Cry Freedom

20 Steel Magnolias

Sally Field, Julia Roberts (1989, Columbia TriStar) Dying and death have been done (see half our list). But Field took grieving to a new level in Herbert Ross' Southern drama about a group of tenacious gal pals who gossip and grapple with love, loss, and beauty-shop appointments. She plays a feisty mother struggling to protect her diabetic daughter (Roberts) as she starts a family, suffers kidney failure, and slips into a coma. Rumor has it there are male characters in the film, but it's the women who carry all the weight. KLEENEX MOMENT Surrounded by friends at her daughter's grave, Field rages from hysterical anger to glacial calm. The tears don't stop until the audacious moment when Olympia Dukakis offers Shirley MacLaine to her as a punching bag.

21 Gallipoli

Mel Gibson, Mark Lee (1981, Paramount) The idea of an entire generation of shining youth lost on the First World War's battlefields is sad enough, but when that youth is represented by the impossibly beautiful Gibson and Lee, the loss is that much more deeply felt. A pair of Aussie sprinters, they join the war effort and ship out to Gallipoli. The waste of war is brought horribly home as higher-ups stubbornly send troops, all too aware of their perilous situation, into certain slaughter. And they go. KLEENEX MOMENT As Gibson fails to make it back in time to inform his officer to stop the advance, his friend heads straight into the line of fire.

22 The Joy Luck Club

Kieu Chinh, Ming-Na Wen (1993, Hollywood) The stories of four Chinese women and their difficult relationships with their daughters are explored in director Wayne Wang's relentlessly emotional adaptation of Amy Tan's novel. A chick flick through and through, the movie switches between the mothers' early lives in restrictive Chinese society -- dealing with child marriage, domestic abuse, and infanticide -- and the Asian-American daughters' present-day lives as they face loveless marriages, racist in-laws, and a major lack of connection with their moms. KLEENEX MOMENT The trophy of tears goes to the deceased Suyuan (Chinh), as a flashback shows how she had to abandon her twin baby girls by the road while fleeing the invasion of Kweilin.

23 Charly

Cliff Robertson, Claire Bloom (1968, Anchor Bay, VHS only) Based on Daniel Keyes' novel Flowers for Algernon, Charly tells the simple story of Charlie Gordon (Robertson), a retarded man who can't even spell his own name. A radical new surgery turns him into a genius and enables him to win the heart of his lovely teacher, Alice (Bloom). But their idyll is cut short when they discover the effects of the operation are only temporary -- and that Charlie will return to his former state. Academy members couldn't keep dry eyes either: Robertson won the Best Actor Oscar. KLEENEX MOMENT Alice begs Charlie to marry her, or to let her stay as long as he can bear it. Turns out, he can't bear it for one minute and, truthfully, neither can we.