The 25 most inspiring movies of all time

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

10. 'Saving Private Ryan'

The 1998 film directed by Steven Spielberg stars Tom Hanks as John Miller, an American captain who receives orders to track down James Ryan (Matt Damon), a private who is the last surviving member of a family of four brothers and is now missing in action. A group of several other soldiers, including Technical Sergeant Mike Horvath (Tom Sizemore) and Private First Class Adrian Caparzo (Vin Diesel), join him on his mission.

The movie famously lost the Best Picture Oscar to the 1998 film "Shakespeare In Love." But the film did win five Academy Awards, including one for Best Director.

The film's opening scene depicting the Invasion of Normandy is very graphic and Florida Times-Union reporter Beau Halton spoke with some veterans of D-Day itself as well as some who fought in Vietnam who left the theater during the movie. "It was the closest thing to the horrors of real combat that I have ever seen," Vietnam veteran Ed Kelly said of the film. "There was no glossing over it."

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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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