The 10 Nicest Movies Ever Made (If These Movies Don’t Make You Cry, You Have a Black Heart)

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Field of Dreams. The undisputed king, for sure. But here’s ten other great ones.

It was a really tricky thing putting this together because they’re ranked on niceness, not goodness.  Number two and number five are the best movies on the list.  But they aren’t the nicest.

Niceness is even harder to define than coolness.  Niceness is a warm and fuzzy feeling that a lot of art can generate.  Probably the most popular example would be Norman Rockwell paintings. Niceness, like coolness, taps into our primal brains somewhere.  We’re wired to feel it because it connects us to each other.  But the problem with niceness is that it borders so heavily on cheese.  Cheese done right is transcendent.  But cheese done wrong is, well, cheesy.
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How ‘Parenthood’ Saved My Life

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When I was three or four years old, my mom took my infant brother to visit her family in New York and left me in Michigan with my dad for the weekend. While she was away, I was riding my bike and somehow managed to fall over my handle bars and scrape my face on the pavement. I was pretty distraught until my dad gathered me up, gave me ice cream, and put on the movie Parenthood. I calmed down pretty quickly, lulled by sugar and the quiet and familiar drama of family life. I’ve always enjoyed that memory; it’s a perfect vignette of my ideal childhood and the loving father figure who shaped it.

We all grew up bathed in the flickering blue glow of Saturday night movie rentals. These moments are primal, as if the light coming out of our living room windows was telegraphed by our ancestors gathered around their fires. These moments penetrate us deeply and shape our lives—in my case, in a way I never could’ve imagined.
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