Items19The creator’s order
  1. 1Terms of Endearment (1983)Terms of Endearment (1983) 7.4/10 on IMDbReleased Nov 20, 1983The template for the mother-daughter weepie, and still the sharpest. Aurora is fussy, vain and impossible, her daughter Emma is warm and messy, and the film follows them over years of phone calls, fights and making up. Shirley MacLaine won the Oscar for Best Actress, the film took Best Picture, and…0
  2. 2Steel Magnolias (1989)Steel Magnolias (1989) 7.3/10 on IMDbReleased Nov 15, 1989Sally Field and Julia Roberts play M'Lynn and Shelby, a mother who worries and a daughter who refuses to be worried over, and their arguments about Shelby's health and her wish for a baby are the spine of the film. Robert Harling wrote the original play months after his own sister died of…0
  3. 3Postcards from the Edge (1990)Postcards from the Edge (1990) 6.7/10 on IMDbReleased Sep 14, 1990Carrie Fisher adapted her own novel, loosely drawn from life with her mother Debbie Reynolds, and the result is the funniest film here about a grown daughter forced back under her mother's roof. Meryl Streep's actress is fresh out of rehab; Shirley MacLaine's mother is a showbiz star who competes…0
  4. 4Mermaids (1990)Mermaids (1990) 6.7/10 on IMDbReleased Dec 14, 1990Cher's Mrs. Flax is a free spirit whose answer to every problem with a man is to pack up and move, and Winona Ryder's Charlotte responds by deciding to become a nun, despite being Jewish. It is set in 1963, and the comedy comes from a daughter trying to be the grown-up in a house where her mother…0
  5. 5The Joy Luck Club (1993)The Joy Luck Club (1993) 7.7/10 on IMDbReleased Sep 8, 1993Four mothers who emigrated from China, four daughters raised in America, and a run of flashbacks that finally lets each side hear what the other never said. Wayne Wang directs from Amy Tan's novel, with a screenplay by Tan and Ronald Bass, and the structure works like a family gathering where every…0
  6. 6Secrets & Lies (1996)Secrets & Lies (1996) 8.0/10 on IMDbReleased May 24, 1996A 27-year-old optometrist who was adopted goes looking for her birth mother and finds Cynthia, a lonely, jittery woman in a gloomy rowhouse who never expected to be found. Mike Leigh lets scenes run long, and the first meeting between Marianne Jean-Baptiste's Hortense and Brenda Blethyn's Cynthia…0
  7. 7Real Women Have Curves (2002)Real Women Have Curves (2002) 6.9/10 on IMDbReleased Oct 18, 2002America Ferrera, in her first film, plays a first-generation Mexican American graduate in East Los Angeles who wants college and a writing life, while her mother, played by Lupe Ontiveros, wants her in the family's small textile factory and married off. The two shared a Special Jury Prize for…0
  8. 8Freaky Friday (2003)Freaky Friday (2003) 6.4/10 on IMDbReleased Aug 5, 2003The easiest yes on the list. Jamie Lee Curtis's mother Tess and Lindsay Lohan's teenage Anna bicker over clothes, boys and Tess's fiancé until a magical fortune cookie swaps them, and each has to live the other's life. Curtis playing a sulky teenager in a grown woman's body is the comic engine, and…0
  9. 9Saving Face (2004)Saving Face (2004) 7.4/10 on IMDbReleased Sep 12, 2004Wil is a young surgeon in Flushing, Queens, keeping her girlfriend hidden from a Chinese American community that gossips about everything. Then her widowed mother, played by Joan Chen, turns up on the doorstep at 48, unwed, pregnant and with nowhere else to go, and now both of them have a…0
  10. 10Volver (2006)Volver (2006) 7.6/10 on IMDbReleased Mar 17, 2006Pedro Almodóvar's film about three generations of women, a run of family secrets and a mother who seems to have come back from the dead to put things right with her daughter. Penélope Cruz and Carmen Maura lead an ensemble whose six actresses shared Best Actress at Cannes, and the script won there…0