Movies for a Rainy Day: Five Films That Make the Weather Feel Like a Gift

There is a particular kind of permission that comes with a rainy day. Plans get cancelled. The light goes soft and grey. Nobody expects anything of you except, perhaps, that you put the kettle on. It is the perfect time for a film.

The five below were chosen for exactly this weather. Some are about rain, some simply feel like it: gentle, a little melancholy, and warm at the centre. Close the curtains halfway, so you can still hear it on the glass.

1. Singin' in the Rain (1952)

Hollywood, 1927. Silent star Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and his best friend Cosmo (Donald O'Connor) are thrown into chaos when The Jazz Singer turns the industry upside down and every studio scrambles to make talkies. The problem: Don's glamorous co-star Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) has a voice like a car alarm. The solution might be Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), a chorus girl with a lovely voice and no patience for Don's ego. Kelly co-directed with Stanley Donen.

Why it fits today: It is the definitive argument that a downpour is not a reason to be miserable. The film is pure, buoyant happiness from start to finish, and it will make you want to go and stand in the rain on purpose.

Scene to look for: The title number, obviously. Don has just walked Kathy home and realises he is in love, and so he sends his car away, folds his umbrella and dances through the puddles of a studio street. Watch the policeman at the end.

2. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964)

In the French port town of Cherbourg, 17-year-old Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve) works in her widowed mother's umbrella shop and is in love with Guy (Nino Castelnuovo), a young car mechanic. Then Guy is called up for military service in Algeria. Jacques Demy's film is sung from the first line to the last, to Michel Legrand's score, in candy-coloured sets that look like nothing else in cinema. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

Why it fits today: This is for the other kind of rainy day, when you want to feel something. It is gorgeous and bittersweet, and it treats ordinary heartbreak with the seriousness of grand opera.

Scene to look for: The opening credits. The camera looks straight down onto a wet cobbled street as umbrellas of every colour pass across the frame, in time to the music. Within the first minute you will know whether you are in love with this film. (You will be.)

3. My Neighbor Totoro (1988)

Sisters Satsuki and Mei move with their father to an old house in the Japanese countryside to be closer to the hospital where their mother is recovering. In the camphor tree nearby lives Totoro, a huge, soft, sleepy forest spirit whom only children can see. Hayao Miyazaki's film has almost no villain and very little plot, and it is all the better for it.

Why it fits today: Totoro is the coziest film ever made, and it contains what may be the most famous rain scene in animation. It is wonderful to watch alone and even better with children.

Scene to look for: The bus stop at dusk, in the rain. Satsuki, waiting for her father with Mei asleep on her back, notices a very large creature standing beside her with only a leaf on its head. She offers him an umbrella. What Totoro does with the raindrops, and what arrives to pick him up, is pure magic.

4. The Garden of Words (2013)

Takao, a 15-year-old who dreams of becoming a shoemaker, skips his morning classes whenever it rains and goes to sketch shoe designs in a Tokyo garden. There, in a shelter during the rainy season, he keeps running into an older woman, Yukari, who seems to be skipping something too. Makoto Shinkai's film runs only about 46 minutes, and nearly all of them are wet.

Why it fits today: If you want a film that is about rain, this is it. Shinkai and his animators render raindrops on ponds, on leaves and on glass with an almost obsessive beauty. It is short enough to watch while the storm lasts.

Scene to look for: Any of the opening rain sequences in the garden. Turn the volume up and the lights down: the sound design is half the experience.

5. Paddington 2 (2017)

Paddington (voiced by Ben Whishaw), now happily settled with the Brown family in London, finds the perfect present for his Aunt Lucy's 100th birthday: an antique pop-up book of London. When it is stolen, Paddington is wrongly convicted of the theft and sent to prison, where he wins over the inmates, including Brendan Gleeson's fearsome cook Knuckles McGinty, with marmalade. Hugh Grant gives one of his best performances as the vain, washed-up actor Phoenix Buchanan. Paul King directs.

Why it fits today: No rain in the title, but it is the film equivalent of a hot drink and a warm jumper. Its message, that if we are kind and polite the world will be right, is exactly what a grey afternoon needs.

Scene to look for: Paddington imagining himself walking Aunt Lucy through the pop-up book, its paper London unfolding around them. It is one of the loveliest sequences in any family film of the last decade.

One More Thing

If the rain keeps going, make it a double feature: Singin' in the Rain followed by The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is the happiest and saddest musical pairing we know, and both feature umbrellas doing a great deal of emotional work.