For Mother’s Day, we asked our Letterboxd crew and contributors to write about their favorite moms in cinema history. While we couldn’t all pick Mabel Longhetti in A Woman Under the Influence nor Alice Hyatt in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, our selections range from stepmoms to godmothers, from Cher to Sigourney, from singing nuns to wives with knives—four of us chose John Waters characters!

But the most common thread woven throughout the selections is the appreciation for flawed mothers. There is no such thing as the perfect maternal figure: motherhood is messy, it’s terrifying, it’s suffocating. Movies help us cultivate empathy for what our moms have gone through in the process of raising us to be the best versions of ourselves we can be. We may take her wisdom for granted when we’re hormonal teenagers, but, like Lady Bird herself, the urge to call and say, “Thank you,” grows as we do. Thank you to all the mothers out there, be they fictional or real.

Mother (마더) (2009)

Kim Hye-ja as Mother
Selected by Mia Lee Vicino

The unbreakable bond between mother and son is perfectly exemplified in the opening scene of Bong Joon Ho’s crime-thriller: Do-joon (Won Bin) is hit by a car at the same time that his mother cuts herself while chopping herbs. They bleed together; they suffer together. “You and me are one,” she wails later on, as the disabled Do-joon is in prison for a murder that she wholeheartedly believes he didn’t commit. Kim Hye-ja, who scooped up several Best Actress accolades for her devastating performance, plays a woman so consumed with protecting her son that she is only ever identified as “Mother”. It’s the ultimate sacrifice, relinquishing your name, your reputation, your morals—all for maternal love. If I were ever accused of a crime, I know that my own Korean mom would fight just as fiercely for me (and I would do the same for my cat).

Cinderella (1950)

Verna Felton as Fairy Godmother
Selected by Ella Kemp

I will never stop banging the drum for 1950’s Cinderella, a film so pure of heart that it’s the only thing that makes me believe in magic. The one person responsible? Cinderella’s fairy godmother, a figure so kind and selfless, who offers what every mother (I hope!) wants to give their child: a better life, a fuller future, a more enjoyable memory, even if solely for one night. “There’s nothing left to believe in,” Cinderella sobs. “Nothing, my dear? You don’t really mean that,” her fairy godmother says, smiling confidently, stroking her hair. “If you’d lost all your faith, I couldn’t be here.” The calm but firm reassurance reminds me of every time my mum has just known what to say, wiping my tears and giving me a five-step action plan that will magic the pain away. Or something a little sweeter, but still gets the job done.

News from Home (1976)

Selected by Samm Ruppersberger

In News from Home, filmmaker and NYC newcomer Chantal Akerman films the bustling streets and subways of the city, set to voiceovers of herself reciting her mother’s melancholic letters from back home in Belgium. While we never actually meet the filmmaker’s mother, we learn about her inner world through her mundane news, devoted interrogations, and increasingly urgent pleas for more frequent letters and a visit home from her daughter. She is immediately familiar in a way that makes you wonder if moms are the same all over. Meanwhile, we can sense that Akerman’s own isolation coincides with her mother’s as she searches for a life outside of the one she’s always known. When you need to sit with your unresolved guilt about leaving family behind or a kick in the ass to call your mom back, throw on News from Home.

Forever a Woman (乳房よ永遠なれ) (1955)

Yumeji Tsukioka as Fumiko Shimojō
Selected by Öykü Sofuoğlu

When my mother was young, she had a brief career as a photographer—before devoting herself entirely to marriage and motherhood. Maybe that’s part of why Fumiko, the protagonist of Kinuyo Tanaka’s poignant melodrama Forever a Woman, resonated deeply with me. Fumiko is a striking maternal figure because she refuses to be defined by motherhood alone, dedicating herself instead to poetry. If nurture is a motherly instinct, Fumiko turns it inward—transforming pain into creativity and desire as she nears death. By conventional standards, Fumiko might be seen as a “bad mother”—she leaves behind two children and a trail of melancholic tankas (Japanese poetry). Cinema rarely tolerates imperfect mothers, even less so in postwar Japanese films, which often favor self-sacrificing, idealized figures. I learned to love my mother more once I realized she had the right to be weak, selfish—even absent—so here’s to all the ionate, inspired and beautifully flawed moms out there.

The Sound of Music (1965)

Julie Andrews as Maria
Selected by Sophie van Waardenberg

When Maria is sent to look after the seven von Trapp children, she accepts the challenge of impromptu pseudo-motherhood the same way she does anything: with chaos and great zeal. Maria sings her problems and makes the kids do a creepy goat puppet show and is so earnest it’s annoying. But boy, if she isn’t doing everything she can to take care of her charges, to learn what they love and fear and—most important of all—to teach them the fundamentals of music theory. I love Maria for pretending to be confident, figuring it out as she goes. She wins those seven kids over with sarcasm and lederhosen made out of curtains and she almost drowns them in the lake… And she’s always, always on their side.

Little Women (1994)

Susan Sarandon as Marmee March
Selected by Marya E. Gates

My favorite mother in the movies is Susan Sarandon as Marmee in Gillian Armstrong’s version of Little Women. Sarandon herself exudes big mothering energy in real life with her steadfast commitment to solidarity in all forms, and so she is the perfect match for playing the nurturing March family matriarch. She rears her children with a firm but gentle hand. She gives them care when they need it but also pushes them to grow through pain and to embrace the freedom of following their own paths in the world. I think Maddie summed it up best when she wrote, “I wish Marmee could brush my hair and embolden my moral courage with advice.”

Back to the Future (1985)

Lea Thompson as Lorraine Baines
Selected by Alexander Jones

Lorraine’s (Lea Thompson) contribution to the cinematic mother canon is profound, complex and potentially inappropriate for a Mother’s Day discussion, but her character’s role in Back to the Future is more than an uncomfortable incest side-plot in this beloved family classic—dare I say, it’s the heart of the film. The contrast of who Marty thought his mother was with who she used to be and who she truly is invites us to reconsider not only our parents but everyone we know. Perhaps they’re not so different, you and them. Maybe everyone is just as hopeful, human and horny as you are. Even your mum.

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

Judith Malina as Sonny’s Mother
Selected by Jack Moulton

In less than four minutes of screen time, Judith Malina leaves a powerful impression as Sonny Wortzik’s “sucker for a mother” in Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon. She’s only in two very brief scenes, but it’s her frenzied plea to Sonny outside the bank with a last-ditch attempt to talk him down that stands out. Her devoted comion and unconditional acceptance of Sonny, even as his father disowns him for his crimes—plus her frantic suggestion for him to run—shows us why his grand act of love simply had to go big. “How beautiful you were when you were a baby,” she cries, for a mother’s love is infinite.

For the majority of the runtime of John Waters’ Female Trouble, Dawn Davenport (played with gusto by Divine), is increasingly at her wits end in her attempts to parent her daughter Taffy (Waters regular Mink Stole). She forbids her from going to school, won’t allow her to have friends over the house and, most importantly, will not allow any rhymes to be sung in the home. At one point, in an attempt to articulate her challenges as a mother, Dawn exclaims, “I’ve done everything a mother can do: I’ve locked her in her room, I’ve beat her with the car aerial. Nothing changes her. It’s hard being a loving mother!” We have no choice but to believe her. JL

Edith Massey often plays authority figures in John Waters movies, flipping square morality on its head. My favorite is in Female Trouble, co-starring Massey as Aunt Ida, the disappointed aunt-in-law of bad gal Dawn Davenport. Aunt Ida isn’t upset that her nephew Gater (Michael Potter) married a criminal, however. She’s worried about Gater’s heterosexuality. In a satirical reversal, Aunt Ida asks Gater if he’s met any “nice queer boys” at the hair salon where he works, telling him that she’d be “so proud” if he divorced Dawn and got himself a boyfriend. If he doesn’t go gay, “I’d worry you’d work in an office, have children, celebrate wedding anniversaries,” she says—a fate worse than death in Waters’ world. KR

Mermaids (1990)

Cher as Rachel Flax
Selected by Kate Hagen

The effervescent maternal magic of Rachel Flax is so potent that it has become a verb in my household: “Are you going to Mrs. Flax those sandwiches?” Mrs. Flax is the chain-smoking, scotch-swilling, Bob Hoskins-snogging unmarried single mother of Mermaids, making her the principal antagonist of her uber-pious teenage daughter Charlotte (Winona Ryder), though Charlotte’s younger sister Kate (Christina Ricci) doesn’t seem to mind her mom’s impulsive whims as a truly independent, iconoclastic American woman of the 1960s.

Mrs. Flax is irable because she is so very flawed—and so willing to embrace her most significant mistakes for the sake of her daughters’ emotional development, while still encouraging them to make a few of their own. Rachel and Charlotte don’t often agree, but Rachel assures that Charlotte understands how to uncover her own personal liberation as a young woman by teaching her how to drive a car, pick out proper footwear and face the adult consequences of adult actions without crumbling, like almost letting your drunk little sister drown because you were busy getting laid by Jake Ryan in a bell tower.

And please, a moment of silence for the many iconic fits of Mrs. Flax: Pastel polka-dotted wiggle dresses galore, perhaps the best bouffant wig ever put to film and of course, the mermaid ensemble. Enjoy the pure serotonin that is the Mermaids tie-in music video, too.

Mum was moving to the US, and saw the film at Auckland’s mighty Civic Theatre. It wasn’t Lana Turner’s story that moved my mum, but the story of Annie Johnson, a Black mother raising a mixed-race daughter. Annie is spurned by her daughter Sarah who wants to “” as white in a racist America, something Annie lives to regret in the stirring finale (spoiler alert): her mother’s funeral where an ethereal Mahalia Jackson laments the trouble of the world. “What world was I about to move to,” my mother thought in 1959, something she was soon to find out.

Stepmom (1998)

Julia Roberts as Isabel Kelly and Susan Sarandon as Jackie Harrison
Selected by Claira Curtis

“Mother is God in the eyes of a child,” writes William Makepeace Thackeray, and that sentiment feels entwined with the conversation that soon-to-be stepmom, Isabel (Julia Roberts), and mom, Jackie (Susan Sarandon), share in Stepmom. “You know every story, every wound, every memory. Their whole life’s happiness is wrapped in you,” Isabel confides as they discuss Jackie’s children, Anna and Ben (Jena Malone and Liam Aiken). In Stepmom, Jackie’s façade of perfection slips, revealing vulnerabilities as Isabel’s reluctance to have children dissipates, revealing a different, but valuable, form of mothering. There is space for both of them. Roberts and Saradon’s complex portrayals of motherhood are two of my absolute favorites.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Charlee Fraser as Mary Jabassa
Selected by George Fenwick

The secret treat of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is that we got a prequel in the prequel. George Miller opens this origin story with what is essentially a heart-stopping, tragic short film: the tale of Furiosa’s magnificent and badass mother, whose fate puts Furiosa on her warpath of revenge. Makes sense that Mary Jabassa, played by an effortlessly rad Charlee Fraser, would be the coolest mother ever—she learned from the best, raising her kid in the Green Place of Many Mothers. After watching her take out man after man with a sniper after Furiosa is captured, and eventually sacrificing herself to let her daughter flee, Mary’s ferocious presence lingers over the rest of the film. Following the film’s premiere, Letterboxd was flooded with rallying cries akin to Ansh’s: “Mary Jabassa: A Mad Max Saga when.”

Aliens (1986)

Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley
Selected by Matt Goldberg

You have to earn a line as good as, “Get away from her, you bitch!” Thankfully, there’s never even a doubt when Aliens reaches that climatic moment of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) squaring off against the Xenomorph Queen to protect Newt (Carrie Henn). The mother-daughter bond that forms between Ripley and Newt is one between two survivors who have confronted the same horror, and yet rather than let nightmares harden their hearts, they find renewal through their relationship. It’s so lovely that I can understand pretending that Alien³ never happened.

Braindead (1992)

Elizabeth Moody as Vera Cosgrove
Selected by Dominic Corry

Peter Jackson’s early preoccupation with matricide was never more fun than in this gonzo gorefest which wrings much Freudian/Greek humor from the relationship between (initially) meek main character Lionel (Tim Balme) and his classically oppressive mother, Vera (Elizabeth Moody). Vera’s sneering contempt for Lionel’s romantic pursuits leads to her being bitten by a Sumatran Rat-Monkey, but Lionel must maintain appearances throughout her devolution into a zombie, most fantastically in one of the film’s standout scenes, a dinner party where Vera literally starts coming apart. Maternal obligation was never so hilariously disgusting, and the film only gets grosser from there. Vera’s a pretty awful mother, really. But she’s my favorite.