Our favorite mother-daughter movies: Do you agree?
The mother-daughter relationship is one of the most reliably rich subjects in American cinema. It contains love, resentment, competition, admiration, and the strange experience of watching someone become you or refuse to.
The best films about it do not resolve the tension so much as hold it up to the light. The films below appear on multiple critical lists, including NBC and SheKnows.
Here are six that keep showing up on every list. Do you agree?
“Terms of Endearment” (1983)
The film follows Aurora Greenway and her daughter Emma across thirty years, through marriages, affairs, and illness. The film won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. What makes it endure is the specific texture of the relationship: Aurora is difficult, Emma is exasperated, and the love underneath is never in question, even when everyone is behaving badly. It established the template for the genre, and nothing since has quite improved on it.
“Steel Magnolias” (1989)
Sally Field and Julia Roberts play a mother and daughter in a small Louisiana town, surrounded by five other women who function as extended family. According to NBC’s review, it is a certified tearjerker for good reason: the film earns its emotional payoff because it spends real time making every character genuinely funny before it breaks them. Dolly Parton, Shirley MacLaine, Olympia Dukakis, and Daryl Hannah round out a cast with no weak link.
“Mermaids” (1990)
Cher plays Rachel Flax, an unconventional mother who moves her daughters from town to town every time a relationship ends. Winona Ryder is her oldest daughter, Charlotte, a devout Catholic desperately trying to be different from her mother. Christina Ricci plays the youngest. SheKnows describes it as a film about what happens when a mother and daughter are more similar than either will admit. The soundtrack alone is worth the watch.
“Freaky Friday” (2003)
The two leads swap bodies and spend the film being horrified by each other’s lives. What distinguishes this version from earlier adaptations is that both characters are genuinely right about the other in ways the script takes seriously. Curtis is particularly funny, and the film’s central argument that understanding someone requires inhabiting their experience is more emotionally honest than most serious dramas manage.
“Mamma Mia” (2008)
Meryl Streep plays Donna Sheridan, a former singer raising her daughter on a Greek island. Sophie invites all three of her possible fathers to the wedding to figure out which one is hers. The film is built on ABBA songs and operates on pure joy. According to NBC’s list, it remains one of the most recommended films for watching with a mother because it asks very little and delivers an enormous amount of pleasure in return.
“Lady Bird” (2017)
Greta Gerwig’s debut feature follows Christine McPherson, who goes by Lady Bird, through her senior year in Sacramento. Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf play daughter and mother with a specificity that makes every argument feel like a real one. SheKnows notes that the film captures how mother and daughter negotiate their changing relationship as one craves independence and the other is not ready. Metcalf received an Academy Award nomination. The ending involves a phone call and should come with a warning.
Wrap up
Six films, six versions of the same relationship. Terms of Endearment set the bar. Steel Magnolias raised it. Lady Bird redefined it for a new generation. Which one belongs at the top of your list?
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