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The 25 most inspiring movies of all time

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

1. 'It's a Wonderful Life'

RKO Pictures Inc./AP
'It's a Wonderful Life' stars James Stewart (center).

  • By Molly Driscoll Staff Writer

The 1946 film directed by Frank Capra centers on George Bailey (James Stewart), a man who lives in a small New York town and, overcome by despair, believes that the lives of everyone around him might have been better if he had never been born. An angel named Clarence (Henry Travers) is given the task of showing him how much every person affects those around them.

Monitor readers recently voted "Wonderful" the best holiday movie of all time in addition to its title from the American Film Institute of the most inspiring film ever made.

Some of the actors who appeared in "Wonderful" were frequent additions to Capra's casts. Actor Lionel Barrymore, who portrayed nasty Mr. Potter, had starred in Capra's 1938 movie "You Can't Take It with You" and H.B. Warner, who played George's onetime boss Mr. Gower, appeared in "Take," the 1936 movie "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town," and the 1939 Jimmy Stewart film "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," among other Capra films.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

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.”

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