25 heartwarming movies that celebrate moms

Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger give tremendous performances in Terms of Endearment, one of those tear-drenched films that were very popular during the 1970s and 1980s. They play mother and daughter, Aurora and Emma, and the film does an excellent job of showing how mothers and daughters can maintain a strong relationship despite the inherent difficulties. It’s also one of those rare films that manage to keep the comedy and drama operating at equal levels, tugging on the heartstrings even as it also provides the feeling of being wrapped up in a warm blanket of comfort viewing. 

Featuring an all-star cast that includes such heavy hitters as Julia Roberts, Sally Field, Shirley MacLaine, and Dolly Parton, it focuses on a group of southern women as they deal with love, loss, and family. Field is particularly exemplary as M'Lynn Eatenton, a mother who has to deal with the impending loss of her daughter to illness. It’s one of Field’s best, and she gives one of the most convincing portraits of maternal grief to have ever graced the big screen. 

The folks at Pixar have always excelled at creating animated films that dig deeply into emotions while never losing sight of the magic of animation as a form. In this case, the film focuses on the young Princess Merida, whose rebellious spirit inadvertently causes her mother to be turned into a bear. In her efforts to undo the curse, Merida must look inside herself and learn to communicate more effectively with her mother. Exhibiting all of the craft and beauty that one expects from the Pixar studio, Brave is just the right mix of funny and poignant. 

Barbara Stanwyck was one of the most successful and talented performers in classic Hollywood, and her extraordinary abilities are very much on display in Stella Dallas. A tear-inducing melodrama about a working-class mother who gives up everything so that her daughter can have a better life, it’s the kind of film designed to make the viewer run and call their mother right away. Stanwyck perfectly captures a mother’s desire to give her daughter every chance she never had, even though doing so ultimately means she must give her up. The final scene of Stella, heartbroken but triumphant, will live in cinema history. 

The bond between mothers and their daughters is often as rewarding as it is frustrating, and this tension is brilliantly explored in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird.  Saoirse Ronan stars as the title character, a young woman whose relationship with her mother (played by the always-divine Laurie Metcalf) is by turns loving and contentious. There’s an emotional authenticity to Lady Bird that elevates it into the realm of the truly great, and Metcalf’s performance is easily one of the best of her entire career (she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar).

With its infectiously listenable songs — drawn from the discography of ABBA — Mamma Mia! r emains as infectiously watchable as it was released in 2008. With its story about a young woman who invites several men to her wedding in the hopes of discovering which one is her father, it is designed to evoke laughter and joy in equal measure. The bond between Meryl Streep’s Donna and Amanda Seyfried’s Sophie is palpable, and they are supported by a true embarrassment of riches of a cast, which includes Pierce Brosnan, Christine Baranski, Colin Firth, and Stellan Skarsgård. It’s a Hollywood spectacle of the best sort.  

Imitation of Life is one of those quintessential 1930s melodramas, filled with heightened emotion, fraught mother/daughter relationships, and great performances from the likes of Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers. It focuses on two mothers, Bea Pullman and Delilah Johnson, who both experience difficult relationships with their daughters, and all four of the characters have to contend with the politics and social influence of race in America. It’s the type of maternal melodrama that manages to be both heartbreaking and heartwarming in equal measure, and it serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of family.

Douglas Sirk’s film Imitation of Life was the second time that the story of a pair of mothers dealing with recalcitrant daughters was brought to the screen (after the 1934 version). Like its predecessor, it contends with many of the issues percolating in American culture at the time of its release, and it amply demonstrates the many things that mothers will do for their daughters, even though the latter may not at all appreciate those efforts. It is arguably Lana Turner’s best film, and it also exhibits all the Technicolor aesthetics, and weepy emotions, that were the hallmark of director Douglas Sirk.

Pixar has long had a knack for using animation to explore weighty and serious issues in the guise of fun, and Turning Red is an excellent example of this phenomenon. Though it is ostensibly about its main character (Mei) and her turning into a giant red panda when she experiences strong emotions, it’s more fundamentally about her complicated relationship with her mother. The film never loses sight of the fact that it’s supposed to be fun, but it truly shines when it dives deeply into the characters and their emotions, showing how complicated and rich the relations between mothers and their daughters can be. 

Few films have managed to straddle the line between comedy and drama quite as effectively as Little Miss Sunshine.  This is largely a testament to its cast's extraordinary skills, including Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette, and the young Abigail Breslin. The film focuses on a family determined to get their young daughter to a pageant. Collette is in particularly fine form as Sheryl Hoover, the family matriarch who, despite often being overworked and more than a little overwhelmed, still does everything she can to see to it that her daughter gets to the pageant, despite the many misfortunes that befall the family along the way.

Though it is more frequently touted as a must-see holiday film, there are many reasons to watch Home Alone around Mother’s Day. There is an undeniable bond between young Kevin (Macaulay Culkin) and his mother, Kate (Catherine O’Hara). Like so many on-screen parent/child relationships, theirs is complicated, particularly since Kevin is, to put it mildly, a difficult kid prone to temper tantrums. The scene in which they finally reunite on Christmas Day, however, is designed to melt the heart of even the most cynical viewers, and it’s a potent reminder of just how important mothers are.

The late Garry Marshall always had a keen eye for how to make a crowd-pleasing film, even if his work didn’t always wow critics. Mother’s Day  was his last film, which carried on the tradition of his later career in producing films focused on particular holidays. Like his earlier efforts, it focuses on various characters navigating the fraught territory of mother/child relationships. Though it can sometimes veer into the predictable and saccharine, there is still much to love about this film, particularly since it features reliable great performances from the likes of Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson, and Julia Roberts.  

Maternal melodramas don’t come any purer than Stepmom,  which features heavy-hitters Julia Roberts and Susan Sarandon in the main roles. Sarandon plays a woman who contends both with her terminal illness and her husband’s new partner, who will, in time, become her children’s stepmother. It’s the type of drama designed to wring tears from even the most stone-hearted viewers, and it does a strong job of exploring how fraught and difficult family relations can be and how love can come in many different forms and provide unexpected bonds. 

The power and importance of family are at the center of Soul Food,  directed by George Tillman Jr. and starring Vanessa Williams and Vivica A. Fox. Part melodrama and part comedy, it handles the happy and the sad parts of its story with a deft touch. Though the central family endures quite a lot as they contend with the various crises that always crop up in life, their essential bonds are shown to be strong enough to withstand almost any trial. Moreover, a relatability to its story makes it as rich and comforting as the food of its title.   

Judi Dench has excelled at creating rich and fascinating characters throughout her career. One of her most notable on-screen creations is Philomena, the main character in the film of the same name. Based on a true story, Philomena follows its character as she tries to find the son she was forced to give up for adoption several decades previously. Due in large part to Dench’s inspired performance, the film manages to work on many different registers, asking the viewer to take a hard look at the restrictive and, at times, abusive nature of clericalism, even as it never loses sight of humanity at its center. 

On the surface, the critically acclaimed Everything Everywhere All at Once seems to be a fantasy/sci-fi/action film about the multiverse. Beneath all of that, there is also a rich vein of maternal melodrama, particularly once the film begins digging into the fraught relationship between Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn and her daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), the latter of whom has become a powerful and destructive entity known as Jobu Tupaki. The film’s brilliance lies in its ability to be uproariously funny yet textured and nuanced in exploring mother/daughter relationships and intergenerational trauma. 

Forrest Gump is primarily about its title character, a gentle and kindhearted man who seems to always find himself at the center of important events in 20th-century American history. Tom Hanks received significant praise for his performance, but many of the film’s fans know that Sally Field is just as deserving of recognition as Mrs. Gump. As she would do in so many other films — most notably  Steel Magnolias —Field imbues her character with richness, warmth, and kindness, depicting a woman who loves her son without question or condition, providing him a solid foundation upon which he can build the rest of his strangely eventful life. 

Even though Disney doesn’t have a great track record for keeping its animated mothers alive, Dumbo is a notable exception to this rule, and, indeed, the baby elephant’s mother, Mrs. Jumbo, is one of the best mothers to have appeared in an animated film. She is selflessly devoted to her son, willing to defend him against anyone and everyone, whether human or elephant. The moments when the two are separated by human cruelty are truly wrenching. Still, their final reunion at the film's end is a balm for the soul, filling the viewer with the same transcendent joy that Dumbo himself experiences. 

Though many of the most notable mother/daughter films are melodramas, Freaky Friday  is an exception, a straight-up comedy. It tells the story of a mother and daughter, played by Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, respectively, who mysteriously find themselves in one another’s bodies. The plot is somewhat predictable in that the body switching allows the mother and daughter to truly appreciate one another’s perspectives. The undeniable chemistry between Curtis and Lohan makes the film really work, and how convincingly they depict a mother/daughter pair learning to work through their issues and appreciate the other as individuals worthy of love.  

The 2000s was a decade well-known for its films depicting the tumultuous relationships between mothers and daughters, and one of the most notable of these is Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.  Based on the novels of Rebecca Wells, it focuses in particular on the deeply troubled relationship between Vivi (a divine Ellen Burstyn) and her daughter, Sidda (Sandra Bullock). Burystn and Bullock give some of the best work of their respective careers as the film explores the nature of intergenerational trauma and how mothers often have their struggles that they sometimes cannot fully reveal to their children, no matter how much they might want to do so. 

Cher might be best known as a musician, but she has also made some extraordinary movies in her career. One of her best is Mermaids,  which focuses on an unorthodox mother (played by Cher) and her contentious and sometimes strange relationship with her two daughters (played by Winona Ryder and Christina Ricci). Both mother and daughter have to navigate the fraught territory of their relationship with one another and with the men in their lives, and both Cher and Ryder more than deliver, bringing out the best in the other. It’s heartfelt 1990s cinema at its best. 

Awkwafina might be best known for her performances in various comedies, but she’s equally excellent in heavier dramatic roles, as she more than demonstrates in The Farewell. She plays Billi Wang, a young woman who goes to China to spend time with her terminally ill grandmother, who has been kept in the dark about her diagnosis. The film’s brilliance shines in its ability to capture the specificity of Chinese culture while addressing universal themes of family, grief, and the emotional bonds that tie different generations together. Though it maintains its melancholy feeling from beginning to end, it also doesn’t neglect the joy of being close to one’s grandparents. 

Though Tom Moore might not be a household name, his animated productions have achieved a resonance and an aching beauty that show how powerful the form remains. In Wolfwalkers, he turns his attention to Robyn Goodfellowe, a young English girl who befriends a young Wolfwalker, Mebh, and her mother. By turns enchanting, heartwarming, and heartbreaking, it’s a powerful fable about the enduring power of friendship and the unbreakable bonds between young women and their mothers. Moreover, as with Moore’s other productions, his animation has a timeless quality, which earns this film a deserved place among the great animated films. 

Though Fried Green Tomatoes does involve mothers as part of its various storylines, it’s about much more than that. Starring Kathy Bates and Jessica Tandy as a dissatisfied housewife and the elderly woman she befriends, it’s about the powerful emotional bonds between women. Both Bates and Tandy give tremendous performances, as do the other cast members, including Mary Stewart Masterson and Mary-Louise Parker. Though it makes some significant changes to Fannie Flagg’s original novel, there’s still much here to enchant and delight, and the film is as comforting as the Southern food it so often depicts. 

Annette Bening and Julianne Moore give superlative performances. While the film is very much about the nature of their marriage and the challenges they must overcome, it’s also about the nature of family. It shows that no matter what might happen and however many trials might emerge, there is something almost transcendently important and enduring about family, no matter how it might be constituted. Like all good films, it is also a reflection of its time, showing how the concept of family is more than capacious enough to welcome members of the LGBTQ+ community.