I cried watching “UP.”
Wanna make something of it?!?!
Well, now I don’t feel half as bad for coming in here to admit that I pretty much always cry at several points during Watership Down (the book, not the movie). I also got all choked up last time I watched The Secret of NIMH. Mrs. Briz is so damned awesome.
All Quiet on the Western Front I’ve not watched in many years. When I did watch it, I cried until I couldn’t cry any more, and wound up giving myself a headache just from crying. Powerful stuff.
“Robot test #12. Go see Pixar’s UP. If your date doesn’t cry, robot.” —Nathan Fillion, via Twitter
I would consider few other voices more authoritative on the subject.
Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey
Milo and Otis
- just about anything involving animals will make me teary, even happy-playing-animals in commercials.
I’ve cried a few tears reading novels by Alice Hoffman. And Sharyn McCrumb, before she started writing crap about Nascar, wrote a novel- I think it was The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter- that had a chapter about a young mother in a trailer fire that had me sobbing uncontrollably for 10 minutes straight.
Steel Magnolias—the funeral scene.
The final episode of “Babylon 5.” My dad passed away the day it aired and I still can’t watch it, and that was about 5-6 years ago.
Black Beauty–when Beauty realizes that the sad, emaciated cart horse that dies in front of him is Ginger, and at the end when he’s out on pasture after having such an up and down life.
There’s only one book that can do it for me: Sarah by Orson Scott Card. I don’t know what it is that makes it so special, as it’s certainly not the saddest one I’ve read, but the chapter where Hagar has fallen pregnant and Sarah is being shunned reduces me to tears every time. Until I discovered it two years ago I was sure nothing but severe physical pain or stress coupled with sleep deprivation could make me cry.
I can’t even WATCH GotF. Hell, I can’t even watch trailers of it on youtube - I just break down. Not sure why this particular film (which I’ve never seen in entirety!) hits me so hard - something about a vulnerable and weak boy trying to protect his even more vulnerable and weak little sister in a cruel world, and he fails. She dies. He is broken. Then he and dies, broken and alone. I can’t take it. I sob like a young child.
I cry twice every time I see Wall-E. The scene where they’re dancing in space, so beautiful, and reminds me of that time when you love someone and…heh 
And then at the end where they take responsibility for their planet in such a naive and determined way. Gosh.
I didn’t cry at UP. Loved it, though.
The book that makes me cry, twice again, is Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones. I can get through it now without tearing up, but I first read it when I was ten and almost couldn’t make it through the whole thing. I gave it to my friend at the time and warned her it would make her cry. I don’t think she believed me, she still gives me guilt trips about it, but now she’s a devotee of DWJ
Same here.
When I was 17 or so, the movie My Girl had me sobbing by the end of it - other people mourning always gets me.
More recently, I always cry when reading Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood – all that mother-daughter stuff, and loss, and hurt, and then reconciliation.
There are lots more that get me misty at all sorts of points (I do happy tears, too), but those are the ones that make me CRY.
I cried after I watched Reign Over Me. The movie did a good job showing accurate portrayal of grief.
I cried at the end of Braveheart after I had seen it for the 1000th time. I have no idea why.
A Mighty Wind
This is not a mis-post.
Also, the hospital scene in She’s Having A Baby, but that’s mostly because of Kate Bush’s This Woman’s Work.
I’m a big cry-baby when it comes to movies. Any movie–it doesn’t even have to be a good one–which features a reconciliation, whether doomed never to happen or whether portrayed happily on screen–will have me in tears. I am a reconciliation junkie.
As for written material, for some reason I don’t usually respond as emotionally. I can only think of two instances.
One was just a few months ago. I read the short story “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter” and cried when
the spirits of Pol Pot’s victims told his daughter they were adopting her.
You had to be there. The imagery had as much to do with my response as the situation itself. Apologies: If you haven’t read the story, I’m not up to the task of describing the imagery adequately. I’m doing the story a disservice by mentioning that the imagery involved ringtones.
The only other instance I can recall was when I was in High School and read Dune Messiah. Some scene in that book–I don’t even remember which–had me in tears. I think it was when Paul was revealed to be blind.. But I was a kid then, I don’t know if I’d react the same way on a re-reading.
Heck, I skimmed through a kids’ comic-book style adaptation of the movie that was written in Japanese, and which I couldn’t understand, and I’d never heard of the movie, and I was still kind of sobbing.
Hey, it appears you can read it legally online here. It’s not a short story after all, it’s a novella.
But go read it. Great story.
Bump!
Can I please add another, and slip in a short story here?
Robert Heinlein’s short story “The Man Who Travelled in Elephants” gets me every time. Not the very end, but the scene in the parade when the elderly veterans are passing, and how some must ride, because “merciful Heaven forgive us, they could not walk.” Geez, I’m tearing up just typing this.
If a dog dies in it, I’m pretty much a goner.
“The Grapes of Wrath” was on the other night. No matter how many times I’ve seen it, I need a box of tissues to make it all the way through. So many sad moments in one movie! 
And “Wild Boys of the Road” - my God, I cried through that one, too. You think of the Depression and you think of musicals , and the Idiot Plot rich people movies, but there were grim and realistic movies, too. So what do we have for our Depression? Michael Moore? Movies about toys?
Movies always make me cry.
Books, not so much. Maus broke me. It is a son’s graphic novel reinterpretation of his father’s experience of the Jewish Holocaust. It won a special Pulitzer Prize. Jews are cute little mice and Nazis are cats and so forth, stripping everything of its usual ethnic connotations and removing the graphic stuff just to depict this very spare, raw story of human suffering. It does its job so well that the Holocaust becomes more than a single event, it becomes every bad thing that has ever happened to humanity since the dawn of time. I didn’t cry a little tear. I sobbed loudly, for at least 5 minutes straight.