The 32 most heartbreaking movie moments

We go to the movies for all kinds of reasons. To laugh, to scream, to cheer. But sometimes, there comes a film that leaves us crying like babies. Some of the most unforgettable movies have equally unforgettable moments that break our hearts in two. But what might be the most heartbreaking movie moments of all time?

Whether it's movies about lovers or family, about dreamers or broken dreams, some of the greatest films get us right in the feels (as the kids might say). If you're in need of a good cry, here are 32 movie moments that are truly the most heartbreaking of all time. Fair warning: these are not for the faint of heart, so be sure to have a box of tissues at the ready.

32. "Daddy" in The Quiet Girl

Year: 2022
Director: Colm Bairéad

In Colm Bairéad's moving drama, a withdrawn and neglected nine-year-old girl named Cáit (Catherine Clinch) spends a summer away with distant relatives, where she experiences a warm and loving home for the first time. At the end of the movie, Cáit returns to her uncaring biological parents. But we also see Cáit chase after her mother's cousin and husband, winding up in the arms of the man she chooses to be her father. While what happens next is up to the viewer to decide, The Quiet Girl tugs on the heartstrings with its poignant story about how much blood doesn't matter when it comes to family.

31. Airport Dropoff, in Lady Bird

Year: 2017
Director: Greta Gerwig

Greta Gerwig's coming-of-age dramedy follows the turbulent relationship between a high school senior, nicknamed "Lady Bird" (Saoirse Ronan) and her mother (Laurie Metcalf). Over the course of Lady Bird's senior year and preparation for college, Lady Bird and her mother navigate their sometimes great, sometimes awful dynamic. Towards the end of the movie, when things are particularly bad, Lady Bird's mother refuses to see her off at the airport, only to change her mind when it's too late. Lady Bird doesn't end on a decisively happy note, but it is an optimistic one. The airport scene is the movie's big emotional climax, where the things we don't do or say hurt just as much.

30. 8316, in Her

Year: 2013
Director: Spike Jonze

Spike Jonze's acclaimed sci-fi romance Her interrogates the limits of personal connections in a brave new world. After a lonely writer (Joaquin Phoenix) falls for his sophisticated A.I. assistant Samantha (the voice of Scarlett Johansson), he learns the hard way that loving someone – or something – that isn't tethered to a human body and single consciousness comes with caveats. The genius of Jonze's direction is having Phoenix stand still in a busy subway staircase. He is paused in a world that keeps on moving, forced to wonder if anyone around him are part of the other 8,316 humans that Samantha has interactions with. While the movie has dudes on Reddit joking that even machines aren't faithful, the real point of this heartbreaker of a scene is that we, as humans, aren't prepared for the world we're creating.

29. One More Day at the Beach, in About Time

Year: 2013
Director: Richard Curtis

What would you do to spend one more day with your parents? In the romantic fantasy About Time, Domnhall Gleeson plays a man who inherits a genetic power to travel back in time. While he uses it to find true love with an American book editor living in London (played by Rachel McAdams), he also uses it to see his dad again after he passes away. Under the movie's unique rules of time travel, time is quite literally running out to ever see dear old Dad again, which encourages them both to leap further back to an unforgettable day at the beach. Most people going into About Time probably expected a typical rom-com. What they didn't expect is facing the inevitable reality of saying goodbye to those we want to spend time with the most.

28. Allie's Last Dance, in The Notebook

Year: 2004
Director: Nick Cassavettes

"What happened to me?" "You just went away for a little while." After spending 90 minutes watching Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling, moviegoers saw Gena Rowlands and James Garner take over to really give them the gut-punch they came for. In the smash-hit romantic drama The Notebook, an elderly man tells a beautiful story about a romance to an elderly woman; soon, audiences learn it was their romance and that Noah has taken it upon himself to spend every day reminding a dementia-stricken Allie of their love. Towards the end of the movie, Allie gets just a few minutes of clarity and a tender dance before the dementia woefully settles back in.

27. Mufasa Dies, in The Lion King

Year: 1994
Director(s): Roger Allers, Rob Minkoff

A bizarre amount of family-animated classics revolve around dead parents. Bambi, The Land Before Time, Finding Nemo. But among the best Disney movies of all time, few are as effective and memorable as The Lion King. The iconic death scene of Mufasa (the voice of James Earl Jones) is still an all-timer, underscored as an act of murder by his own brother Scar (Jeremy Irons). Adding to the movie's drama is the chaos of the stampede, which artfully masks the actual death for a family audience. For decades, Bambi was the go-to movie for tragic parental death scenes, but then came The Lion King roaring in all its beautiful and traumatic glory.

26. The Family Special, in All of Us Strangers

Year: 2023
Director: Andrew Haigh

It's absurd to pick just one time in Andrew Haigh's All of Us Strangers that doesn't smash our hearts to bits. The whole movie is an open wound, an interrogation about manhood and queer love with the universal longing for our parents. Andrew Scott stars as a screenwriter who finds out that his parents, who died in a Christmas car crash long ago, are still living as ghosts in their old family home. (There's also a parallel romance with a hot neighbor, played by Paul Mescal, which offers its own devastating story.) Narrowing things to just one scene, Scott's character's farewell to his parents – a farewell he never had the chance to do before – takes the cake for the movie's most heartbreaking moment, where the warm comfort of nostalgia slowly segues into a colder, lonesome present.

25. Expectations vs. Reality, in (500) Days of Summer

Year: 2009
Director: Marc Webb

We've all been there before. We get our hopes up, thinking we can fly, only for the hard physics of the real world to take us tumbling down. In Marc Webb's rom-com classic (500) Days of Summer, Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Tom is intoxicated by the thrill of getting back with Summer (Zooey Deschanel), only to see up close just how far they've drifted apart. (Adding to the moment: Regina Spektor's melancholic downtempo piano and her lyrics: "I'm the hero of this story, don't need to be saved.") Webb's clever direction of showing side-by-side the stark contrast of Tom's imagination with objective reality speaks to all of us who thought life and love would go the way we hoped. We should know by now that it rarely does.

24. Nearer My God To Thee, in Titanic

Year: 1997
Director: James Cameron

One might think a romance on a famously doomed liner would mean its most heartbreaking moment centers around Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. And, sure, Leo's frozen fate is quite sad. But there's something magnificently human about the montage "Nearer My God To Thee," commonly called "the violin scene." Underscored by the ship's orchestra continuing to play as panic as chaos unfolds around them, director James Cameron darts the camera around the ship to glimpse those who've accepted their fate. (Hence the choice in hymn.) From an elderly couple resting in each other's arms to dapper gentlemen having second thoughts, there are many on the Titanic who went down with it, preparing for unimaginable horror with calm and grace. To say nothing of the musicians, who meet death with just their God-given talents. Capping off the sequence is an all-time line: "Gentlemen, it has been a privilege playing with you tonight."

23. "I Love You, 3000" in Avengers: Endgame

Year: 2019
Directors: Joe Russo, Anthony Russo

Ten years and twenty-odd movies made Avengers: Endgame a victory lap for Marvel Studios, who successfully caught the world's imagination with a serialized saga of superheroes. But victory is never earned without sacrifice, and Avengers: Endgame ended its impossibly huge climactic battle against Thanos with the death of the man who built the empire: Tony Stark, aka Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.). His quiet death already drew plenty of tears, but then came a belated message of goodbye, set to a moving montage of a restored universe. Looking into the eyes of his daughter and in the direction of the audience sitting in the dark, Stark signs off from the Marvel timeline for a well-deserved rest.

22. Derek Finds Danny, in American History X

Year: 1998
Director: Tony Kaye

Arguments with the studio led Tony Kaye to disown his directorial feature American History X. (He reportedly did not watch it until 2007.) But the movie has become an American classic, an unfortunately timeless warning about the consequences of hatred. Late in the movie, Edward Norton's reformed ex-neo-Nazi finds his rebellious young brother (Edward Furlong) shot dead by other students. Bursting into the bathroom to the sight of his lost brother, Norton puts on the performance of his career as he cries out over the futility of his efforts to save his sibling from his own mistakes. Life is simply too short to be hateful all the time.

21. The Ending, in The Mist

Year: 2007
Director: Frank Darabont

Patience, truly, is a virtue. In Frank Darabont's acclaimed film version of Stephen King's horror story The Mist, Thomas Jayne stars as a family man who, along with his son, ends up trapped in a supermarket after a mysterious mist filled with menacing monsters engulfs the town. Towards the end of the movie, Jayne's David has escaped with his son and other survivors, only for their car to run out of gas. After deciding to kill them all (even his son), David calls out for the monsters to get him, only for the mist to clear up. As military tanks roll past him, David cries out in defeat. Lesson learned the extremely hard way: Never give up.

20. Baby Mine, in Dumbo

Year: 1941
Director: Ben Sharpsteen

Mercifully, Dumbo is not another Disney movie with dead parents. But Mrs. Jumbo still gets herself in hot water when acting in defense of her big-eared son nicknamed "Dumbo," Mrs. Jumbo shows her motherly wrath by wreaking havoc upon the circus she and her son are attractions for. This leads Mrs. Jumbo to be locked up, depriving her of caring for her vulnerable son. Behind a locked carriage, the mother elephant sings her baby boy a lullaby, and the two interlink trunks, a moving expression of love finding its way through the cracks of confinement. While the song "Baby Mine" is sweet and sentimental, we still feel Mrs. Jumbo's rage. No one should live like this, not even in the circus.

19. The Train Station, in The Elephant Man

Year: 1980
Director: David Lynch

"I am not an animal!" It may take place in Victorian times, but one of the best David Lynch movies, The Elephant Man, still resonates in its sympathetic portrait of people who only ever want dignity, and to not be an object of ridicule. Based on the life of Joseph Merrick, an English artist with severe deformities, The Elephant Man stars John Hurt as Joseph Merrick, whose intelligence and kindness are shrouded by his grotesque features. Halfway through the movie, Joseph arrives at Liverpool station, where he is unmasked and chased by an unruly mob. Cornered, he cries out in his own defense: "I am a human being! I am a man!" Besides the sympathy we feel for Joseph, we also feel scorn towards a hostile crowd who are better deserving of being called monsters.

18. "Is This Heaven?"/"It's Iowa," in Field of Dreams

Year: 1989
Director: Phil Alden Robinson

A simple game of catch between father and son becomes movie magic – and a faucet for tears – in Phil Alden Robinson's Field of Dreams. After Kevin Costner hears whispers to build a baseball field on his Iowa corn farm, the ghosts of legends like Shoeless Joe Jackson show up, as does the ghost of his estranged father who never lived out his wildest dreams of playing ball. At the end of the movie, Costner and his father's spirit play an overdue game of catch, imparting a lesson that it is, perhaps, never too late – and you're never too old – to want to toss a ball with Dad.

17. A Night in the Subway, in The Pursuit of Happyness

Year: 2006
Director: Gabriele Muccino

Will Smith embodies all fathers who feel like failures in The Pursuit of Happyness. Based on the true story of businessman Chris Gardner, Smith plays a father whose financial investments have soured on him, leaving him close to penniless and homeless while hustling at an unpaid internship. On one bad night, Chris and his son (played by Smith's real-life son, Jaden Smith) take shelter in the bathroom of a subway station. But what gets audiences right in their feels is how Chris cleverly keeps his son from understanding just how dire things are, tapping into his imagination in a sweet and playful way. The result is a heart-wrenching moment that is almost too much to bear.

16. Being Superman, in The Iron Giant

Year: 1999
Director: Brad Bird

Who are we? What is our purpose? What are we made for? Such questions are explored in Brad Bird's celebrated animated classic The Iron Giant, where a young boy befriends a colossal robot from outer space (voiced by Vin Diesel). While we get glaring hints that the "Iron Giant" was made for warfare, young Hogarth teaches his new friend of steel that just because we're made for a reason doesn't mean we have to be that reason. With a crate of Superman comics, Hogarth instills in the Giant that he can be whatever he wants to be. In the end, the Giant chooses to be like Superman, using his inexplicable armaments to save the world instead of destroying it.

15. The Prologue/Life With Abigail, in Up

Year: 2009
Director: Peter Docter

The extended prologue of Up is legendary, infamous for how it decimates hearts and souls before the movie actually begins. (Truly, what other scene has its own Wikipedia page?) But meme status doesn't diminish how effective it remains. If you don't already know, the prologue of Disney/Pixar's Up chronicles the life shared between Carl (Ed Asner) and his true love, Ellie, until her death. Mostly nonverbal – the filmmakers fashioned the sequence after home movies – the prologue reveals the highs and lows of Carl and Ellie's married life together, including Ellie's disappointment in being unable to have kids. Again, this is just the beginning of Up, but in less than 10 minutes, the movie takes audiences through one heck of an emotional ordeal.

14. "O Captain, My Captain" in Dead Poet's Society

Year: 1989
Director: Peter Weir

When Robin Williams died in 2014, among the many tributes to him were re-uploads of this iconic scene from the 1989 film Dead Poet's Society. At the end of the movie, after Robin Williams' John Keating has shown his students how to express themselves and seize their days with the power of poetry, his students pay homage to their departing teacher by reciting the opening lines – "O Captain! My Captain!" – from Walt Whitman's poem for Abraham Lincoln's death. Though the moment has been replicated and parodied everywhere, its original form is still stirring enough to make us well with tears and encouragement to Carpe all our diems.

13. Ricky Gets Shot, in Boyz N the Hood

Year: 1991
Director: John Singleton

The ruthlessness of hood life is made painfully clear in John Singleton's dramatic classic Boyz N the Hood. While most of the movie revolves around young Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.), who tries to keep his head on straight while living with his father in South Central L.A., it's his close friend Ricky – a star football player with dreams of going to the University of Southern California on a scholarship – who carries the movie's most devastating moment. Late in the film, Ricky is targeted and shot by gang members… just in time for his winning SAT scores to show up in the mail. That's the real tragedy here. It's the ones who deserve violence the least who get caught up in its storm the most.

12. "You Bow to No One," in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Year: 2003
Director: Peter Jackson

One does not simply walk into Mordor. But a few humble Hobbits did, and for saving Middle-earth, they are rewarded with reverence. Towards the end of Peter Jackson's seminal Lord of the Rings trilogy, after the threat of Sauron has become a memory, the coronation of Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) as the new King of Gondor sees the kingdom bow to Frodo (Elijah Wood), Samwise (Sean Astin), Pippin (Billy Boyd), and Merry (Dominic Monaghan) instead. Everyone takes that moment to acknowledge the halflings' courage in facing one of the most evil and powerful forces, even when it seemed that all was lost. In concert with a reprisal of the Shire motif by Howard Shore, it's hard not to get choked up – and more worried as Frodo doesn't look so good. Hobbits really are amazing creatures. Even after a hundred years, they can still surprise you.

11. "When She Loved Me" in Toy Story 2

Year: 1999
Director: John Lasseter

Toy Story 2's infamous "When She Loved Me" montage made us all hold onto our childhood toys a little tighter. Deepening the relationship between kids and toys from its predecessor, Toy Story 2 sees newcomer Jessie (Joan Cusack) recall her first owner, a girl named Emily, whose memories together are drenched in a golden hour sun. But soon, the inevitable happens. The kids grow up. They put down their favorite toys and never pick them up again. Set to a slow pop ballad ("When She Loved Me," which invites multiple interpretations beyond kids and their toys) with Sarah McLachlan on vocals and lyrics by Randy Newman, the sequence contains the universal truth that we all move on, sometimes without realizing what – or who – we leave behind.

10. "I's Afraid of the Dark" in The Green Mile

Year: 1999
Director: Frank Darabont

The late Michael Clarke Duncan lives on forever as gentle giant John Coffey in The Green Mile, whose unforgettable execution scene is to witness the death of innocence. Based on Stephen King's novel, The Green Mile stars Tom Hanks as a death row prison guard in 1935 who befriends an innocent convict, John (Duncan), who demonstrates strange healing powers. Despite his innocence of a heinous crime, John's sentencing is carried through. At his execution, John tearfully asks not to be shrouded with a hood. "I's afraid of the dark," he whimpers. To see a big shell house such a frightened soul is powerful enough to make us all cry for justice, even if it falls on deaf ears.

9. The End of the Game, in Life is Beautiful

Year: 1997
Director: Roberto Benigni

It was a massive high-wire act for actor, writer, and director Robert Benigni to make a family comedy set at a Nazi concentration camp. But Life Is Beautiful is not a careless film. Instead, it's a multi-layered work that reveals the lengths we go to protect the ones we love. Its story follows an Italian Jewish father (Benigni) who, during World War 2, shields his precocious young son from the horrors around him by inventing games to distract his attention. Even to the end, Benigni's character kees up the ruse for his son, playing along even as he literally marches to his death. As audiences, we're all laughing, however uncomfortably, until suddenly there's nothing to laugh at.

8. Shirts in the Closet, in Brokeback Mountain

Year: 2005
Director: Ang Lee

"In the closet" holds plenty of meaning in Ang Lee's dramatic classic Brokeback Mountain, which revolves around the forbidden love affair between two American cowboys played by Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. Late in the movie after Gyllenhaal's Jack Twist is dead – or killed? – Ledger's Ennis visits Jack's childhood home. Hanging in the closet is a shirt Ennis thought he lost, wrapped by one of Jack's, still stained with dirt from Brokeback Mountain. It doesn't take much effort to see what Jack still thought of Ennis and their time together or that Ennis breaks down following months of silence between them. Whether you relate to gay cowboys or not, we all keep something precious in our closets.

7. "I Didn't Do Enough" in Schindler's List

Year: 1993
Director: Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg's sweeping Oscar-winner Schindler's List follows the real-life story of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who risked his living (and his own life) by turning his factories into a haven for over a thousand Jewish lives during the Holocaust. At the end of the movie, Schindler (played by Liam Neeson) tearfully regrets not doing more to save just one more. But the Jewish survivors who still live comfort Schindler, reminding him that even saving just one was a miracle. He is gifted a ring bearing a saying from the Talmud: "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire."

6. "Remember Me" in Coco

Year: 2017
Director: Lee Unkrich

Pixar's polychromatic classic Coco plunges audiences into the breathtaking world of the Mexican holiday Day of the Dead, exploring everlasting love through the ethereal power of memory and music. The movie's big emotional climax sees young Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez) breathlessly race to reignite his great-grandmother's memories of her father, Héctor (Gael García Bernal), before he vanishes for good in the afterlife. Thanks to a heartfelt rendition of "Remember Me," an original song critical to the story, Mama Coco does indeed remember her father once more. And with that, Miguel is crying. His grandmother is crying. The family is crying. You're crying. Everyone is crying. For once in 2017, Pixar recaptured a magic almost forgotten.

5. Sophie Makes Her Choice, in Sophie's Choice

Year: 1982
Director: Alan J. Pakula

You might have heard the term "Sophie's Choice" before, a slang meaning having to make a choice between two impossible options. If you don't know the origins of it though, buckle up. The term originates from William Styron's '79 novel, which was made into a movie starring Meryl Streep as Sophie in 1982. While the movie takes place in 1947, it flashes back to Sophie's recent past, surviving the Auschwitz camp during the Holocaust. Late in the movie, it's revealed that a Nazi soldier forced Sophie to make a choice between her two children to send to a gas chamber. Sophie indeed makes a choice, and it haunts her for the rest of her days, which explains her demeanor throughout the movie. Pray you never have to make such a choice yourself.

4. Standing in the Rain in The Bridges of Madison County

Year: 1995
Director: Clint Eastwood

There are countless movies about separated lovers torn apart by circumstance. But few moments perfectly illustrate longing like Clint Eastwood's The Bridges of Madison County, based on the book by Robert James Waller. At the end of the film, Meryl Streep and Clint Eastwood – playing two people who did not expect to find love so late in their lives – are caught in the rain, eyes locked as they silently decide whether their moment is hello or goodbye. As they linger, it quickly becomes clear: This is goodbye. Eastwood's delicate direction makes this scene immortal, depicting what we all feel about the ones we let slip away.

3. A Secret in Mud, in In the Mood for Love

Year: 2000
Director: Wong Kar-wai

When you have a secret in your heart, where else can you keep it? In Wong Kar-wai's lush romantic drama In the Mood for Love, two neighbors – played by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung – learn their spouses are cheating on them with each other. As they resolve to figure out how the affair began, their own feelings swirl in a haze of attraction and yearning. As the two drift apart, Leung learns from a friend an ancient Southeast Asian ritual to bury a secret forever. At the end of the movie, while on a visit to Cambodia, a monk witnesses Leung speaking to a hole before walking away, the crevice now plugged with mud. Wong Kar-wai is not a filmmaker who elaborates on his stories but trusts his audience to fill in the gaps themselves.

2. A Different Ending, in La La Land

Year: 2016
Director: Damien Chazelle

Damien Chazelle's romantic musical La La Land isn't a love letter to dreams so much as it is a breakup text, a movie that posits that dreams and love aren't always in step. Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone co-star as ambitious artists living in Hollywood – one a jazz musician, the other an aspiring actress. While they are smitten with each other, their pursuits take them on divergent paths. The end of the movie, set to a reprisal of "City of Stars," allows a glimpse at the road not taken where a happy home life awaits. But would they be happy people? The question lingers as Gosling and Stone's characters share one long, final glance across a crowded room. They're people living out their wildest dreams, and it only cost them each other.

1. Decembre, 1963, in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

Year: 1964
Director: Jacques Demy

At the end of Jacques Demy's sung-through musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the candy colored spring of young love yields to the frosty snowfall of adulthood, where two formerly inseparable lovers now talk like polite strangers. In Demy's romantic classic, the two main protagonists – played by Nino Castelnuovo and an especially radiant Catherine Deneuve as Geneviève – at last reunite after years apart due to Guy (Castelnuovo) being drafted to the Algerian War. Years later, after Geneviève has married a wealthy businessman, Geneviève's unsuspecting stop at a gas station puts her back in front of Guy once more. While their conversation is stiff (well, as far as a musical can let them be), Michel Legrand's haunting music resurrects old melodies that used to score their love. It reminds the audience of what the twoused to have, but a ghostly choir accompaniment definitively states what was there has now died. Of course, it's French cinema that shows us the ultimate vision of a pure love stamped out too soon.