6. Solaris (1972)
Solaris is one of the most famous and successful Russian films of all time, which was blandly remade in 2002 starring George Clooney and directed by Steven Soderbergh, but it's not nearly as depressing as the original. The movie is a sad examination of how powerful grief and memory are. Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is a psychiatrist who has recently lost his wife when she committed suicide, and who is tasked with evaluating the crew on a space station that's circulating around a newly found planet called Solaris. When arriving at the station, he finds that some of the crew have killed themselves, including one of his friends who was aboard, and after a short time, apparitions of Kris's dead wife start to appear. Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk) is self-aware, fully formed and created entirely from Kris's memory. Kris now has to decide if he wants to stay on the space station with the apparition who may be doomed to repeat her own history over and over or return to Earth where he has lost everything. Cheerful, no? Solaris' bleakness is based entirely in the idea that you can never go home again, hammering home that some things remain in the past and can never be re-attained or relived. All those moments we cherished with loved ones are only memories you can never relive them and if you've lost that loved one, you'll never get a second chance with them, and you can either move on or be haunt by ghosts of the past.