10 Most Emotionally Devastating Movie Moments Of 2016
Is somebody peeling onions in here?
For the more emotional moviegoer, 2016 was full of films that got the old tear ducts working in overdrive. And it wasn’t just the usual suspects either.
It used to be that you knew where you could get your teary fix from - rom coms ripe with manipulation, films with clearly doomed central characters, anything with a bloody dog in it... But now it's all changed. Alongside the obvious culprits like dramas about grieving or romantic movies that don’t pan out quite how we’d expect, a few quite surprising genres veered into more emotional territory than usually seen.
Superhero movies, for example, weren’t all just car chases and big fight scenes last year – a good number of them were surprisingly heartfelt affairs, at least in a scene or two.
If you’re the type that would rather swallow back that lump in your throat rather than giving into to a tidal wave of salty tears, then fear not – you won’t see any Homeward Bound level tear-jerkers here.
Fair warning, though: you might want to have some Kleenex at the ready just in case.
10. Finding Dory – Dory Finds Her Parents
Disney-Pixar’s long-awaited Finding Dory hit the big screen this summer to huge success, earning a huge $1.028 billion and a not too shabby 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Of course it did, it's Pixar.
Ellen DeGeneres returned to voice the forgetful titular character and was joined by a host of familiar fish faces and new sea creatures, but this time around the plot centred on Dory’s quest to find the long-lost parents she was separated from as a baby blue tang.
This mission forms the main crux of the film but of course the beloved Dory faces many a challenge along the way, namely the fact she suffers from short-term memory loss and accidentally gets herself captured by a SeaWorld-like aquarium.
So, when she finally does find her parents late on in the movie by following a trail of seashells that they have habitually been leaving for her since they were parted years earlier, the payoff is most definitely worth it. It’s the kind of reunion emotional enough to make a grown man cry, or a grown woman. Or a stony hearted crone with no real spectrum of emotions, actually.