That is a brilliant and underrated movie, I agree. Frank Cottrell Boyce, who wrote the book the film’s based on, deserves to be much more famous - he’s so good at capturing the voices of kids who are slightly odd, but not in the way you’d usually see in books or films.
I thought it was Seconhand Lions, too, from that description. You mean HJO was in three movies where his mother abandoned him? Poor kid must have got issues from that! 
Wrony (Crows) by Dorota Kędzierzawska is about a neglected nine or ten year old girl who accosts a two or three year old girl, to mother and play with her for the day. It’s a beautiful, bleak, washed-out, quiet film that captures amazing performances from the two children which children can enjoy but which really speaks to adults.
At one point they play in a boat that floats adrift, and the older girl says mournfully ‘All my life has floated away’.
Grave of the Fireflies. I don’t think I could just nail down one scene, though. That whole movie was rather touching if you forget about the politics of the war and just look at the humanity of it.
mrs.kidneyfailure has yet to make it all the way through Hachi (Hachi: A Dog's Tale (2009) - IMDb) without tearing up. She’s tried about three times thus far and has never made it to the end.
I have. I dunno, I’m in the minority on this. I didn’t really find it all that moving. Plus I spent much of the movie wondering what kind of parents would let their two little girls wander alone around the New York streets at night.
I forgot to add one of my favorites. I think it was made in the '80’s. It was called Heartland, and it’s about a woman and her little girl in the 1880’s on the Great Plains who hire out to a farmer as kitchen help, and the woman marries the guy. I think this movie probably comes closest to how life in the Old West really was like.
Anyway, the woman gives birth to a baby, and eventually the baby gets sick, and the family is really too isolated to get any help for the little boy. The baby dies, and there’s a scene where the little girl comes in the room to see the mother washing the dead baby in a little tub before his burial. It’s a short scene, and I don’t know if they used a wax doll for the baby, but man, that was one dead looking kid lying in that tub of water with his eyes open. Can you imagine what doing that must’ve been like back then?
Very powerful; so much is encompassed in 5 minutes.
One of my favorite movie segments is at the very end of Local Hero, when our hero Mac has left the quirky yet beautiful Scottish village and returned to Houston. He walks into his apartment and empties his pockets of seashells. The scene shifts back to that village, and the red telephone box rings. That’s it, and it is heartbreaking in its simplicity. (Local Hero seems less and less obscure these days, though–perhaps in part because of the oil spill in the Gulf.)
Another favorite: in the French documentary To Be and To Have (Etre et Avoir), the partnership of teacher and learner, as well as group living, is explored in a tiny, rural one room schoolhouse in St. Etienne-sur-Usson. To me, the film as a whole illustrates how education, so much of which is group living, could and should be. At the end, the teacher Monsieur Lopez quietly counsels a particularly shy student who will be heading off to middle school. We next see the group of kids say their final Au Revoir, Monsieur–then they are off.
Mr. Lopez stands alone at the door.
That was a fantastic movie. Very stark and true. Outstanding performances.
The “telephone” scene between Harry Dean Stanton and Natassja Kinski in Paris, Texas . I’m convinced Sam Shepard wrote the entire scvreenplay just to be able to write that scene.
Have you seen the wonderful Australian film, Mary and Max? More plasticene, but you’ll feel more for these puppet characters than you do for the flesh and blood ones in most movies. And it features an amazing voice performance by Phillip Seymour Hoffman. It’s one of the best movies of last year. Much better than any of the best animated film Oscar nominees.