I once loved the movie for its exquisite cinematography and Shearer’s grand performance, but now I also feel a pang of sadness watching it. In today’s light, the narrative becomes a tragic allegory for the woman who wants to have both love and a profession. Her death was not caused by cursed dance shoes but by a man’s intolerance to see his partner as an equal. While we can walk away from such situations now, I still think of the generations of women who had to sacrifice their passions for feelings, and how much we’ll never know what became of them.

WESLEY MORRIS ON ANNIE WILKES FROM MISERY (1990):

I know, I know. The assignment was for a death that upsets you as an adult. So even though I saw Annie Wilkes die when I was fourteen and will never forget the twenty minutes of mucus that bungee-jumped into my lap, I just watched Misery again—as an adult. Film-wise, I’d always thought of this movie as a perfect contraption. How long until Paul, the bestselling novelist Annie kidnaps and tortures, finds a way to get out of her cabin? The pot boils and boils until the whistle goes off. But all the blubbering I did in 1990 came from the same realization I had watching Misery last week. It’s a love story, about the romance we have with the people who make our culture and how the romance can corrupt and distort and pervert.

But Misery works too well. Annie might fall in love with Paul. But Kathy Bates made me fall in love with Annie. I can see as a grown-up what I could only sense as a kid, which was that Annie is unwell. The movie needs her to be a psycho. It needs for her pot to whistle. But I now dread where this movie take us. I hate the pleasure it takes in getting Paul to the point where he doesn’t just kill Annie, he pulverizes her. The sequence goes on and every time she’s punched or tripped or bludgeoned, even now, starts me blubbering. Because you’re never being asked to celebrate the thrashing of a lunatic, not really. You’re being goaded to cheer the destruction of a woman who, basically, loved to read. I cry because I’m watching a character die a terrible death, a character who could have been my English teacher, my first editor, or my mom. Her death has never felt like justice. It’s always felt like a crime.

AMANDA DOBBINS ON NOAH AND ALLIE FROM THE NOTEBOOK (2004):

A few years ago, my husband and I were back in our hotel room after a long day with various family members. We needed a little TV time to unwind, and since I was in possession of the remote, we chose to unwind with the 2004 masterpiece The Notebook. We turned the movie on somewhere around the boat scene—when Noah, played by Ryan Gosling, takes Allie, played by Rachel McAdams, on a canoe trip to see some very symbolic swans, and then it rains, and then they yell, “It still isn’t over!” and then they have sex—and I planned to turn it off about twenty minutes later, before all the sad old people scenes started.

Fast-forward to: The old people peacefully dead in their bed together, the credits rolling, and me waking my husband up with the violence of my sobs. I have seen this movie upward of thirty times, and it basically has a happy ending. (Noah and Allie get back together! They live a long happy life in a mansion!) Still, I cannot watch it without weeping, in part because the dementia plotline is deeply heartbreaking and in part because the ending is a straight-up betrayal. Love like Ryan Gosling’s and Rachel McAdams’s should never die, not even of natural-ish causes at an advanced age. We were told it wasn’t over.

DOREEN ST. FÉLIX ON MIA SULLIVAN FROM THE BEST MAN HOLIDAY (2013):

The Best Man Holiday is a case study in emotional manipulation. Its director, Malcolm D. Lee, simply cares not for our psychological state. He lulls us into a place of complacent nostalgia; in 2013, when it premiered, the Christmas vehicle looked like a handsome and formulaic sequel to the original ensemble movie The Best Man. We were expecting a little drama—a nearly foiled wedding, in the way of the comedy, or a betrayal of friendship—something resolvable. It was Christmas, after all. What we got instead was the agonizing loss of a mother, friend, and wife. I’m a grown-ass woman who is basically immune to movie clichés about unfair death, but there’s something about the familial warmth of the Black ensemble that makes me a little irrational, a little helpless, more willing to be affected. Five years later, and I’m still crying.

Mia Sullivan, played elegantly by Monica Calhoun, is the platonic ideal of a hostess. Her voice never rises above a maternal whisper. She persuades the old crew of sexy and suave Black professionals (and a silk-robe-clad Terrence Howard) to get together again, for old times’ sake, at her family mansion. Her husband, the NFL star Lance Sullivan, played by Morris Chestnut, is sulking the whole time. We learn why—the reunion is actually a prolonged farewell. First, it’s a cough, then the bags under Mia’s eyes deepen, and then her skin turns gray. Mia manages to stay on this wretched earth long enough to see her man win an impossible game. She wills him to win. She’s gone before Christmas morning and Sullivan collapses at her grave. There’s hope and a laugh and a baby at the end of the movie, but to be honest, I am always weeping too hard to watch the rest of it unfold.

JASON CONCEPCION ON PRIVATE STANLEY MELLISH FROM SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998):

The death of Private Stanley Mellish never fails to fuck me up. It’s not the circumstances or the violence that affect me—though as a story set in World War II, those are substantial. No, what disturbs me about the scene is the way, in the moments before the knife goes in, Mellish cries, “Wait, wait.”

In the scene, Mellish and another comrade are posted up in an apartment manning a machine gun. Germans are overrunning their position and they’re out of ammunition. They send a guy off to get more, but before he can get back, the Germans storm the apartment. The other soldier is quickly killed, shot in the neck. Mellish takes out at least one German soldier. The last, though, charges him. They fight hand to hand. Mellish gains the advantage and pulls his combat knife. But the German manages to disarm him. He turns the knife on Mellish and, placing all his weight behind it, drives it into Mellish’s chest.

I am, without fail, always disturbed when characters exhibit behavior that reminds me of myself. I find characters who are brave in the face of danger comforting. I have never fought a German to the death in a bombed-out French village in the middle of a firefight, but I’m certain I’d meet the challenge by vigorously shitting my pants; by remarking on the absurdity of the situation by attempting, like a kid playing tag, to call a time-out. “Wait, wait,” I’d cry.

Just like Mellish.

I saw me in him.

DONNIE KWAK ON THE DEATH OF A RELATIONSHIP IN MY SASSY GIRL (2001):

To quote the great poet Omarion, “I got this icebox where my heart used to be.” Well, for the most part, anyway. A movie death has never moved me to tears, but I have cried when two characters broke up in a film. Toward the end of the Korean rom-com My Sassy Girl, the girl and the guy have decided to part ways. They write each other letters and travel to the mountains to bury them in a time capsule in the mountains. (It is, to tell you again, a Korean rom-com.) After doing so, the girl asks the guy to walk to another mountaintop. When he arrives there, she screams out a tearful apology, which he can’t hear because he’s so far away.

Up until this point in the movie, the girl has been a bastion of strength and spunk—“sassy,” as the title says. But in that moment, she couldn’t be more vulnerable and fragile. I felt sad watching her emotional outburst the first time I saw the movie; when I returned to the scene after a sad breakup of my own, the tears fell freely. It felt great, actually.

JASMINE SANDERS ON ROSIE FROM FRESH (1994):

Fresh, written and directed by Boaz Yakin, stars Sean Nelson as Fresh, a preteen drug courier in pyretic 1994 Brooklyn. He has a crush on Rosie, a girl at his school. One day, while out at a park, an older drug dealer gets upset that a young basketball player has shown him up and shoots him several times. The boy dies swiftly, his body crumpled over so that the camera misses his face, allowing him some dignity. A stray bullet hits Rosie in the throat. She dies slowly, her hands grasping her at her neck, which is now spurting blood, and Fresh places his hands atop her own.

As a child, it was this scene which stayed with me after viewing. Perhaps I’d thought it romantic, dying in the hands of a man who loved you, tragedy making the romance even sweeter. Or maybe I was rapt by this first rendering of a girl dying, having been taught via film and home that the primary (and therefore only) victims of urban violence were black boys. I think I counted Rosie’s death as a triumphal testament to the vulnerability of black girls, whose frailties I had known but had never seen on screen. But even in Fresh, Rosie’s death is metabolized via the male protagonist; he alone grieves her.

You see her neatly styled hair, the crisp jeans and manners, and you know that someone loves her. Someone is at home; likely some woman who’d looked after Rosie and will be left undone after she dies. I wonder who?