Robin Williams avoids his trademark tics and tremors to deliver a convincing performance as an inspirational English teacher in a conservative American boys school. Ethan Hawke and Robert Sean Leonard are the students who start to appreciate poetry as a result. Unfortunately, the parents object to Robin's liberal ways and it's left to the pupils to stage a moving protest when he gets the sack.

Based on William Styron's bestseller, this is a thoroughly successful adaptation. Meryl Streep turns in the performance of a lifetime as Sophie, the Polish survivor of a Nazi concentration camp stranded in suburban, post-war New York. Her big secret is slowly revealed over several long summer days to young aspiring writer (and the film's narrator) Peter MacNicol. When the revelation comes, it is truly heartbreaking.

David Lean breaks out the stiff upper lips for his restrained, yet emotionally charged, examination of forbidden passions in 1940s England. After a chance meeting at a suburban railway station, Trevor Howard and housewife Celia Johnson embark on a remarkably chaste, yet overwhelmingly passionate, affair. After numerous meetings and much soul-searching, the tears start to flow when the couple see each other for one last time in a railway tearoom.

Touching, high-quality drama about a bunch of kids who discover the meaning of friendship in 1950s America - whilst on an adventure to find the body of a dead boy. Based on a Stephen King story and directed by Rob Reiner, Stand By Me is the definitive coming-of-age drama and features a wonderful performance from a very young River Phoenix. Phoenix delivers such a heartbreaking story about his abusive father in one scene that you'll find yourself crying along with him.

Showered with praise, laden with Oscars, this hugely successful tearjerker boasts some magnificent on-screen chemistry between Jack Nicholson and Shirley MacLaine. Although the story focuses on the fraught relationship between MacLaine and her daughter Debra Winger, it's retired-astronaut-next-door Nicholson who brought cinema audiences flocking. Terms Of Endearment also features one of the most moving ever deathbed scenes, when Winger explains to her son that she isn't going to be around forever.

A beautifully animated version of Richard Adams' classic tale of rabbits and men, Watership Down follows the trials of a group of rabbits who must abandon their doomed warren and find a new home. Although it looks cute, the film has more than its fair share of bunny peril and violence, and is more than a little upsetting. You'll be choking back the sobs when Hazel is shot, and his little brother Fiver has a dreamlike vision of him to the sound of Garfunkel's Bright Eyes.

The definitive Technicolor romantic epic. Rhett, Scarlett, burning sets and a whole slew of nostalgic and/or reactionary values, this is creator-producer David O Selznick's finest hour and a cornerstone of the Hollywood monolith. Winner of 10 Oscars, hugely successful at the box office and containing one of the most quoted lines in the history of the movies, Gone With The Wind is the stuff of film legend. Vivien Leigh and Clarke Gable spend the whole of the American civil war falling in and out of love, before he finally leaves her in one of cinema's saddest and most famous moments. Frankly my dear, he just didn't give a damn.

Blackadder had been one of Britain's most successful ever comedies, but its final series set during the First World War managed to elicit genuine affection from the audience. Rowan Atkinson's Captain Blackadder fails in his quest to get out of the trenches and is sent 'over the top' in the last ever episode. This grim image, the frame frozen which then dissolves into one depicting the same field now full of poppies, memorably ended the series on a note of dark satire.

Gary Marshall's 1980s chick flick is as shamelessly entertaining as it is mushy. Two girls, one a privileged rich kid, one from the wrong side of the tracks, forge a lifelong friendship one summer, fall out and make up endlessly until the inevitable disease-of-the-week plot happens along. The tears will be welling up when the two friends sit on the beach for the last time together to the strains of Wind Beneath My Wings.

Tom Hanks is the heroic dunce living through America's recent history in Robert Zemeckis' multi-Oscar winning comedy-drama. Top-notch performances and some impressive visual trickery contribute to one of the populist triumphs of the 90s. Hanks fills the timid, innocent Gump with such sentimental energy, that you can't help but celebrate his triumphs and cry at his falls, especially when his beloved Jenny decides to leave him heartbroken