The 25 most inspiring movies of all time

What are the most inspiring movies ever made? Check out our full list.

12. 'Apollo 13'

Ron Howard's 1995 film is based on the incident which occurred involving the craft of the same name. Actors Tom Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon portray the three astronauts who attempted to travel to the moon in 1970 and soon found themselves stranded in space when an oxygen tank exploded.

According to AMC, astronaut Jim Lovell, who was portrayed by Hanks in the film and co-wrote the book, "Lost Moon," on which the movie was based, has a cameo in the movie as the captain of the USS Iwo Jima, the ship that picks up the astronauts after they land on Earth.

When New York Times reporter Lena Williams saw the movie in theaters with Lovell, an audience member audibly expressed doubt that Lovell could have gotten the spacecraft to a stop in 38 seconds as depicted in the film. "Actually, we only had 14 seconds to do that maneuver," Lovell told Williams.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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