US: Make Way For Tomorrow. Old couple wiped out by the Depression. Their adult children blow them off
USSR: Come and See, although it’s as horrifying as it is saddening. I’d go with The Cranes are Flying: Girl’s boyfriend disappears in the war, his buddy rapes her, everybody thinks she’s a cheating slut.
France: Au Revoir Le Enfants. Jewish kids hide at Catholic boarding school, but get caught.
UK: The Magic Box. Man invents movie camera, kids get wasted in WWI, business sucks him under. (otherwise, I had a hard time thinking of a British tearjerker, among the many great movies from there. Phlegmatism?)
Japan: probably **Grave of the Fireflies, ** but there are a lot of sad Japanese movies to choose from. Not a big fan of animie myself, so I’d choose The Burmese Harp: soldier stays behind to bury all the dead, meaning he’ll never come home.
Afghanistan: Osama. A girl has to disguise herself as a boy to find work to support her mother under the Taliban. The final scene is one of the saddest in film.
Iran: Children of Heaven. A boy loses his sister’s shoes. They cannot afford another pair. He has to try to replace them. Again, the final scene is heartwrenching, a moment mixed with triumph that is a loss.
India: Man, there’s an embarrassment of riches in Hindi cinema in this category, but I’d have to go with the 2003 Ravi Chopra film Baghban: a sort of domesticated Indian King Lear about an elderly couple making over all their assets to their sons who in return treat them with selfish cruelty. Schmaltzfest supreme.
It does have a somewhat happy ending, being a Bollywood movie, but I think it definitely fulfills the “tearjerky” criterion. So does Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s 2005 Black.
Surprised nobody has yet mentioned Titanic among US movies: personally, I wasn’t particularly moved by it, but I thought it was widely regarded as a massively sentimental weep-o-rama.
Iraqi/Iranian Kurdistan: Turtles Can Fly. Not sure which country of origin is best here.
Germans aren’t normally known for their dour seriousness, but there are quite a few examples. Strozek (filmed in USA) was reportedly the last movie that Ian Curtis watched before hanging himself.
Bosnia: No Man’s Land perhaps. Mainly for the ending, where:
The Bosnian and Serbian soldiers who were making peace end up killing each other. Then another Bosnian solider who is injured and lying on a triggered landmine is abandoned to his fate by soldiers, the UN, and aid workers.
Italy: Not a whole film or even the ending, but a section in the middle. The Valse Triste segment of Bruno Bozzetto’s Fantasia parody Allegro non Troppo induces projectile crying in me every time. For a film with a lot of comedy in it, this is a real emotional rollercoaster.