Life lists · Emotional Truth Diaries

100 films for every feeling

For the evening when you know what you want to feel, but not what to watch. Tick what you’ve seen, or let the cards choose tonight’s film.

100 films 10 moods classics & new

Read the list

How to use it

Pick the chapter that matches tonight’s mood.
Tick the films you’ve seen and see how far you’ve come.
“Shuffle” draws a film for tonight.
“Where to watch ↗” opens a search on a streaming guide.

Our own selection, not an official ranking. Years are of first release.

To have a good cry

Sometimes it helps.

1
A love story on a ship everyone knows will sink, and you still hope until the end.
2
An old man reads a love story to a woman who no longer remembers it.
3
A German businessman saves more than a thousand Jews during the Holocaust. A true story.
4
A father turns a concentration camp into a game to protect his son.
5
A death-row guard meets a gentle giant with a miraculous gift.
6
A dog waits for his owner at the station every day for years. Based on a true story.
7
The first minutes tell a whole life of love, and then an old man flies away in his house.
8
A boy enters the Land of the Dead and learns why we must remember those we love.
9
Two orphaned children try to survive in wartime Japan. Quiet and devastating.
10
A kind, simple-hearted man walks through decades of American history, and loves one woman.

About love

When it begins.

11
Two strangers meet on a train and spend one night walking through Vienna.
12
Pride, prejudice and one of the most famous love confessions in the rain.
13
A shy Parisian waitress secretly arranges happiness for others, and forgets about her own.
14
A London bookseller and the most famous actress in the world.
15
Can men and women just be friends? Twelve years of arguing about it.
16
A princess escapes her duties for one day in Rome with a journalist.
17
A bar owner in wartime Morocco meets the woman who broke his heart.
18
A young man learns he can travel in time, and discovers what really matters.
19
Two neighbours in 1960s Hong Kong realise their spouses are having an affair.
20
A shy statistician and his strict boss: one of the most beloved Soviet love stories.

About love that ends

And about what stays.

21
A couple erase each other from memory, and at the last moment try to hold on.
22
A jazz pianist and an actress in Los Angeles choose between love and dreams.
23
He believes in fate, she doesn’t. 500 days, told out of order.
24
A divorce seen from both sides, while love is still in the room.
25
Four days that change a farmer’s wife’s life forever.
26
Two childhood friends from Seoul meet again decades later.
27
Two cowboys and a love they hide for twenty years.
28
She is political and passionate, he is easygoing. A love that isn’t enough.
29
Nine years later they meet again in Paris, and have only an hour or so.
30
A musician and a singer on both sides of the Iron Curtain, unable to live together or apart.

To feel alive

Get up and go after watching.

31
A teacher who gets his students standing on their desks to seize the day.
32
A daydreamer finally leaves his desk for a real adventure.
33
A young man gives everything away and goes to live in Alaska. Based on a true story.
34
A paralysed aristocrat and his unlikely carer. Warmth and a lot of laughter.
35
A bride invites three men who might be her father to a wedding on a Greek island. With ABBA.
36
A chaotic family drives across America in a yellow van to a beauty pageant.
37
A chef quits a fancy restaurant and starts over with a food truck and his son.
38
After a divorce, a woman spends a year in Italy, India and Bali.
39
Hope behind prison walls, and one of the best endings in cinema.
40
After losing her mother, a woman walks more than a thousand miles alone on the Pacific Crest Trail.

About friendship

The people who choose you back.

41
Two friends set off for a weekend and never go back to their old lives.
42
Four boys walk along the railway to find a body, and find themselves.
43
A genius janitor and the therapist who finally gets through to him.
44
An elderly woman tells the story of two friends in 1930s Alabama.
45
A cowboy doll and a space ranger learn to share a child’s love.
46
A 27-year-old dancer in New York, still figuring out her life and her best friendship.
47
A Black pianist and his Italian-American driver tour the segregated South in 1962.
48
Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda: a friendship that outlasts any man.
49
Three friends come to Moscow in the 1950s, and we meet them again twenty years later.
50
Five teenagers in Saturday detention find out they have more in common than they thought.

About family

Complicated, loud, irreplaceable.

51
Four sisters grow up, and each chooses her own path.
52
A homeless father fights for a better life for his son. Based on a true story.
53
Thirty years of a stormy, loving bond between a mother and her daughter.
54
A teenager and her mother in Sacramento, fighting and loving in equal measure.
55
A son tries to find the truth behind his dying father’s tall tales.
56
After his wife’s accident, a father has to reconnect with his daughters, and learns her secret.
57
A poor Tokyo family of small-time thieves takes in a little girl.
58
A divorced father disguises himself as an elderly nanny to be near his children.
59
A family, a crime empire and a son who never wanted to become like his father.
60
The only hearing member of a deaf family dreams of singing.

About growing up

Awkward, brave, unforgettable.

61
Filmed over twelve years with the same actors. A boy grows up before your eyes.
62
A shy new high-school student finds friends who change everything.
63
The new girl infiltrates the most popular clique in school.
64
A witty sixteen-year-old gets pregnant and sets out to find the perfect adoptive parents.
65
A summer in 1980s Italy and a first love that stays forever.
66
The emotions inside an eleven-year-old girl’s head when her family moves.
67
A fifteen-year-old goes on tour with a rock band to write for Rolling Stone.
68
A rich Beverly Hills teen plays matchmaker and misses her own feelings.
69
Summer 1963, a holiday resort and the dance instructor who changes everything.
70
A high-schooler skips school for the best day of his life in Chicago.

Beautiful cities

Travel without leaving the sofa.

71
Every night at midnight, a writer is carried back to Paris in the 1920s.
72
Two lonely Americans meet in a Tokyo hotel.
73
A legendary concierge and his young lobby boy in a pastel fairy tale.
74
Ten love stories in London in the weeks before Christmas.
75
Mozart through the eyes of his envious rival Salieri, filmed in Prague.
76
Two American friends, one Spanish painter and a very hot summer in Barcelona.
77
After a divorce, a writer impulsively buys a villa in Tuscany.
78
Holly Golightly, New York and the little black dress.
79
Sun-drenched 1950s Italy and a young man who wants someone else’s life.
80
Eighteen short love stories in different districts of Paris.

Magic and other worlds

For when this one is too much.

81
A girl trapped in the spirit world works in a bathhouse to save her parents.
82
Nine companions set out to destroy one ring. The beginning of a legend.
83
An orphan learns he is a wizard and goes to Hogwarts.
84
In 1944 Spain, a girl escapes cruelty into a dark fairy tale.
85
A young woman cursed into old age finds shelter in a wizard’s walking castle.
86
A mute cleaner falls in love with a mysterious creature held in a secret lab.
87
A young man promises to bring back a fallen star, and the star turns out to be a woman.
88
A gentle man with scissors for hands in a pastel suburb.
89
A paralysed marine gets a new body on a distant planet and falls in love with its world.
90
A mysterious woman opens a chocolate shop in a strict French village.

To think about

You’ll talk about these for days.

91
A man discovers his whole life is a TV show.
92
A cynical weatherman lives the same day over and over again.
93
A lonely man falls in love with an operating system.
94
A father leaves his children to find humanity a new home among the stars.
95
Red pill or blue pill? The world is not what it seems.
96
A poor family slowly slips into a rich family’s life. Nothing goes to plan.
97
An insomniac office worker meets a soap salesman who changes everything.
98
A linguist learns to speak with aliens, and time starts to look different.
99
A guide leads two men through a mysterious Zone to a room that grants wishes.
100
A Tokyo toilet cleaner and the beauty of an ordinary, repeating day.