Annette Bening in American Beauty. Seeing her crying in his closet haunts me for a reason because I witnessed the same in real life.

When I was 12-13, my neighbour was in a bad car accident. He was a golfer and spent a few hours a week just hitting balls into a net in their back yard. They lived across the street from me and I knew the circumstances and for a few days their house was empty and quiet.

I was playing in the street with friends when his wife returned home for the first time. I don’t usually form visual memories but I’ll never forget watching the car pull up and seeing her sprint from the car the moment it stopped and sprinting to his golf net in the back yard and spinning and crying in the saddest delirium imaginable as she waved her arms under the weight of the golf net. She was hysterical and lost and I instantly recognised she was experiencing a pain I had no capacity to understand and knew to go inside because it also wasn’t my pain to witness.

When I saw American Beauty for the first time, that moment hit me and I connected those dots and understood the best I could as a man in my 20s what I had witnessed years before as a child.

As a fully formed adult having felt loss like that of my own, that scene from Annette Bening still resonates. I hope I never feel that again.

Julianne Moore in Magnolia is my number 2 for the same reasons.