Watch and weep: 5 movies for the cry you need – The Boston Globe

Whether you’re a front-line worker or a grudging homeschooler — we’re all grieving the lives we once lived. For all in need of some healthy catharsis this weekend, Globe writers and critics recommend these movies to get the tears flowing:

No do-overs

“I should have warned you,” my film critic friend said after I left “About Time” (2013), a time-travel romance by Richard Curtis, the man responsible for “Love Actually.” My mom had just died, and there I was, weeping through this lovely movie about family, chosen family, and all of the meaningful experiences we wish we could repeat. But I had no regrets about seeing this dramedy; “About Time” had inspired the first good cry (with laughs) I’d had in months. The film, which stars Rachel McAdams, Domhnall Gleeson, and Bill Nighy, is about living every day with kindness, enthusiasm, humor, and gratitude — so you don’t need any time-travel do-overs. Kind of perfect for right now.

MEREDITH GOLDSTEIN

Buried grief

Sometimes, one good emotional film moves you to tears while another one doesn’t, usually because it somehow relates to your life. But “The Dead,” John Huston’s gorgeously quiet and generous last film, made in 1987, leaves me in a puddle for reasons I’ve yet to quite understand. Based on the story by James Joyce, it’s set in Dublin in 1904 at a Christmas party given by two elderly sisters and their niece. There’s no action, really; it’s all nuance, held-back feeling, melancholy, and, ultimately, epiphany, after Anjelica Huston’s Gretta grieves broken-heartedly to her husband, Donal McCann’s Gabriel, over the long-ago loss of a 17-year-old boy named Michael Furey. There’s something so dark, mysterious, and forgiving at the core of this magnificent movie, as a husband sees his wife, and their family, and himself as unmoored in the passage of time.

MATTHEW GILBERT

French heartbreakers

The classic French tale of boy meets girl; boy gets girl pregnant; boy goes off to war; girl gets married to another man to avoid the shame of being 16, pregnant, and single; boy returns from war and marries his dead aunt’s morose caregiver is given a twist in Jacques Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” (1964) with dialogue that is completely set to song. Composer Michel LeGrand slyly draws us in with a jazzy opening number set in the garage where Guy (he’s the boy who goes to war) works. He’s off to see his best girl Genevieve (she’s the girl who gets pregnant). Demy makes it impossible not to fall in love with it all. Colors are oversaturated, the sung dialogue floats above the scenery, and the protagonists are two of the most beautiful people in Europe. It matters little that Catherine Deneuve, as Genevieve, lip-syncs all of her sung dialogue. Her character is conveyed through dewy doe eyes. As Guy, Nino Castelnuovo is a proto James Marsden with a wounded expression that can break hearts like Wedgwood china. After we fall in love with the lovers, Guy is shipped off to war. Deneuve begs him not to go. Cue the waterworks. This is a movie that’s as lovely and graceful as it is sad. Keep the tissues handy for the final scene.

CHRISTOPHER MUTHER

Classic weepers

When my editor said she wanted us to write about art that prompts a good, cathartic cry, I immediately thought of Leo McCarey’s “Make Way for Tomorrow” (1937), one of the least-known great films of the Hollywood studio era and one of the most honest. It’s about an elderly couple (character actors Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi) who are pulled apart by circumstance and their grown, preoccupied children, and Bondi has a telephone scene that has been ripping out viewers’ hearts for over 80 years. But guess what? The movie’s unavailable for streaming anywhere, although you can buy the Criterion DVD. So I guess I’ll have to send you to Yasujiro Ozu’s Japanese remake, “Tokyo Story” (1953), which will also destroy you in the best possible ways and is available on the Criterion Channel and on Kanopy. Ozu’s film regularly shows up on lists of the best movies of all time, and it belongs there. But so does “Make Way for Tomorrow.”

TY BURR

A final act

Snow falls. An elderly man in hat and overcoat sits on a playground swing, slowly going back and forth. He softly sings. Even if you don’t know that the man is dying, which he is, there’s an overwhelming sense of poignance. This is toward the end of Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” (1952), and the moment is as moving as any in film history. Two years later the same actor, the great Takashi Shimura, will play the leader in Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai.” That contrast is also a cause of tears. In the movies a dying old man can shed hat and overcoat, grasp a sword, and live again as a magnificent warrior. In life, he just dies.

MARK FEENEY