right beats of love, acceptance, and sacrifice, and suddenly you’re sobbing at the sight of a group of neon-green CGI dragons zooming around the sky in a jubilant reunion. None of Disney’s other live-action adaptations has come remotely close to feeling this bone-deep. —Roxana HadadiÂ
The Criterion Channel
Petite Maman
This lovely little French film, Céline Sciamma’s follow-up to Portrait of a Lady on Fire, packs a lot of crying into a petite 72-minute package. Maternal and childhood angst are tangled up together when 8-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) meets and befriends an 8-year-old version of her mom, Marion (Gabrielle Sanz, Nina Meurisse as an adult), after her beloved grandmother dies and Marion takes off without saying good-bye. Nelly’s curiosity about her parents, especially about her mother’s sadness, is so pure and sweet, she’ll have you tearing up well before the inevitable mother-daughter reunion. —Emily Palmer Heller
Mubi
The AppleÂ
A word of warning: The tears The Apple will bring aren’t inspired by maximalist spectacle, cathartic, or romantic; the film doesn’t easily fit into any category or re-create any of the tropes from this exhaustive list. Iranian director and writer Samira Makhmalbaf’s debut, made when she was just 17 years old, is slippery, cunning, disturbing, and moving, and the emotions it brings about are as complicated and contradictory as the movie itself. A sort of Iranian version of The Virgin Suicides, The Apple is both based on a true story and stars the nonactors whose lives are being lightly fictionalized here. In The Apple, 12-year-old twin sisters Zahra and Massoumeh Naderi have been kept locked in their house by their parents their entire lives. Their elderly father, an incredibly religious man, is convinced that sending his daughters outside would lead to their corruption, rape, and ruin; their mother, who is blind, acquiesces to her husband’s demands. The story became national news when their neighbors alerted authorities, and within days, Makhmalbaf met the family and began filming them. She has them re-create conversations and events, follows Zahra and Massoumeh as they discover the outside world and its myriad rules, and questions the Naderi parents about their choices; the effect is a seesaw between confused shock at the lengths to which parents will go to serve their delusions and fears and measured relief at the possibility that these sisters could now live a better life. The Apple is an experiment in form, but what’s never in question is how overwhelming this film is in both its depictions of despair and hope. — Roxana HadadiÂ
Paramount+
Little Women (1994)
Anytime Claire Danes is crying, we’re crying. Or Kirsten Dunst is crying because she got bullied by her teacher, and Susan Sarandon is indignant about it! Or Christian Bale is crying because he’ll never love anyone like he loves Winona Ryder, only to fall in love with Kirsten Dunst years later! Or Winona Ryder is crying because she caught Gabriel Byrne before he left for California dejected, thinking she was married to Christian Bale! We’re also crying then. —Emily Palmer Heller
Roman Holiday
The movie that introduced the masses to the talents of Audrey Hepburn, William Wyler’s romantic comedy is about the whirlwind romance between a runaway princess (Hepburn) and a reporter (Gregory Peck) in Rome. Most of the film elicits more laughs than tears, but it’s the bittersweet ending that’s guaranteed to make you cry every single time. All it takes is the most intimate glances between Hepburn and Peck to have you getting watery. —Savannah Salazar
Titanic
It’s hard to have a unique experience with Titanic. You’ll find Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet’s chemistry irresistible; you’ll be gagged by Billy Zane’s audacity; you will feel overwhelmed by the massive spectacle of the back half of the film; and your crying will hit its uncontrollable peak either when the musicians decide to go down with the boat or Cameron shows the old couple lying on the bed. Either way, if you need a banger of a movie to release that pent-up emotional energy, Titanic is always the answer. —Savannah Salazar
Peacock
Glory
I first encountered Glory in high-school social studies. There are few environments less conducive to being emotionally vulnerable, but the movie still marched past my defenses. Matthew Broderick plays the white officer commanding the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment — one of the country’s first Black military units. He clashes with the men serving under him, in part because they have a whole lot more at stake than he does in this whole Civil War thing. Seeing how each soldier navigates being Black in a racist society is very powerful: Each man has their own strategy for escaping this world unharmed, and it’s heartbreaking that (1) they have to do all this extra work in order to just exist, (2) that this hard work still doesn’t protect them, and (3) their descendants are doing the same labor. But the whole film is basically preamble to the end: They lose! The film follows these men, who are imbued with inner lives and backstories and hopes and dreams for a better America, only for them to die at the hands of the Confederacy. We know the Union eventually wins the Civil War, but it doesn’t erase the haunting image of Broderick’s colonel and Denzel Washington’s Private Silas Trip being tossed into the same mass grave. — Bethy Squires
Love, Antosha
Many movie cries offer a sort of escapism, safely ensconced in the realm of fiction. Love, Antosha, a documentary about the actor Anton Yelchin, who died tragically in a freak accident at the age of 27, provides no such protection. The film is narrated by Yelchin’s Dying of the Light co-star Nicolas Cage and features interviews with several close friends and colleagues that celebrate his talent as an artist. But the heart of the movie is his relationship with his parents, Irina Korina and Viktor Yelchin. Their love is detailed in archival footage of Yelchin as a kid and letters he sent home. (The title of the documentary comes from his sign-off in those notes.) If that weren’t sad enough, learning that Irina and Viktor fought to get the movie made as a tribute to their son will bring on the sobs for sure. —Emily Palmer Heller
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- Which Part of Beaches Makes the Author of Beaches Cry Hardest?
- The Idea of Martin Scorsese’s Career Brought Me to Tears
- The Crying Game