Steve McQueen Death scene in “The Sand Pebbles”
Yes, my stoical husband was sobbing inconsolably when we watched this at home.
Good grief, I’ve spend the majority of the day binging on this. BEST thing I’ve read in so long! I haven’t gotten to what you quoted yet, but just now stopped at “Digger must act NOW.”
This is amazing! 
Every time I read that SDMB Thread:
Movie/books scenes that tear you up every time.
Start tearing up midway through the first page! Don’t know if I can make it all the way through!
I can’t do this moment justice as it takes 9 episodes to build up the tension to this point, but there are a pair of moments in the anime Yuki Yuna Is a Hero:
“Why do we have to go through this? Why does Itsuki have to lose her voice? To give up her dreams!”
Itsuki’s reply a few minutes later destroys me every time. “If I hadn’t joined the Hero Club, I never would have dreamed of singing. I’m really glad I joined.”
The fact that the background music for all of this is Itsuki singing the last song she ever sang doesn’t help.
Another one that got me was in Brief Lives where Dream and Delirium are walking through Destinys garden and Delirium notices a statue of herself from when she was Delight.
Delirium: Is that me?
Dream: Yes, it is you. You a very long time ago.
Delirium: I was very pretty.
Dream: Yes you were.
Here’s another one, and I’ve only seen a clip of it (here or on Buzzfeed) and the one clip, and simple premise alone, makes me never want to see it IRL.
I don’t even know the TV show, but a mom has cancer and there’s a scene where her son (daughter?) goes to a storage facility and it’s loaded with all the Christmas and birthday presents that the mother can’t give her kid because she will be dead.
And the kid is sobbing and holy shit I can’t even type it anymore
YES! Ed has many moments.
I own the Digger graphic novels. I own the omnibus hardback. I still go back to the website, if only for some of the comments. (You don’t have to worry about the comments on your first read-through. They’ll keep for the second or third time.)
I’m glad it got it’s Hugo.
There are several scenes in On The Beach, the San Francisco scene as well as the well as the scenes with the baby that get to me.
Glad someone else mentioned TCP. For me, the scene that kills me every time is when Mister makes Nettie leave because she’s rejected his advances. When she’s trying to hold onto the fencepost, anything she can grab, and Celie is sobbing and begging, “Please let her stay”… auuuugggggghh. Kills me!!
I’m not through this thread yet but I’ll be surprised if nobody mentions Sophie’s Choice. The “choice” scene is the worst, but many other scenes too. I may be misremembering but I think I’ve heard Meryl Streep talk in interviews about how the little girl in that scene was her real daughter and how this made it easier to access the necessary emotion and imagine how it would feel to be in such a situation. Not that I’d imagine Meryl Streep has much trouble doing so in any case!
Here’s the Sophie’s Choice scene.
OMG! That’s the one for me too. That scene tears me in half.
A scene that always puts a lump in my throat and wets my eyeballs: Starman, when Jenny sees the alien resurrect the dead deer, and joyously realizes he is profoundly benevolent.
And the one that really gets me: The Fisher King - “I really miss her, Jack. Is it okay to miss her now?”
Has anyone seen Defendor? The climactic scene is pretty wrenching.
“Boxer has fallen! he is lying on his side and cannot get up!” from Animal Farm.
"will it help to say that you two are in no danger? That I would protect you with my body? As you protected mine? " from Have Spacesuit, Will Travel
The speech near the end–You (humans) are at your best when things are at their worst, etc.–does it to me.
“Ladies and gentlemen, may I present our Governor. . .The Most Honorable Gertrude Lang.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng3l4vEN3Dk
I will never watch that movie again. I have never sobbed so hard in my life. It completely ripped me apart and left me feeling raw and devastated. It was so utterly brutal in the way it was presented, in the reality of the situations, the knowledge that it was pretty much guaranteed that EXACT scenario played out somewhere in Japan. And being a mother…I just…I can’t. That just added an extra layer of misery to it. Yet at the same time, the movie is so beautiful and well done but I hate it. I hate it with every ounce of my being for making me feel how it did.
I’m not a dog person, I haven’t owned a dog since childhood, I’m a pretty cynical bastard overall and I’m tougher than Iron-Eyes Cody when it comes to tearing up at movies. There’s probably just six or seven movie scenes which inexorably cause me to melt into a blubbering puddle every time, and this one – the epilogue, at least – is one of them.
Another one, most recent, is the escape scene from Room: [Part 1] / [Part 2] / [Part 3] | This one’s especially tense since it comes in the middle of the movie, so:
while Jack escaping is easy to guess, there’s no expectation that Brie Larson will also safely escape.
Luke: “She’s still a little shook up about the whole Alderaan thing…I’m gonna give that a hard pass.”
Oh, I forgot The Tiger and the Snow. For a comedian, Benigni has a great facility for that other thing.