10 Movies It's Impossible To Finish Without Crying

5. My Girl

Everybody remembers the scene. Some of you may be getting misty-eyed right now. For those who don't know, the film follows a young girl named Vada (Anna Chlumsky) who is coping with the death of her mother who passed away during childbirth. Her father Harry, played by Dan Akroyd, is a funeral director and operates out of their family home, leading to a strange obsession with death for Vada. The rift between her and her father is huge, with Harry often ignoring her because he doesn't know how to be a father to a young daughter. Her best friend Thomas J. (Macauley Culkin, at peak adorability), with whom she was just realising she had feelings for, tragically dies from getting stung by a truckload of hornets (yup) after he tried to find a ring she had lost in the woods some time earlier. The emotional scenes come one after the other, rat-a-tat-tat - like some kind of AK47 loaded with the tears of children.

Thomas' death scene is one thing, as you cry in frustration at the TV, yelling at Macauley not to kick the damn hornet nest. Then it's Harry heartbreakingly telling Vada that Thomas J. slipped away in the night, and after that it's the cherry on top; Vada, at first refusing to attend her friend's funeral (which is taking place inside her own home), slowly ends up making her way downstairs through the eulogy, approaching Thomas J.'s open casket and asking him if he wants to go and climb trees. She falls to pieces, and starts screaming for his glasses, that he can't see without his glasses... and now I'm fairly certain that watching all this had a traumatic effect on my childhood. The bittersweet ending revolves around the morbid realisation that Thomas J.'s death actually brought Vada closer to her father. It's a nice thought that the boy didn't die in vain.