I fight back emotion hard when other people, including my girlfriend, are around, but when I watch a film alone I became a huge crybaby with media as I hit my mid-20s and into my early 30s. I find it funny that Marc Maron, a really repressed and sardonic guy, says the same thing pretty often. There's a particular breed of us that are extremely stoic externally but just roiling with emotion throughout.
That said, the end of Lost in Translation kills me. Every time. It's not a sad ending nor a happy ending, it's just bittersweet and real. Life is a series of lives and the film points to that, fully extolling that who we are at 25 isn't who we are at 35 isn't who we are at 45, but that we are a multitude of people who maintain some sort of bodily continuity but carry it all with us all the time.
It's a movie I revisit every few years and it always reveals something new for me, some unseen facet of the film and my own life. I saw it first as a yearning 17-year-old, again as a hopelessly lovestruck 22-year-old on the same couch with a friend who would never feel the same for me as I did for them (on my birthday no less) which eventually doomed the whole relationship, again as a jaded 25-year-old nursing a lot of romantic wounds after a couple years of amazing highs and lows, and again as a 30-year-old in a very long-term and still intact relationship. I think I'm overdue for another watch.
Royal Tenenbaums: when Ben Stiller says it's been a hard year
This is a big one for me. That movie, top to bottom, is stunningly good.
For a recent example not yet mentioned, a few bits of Leave No Trace, the dad doing the computer personality test and the last conversation the dad and the daughter have at the end, the 'the same thing that's wrong with you isn't wrong with me' one, really did a number on me.
This is a really good, but indeed heart-breaking movie. It's handled so humanely, so gently, and there's really no sense of judgment of anyone in that movie. It's a lot of very broken people who cannot help their conditions and a lot of very helpful people just trying to do what's right for the broken. That ending is pitch perfect, too - you simultaneously wish it had come to anything else while knowing anything else would ring false.
I also LOVE that it's somehow rated PG. It feels like a great movie to show kids entering adolescence as a way of broaching a lot of very sensitive topics while still being materially appropriate and honest.