I'll say "Love, Simon". It's maybe the only coming-of-age type story I've cried at. I'll preface by saying I don't really know if it will tug at heartstrings if you aren't gay.
But god did it make me cry.
It's the movie I so desperately wish I had in high school. It captures this unspoken tension that lives on the edge of being closeted. You want so desperately to be happy but everything just seems so much... easier if you don't go for the life that would make you happier. If you play along, maybe that's for the best.
And then it hits you with these quiet but charged moments like the first time Simon comes out to anybody when he tells one of his friends:
The way he says the simple words "I'm gay" made me choke up immediately. Nick Robinson delivers it so well, you can hear the way he almost doesn't want to say them, he just holds back and then says it before he can stop himself. He doesn't even give the words much intonation because it's such an new, unexpected moment even to him that he can't really deliver those words any other way.
Then you have this scene:
I can't tell you how terrifying it is growing up thinking the people who love you most only do so because they don't fully know you. Hearing his mom truly being there for him, while also clearly being in pain knowing how much he had held himself back... I full on started crying when this scene came on.
"you get to exhale now Simon. You get to be more you than you have been in... in a very long time" God, every bit of that hits hard.
Love, Simon is not an insanely well-written movie. It's not intensely artistic or trying to be an Oscar-winning film. But it's immensely important, and what it sets out to do it does with incredible grace. It's really the first coming of age film I've ever seen that actually told some part of the story I had felt growing up. In the end I think that's a big part of the value of those movies. To frame the confusion and anguish and strangeness of that time in life as a normal part of the human experience. It's weird and awful and magic and that's what growing up and finding yourself is. This is what being gay is. And Love, Simon paints that story beautifully.
