The 15 best, and 5 worst, movie moms
In honor of Mother's Day, let's pay tribute to awesome big-screen moms like Evelyn Wang, Sarah Connor, and Ellen Ripley—and recognize some truly awful ones
Film Features Keke Palmer
From L-R: Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All At Once, Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, Michelle Williams in The Fabelmans, Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (Photos: A24, 20th Century Fox, Tri-Star, Universal Pictures). Graphic: The A.V. Club
Hollywood offers plenty of great examples of motherhood. These moms, just like the ones in real life, come in many forms—natural mothers, adoptive mothers, single mothers, widows. Some are strong, some are nurturing, and many are thrown into extraordinary circumstances. Most are the kind of mothers we’d like to have, and that some of us wish we could be. All of the moms on our “best” list would sacrifice anything for their children. Of course, not every movie mother is quite so wonderful, as demonstrated by the moms on our “worst” list. These truly terrible matriarchs will make you appreciate all those good mothers that much more. So, in honor of Mother’s Day, here’s our look at the most memorable big-screen mothers of all time.
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For best movie moms, Dianne Wiest in…just about anything. But I mainly have Edward Scissorhands in mind here.
Totally agree, but it’s Fright Night for me.
I assume you’re thinking of The Lost Boys? (since I’m pretty sure she wasn’t in Fright Night). It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen it but I seem to recall The Lost Boys being another good example of Wiest as a good movie mom.
Ach, you’re right! I got my cheesy 80’s vampire movie names mixed up, thank you for correcting me!
And I say that as a huge fan of cheesy 80’s vampire movies. I’m unabashedly a fan of both movies, which is probably why I got the names mixed up.
Also check out Near Dark (1987) if you haven’t. It’s a cheesy 1980s vampire movie that’s practically an Aliens reunion, with Bill Paxton, Lance Hendriksen, and Jeanette Goldstein.
I actually own that on DVD…and thank you for reminding me to rewatch it!
Parenthood FTW. Love the scene where she learns her HS-aged daughter is pregnant, in front of a guy she just went on a first date with.“I can’t be a grandmother! I was at Woodstock for God’s sake!”“Hey, I was at Woodstock too!”“OH YEAH? I THOUGHT YOU LOOKED FAMILIAR!” (slams shot of vodka)
Indeed! Wiest really had a great run as a movie mom in the late ‘80s/early ‘90s.
Her replacing Fred Thompson as Manhattan DA on L&O was disorienting.
Mary Tyler Moore in “Ordinary People” is terrifying. Also for worst how about Angelica Huston in “The Grifters”?
Two excellent examples of horrifyingly bad moms, especially Huston in the Grifters. I only watched that movie once, I was so traumatized by what she did. Awful.
How about Anjelica Huston as best for Morticia Addams?
The GriftersI’d forgotten about that wonderfully dark performance and plainly am overdue for a rewatch.Maybe on a rainy-weekend double bill with (diverging from the motherhood theme) another nice bit of work from that era with a great Anjelica Huston performance, Prizzi’s Honor. Yeah, definitely a rewatch, right here, on the oriental.
Yeah, but it’s her threat of Bobo which gets the doctor to exert effort to save her son’s life, so it’s kind of a tough call. And I don’t think she intended to kill Roy, though it’s awfully gross to proposition your child….
“I’m afraid that one isn’t new like Ron’s, it was actually my brother Fabian’s and he wasn’t terribly careful with his possessions, it’s a bit dented on the back, but-” The rest of her speech was lost; Harry had got up and hugged her. He tried to put a lot of unsaid things into the hug and perhaps she understood them, because she patted his cheek clumsily when he released her, then waved her wand in a slightly random way, causing half a pack of bacon out of the frying pan on to the floor.— Molly Weasley on the morning of Harry’s seventeenth birthday, when she gave him a watch (traditional for wizarding families). That’s why Molly is the best.
That is the same book where she goes all bad ass defending her babies as well.
Petunia should have made the worst list. Spoils Dudley, absolutely abuses Harry. Making him live under the stairs and only let him have a real bedroom when they find out he’s a wizard (and that was only out of fear)? WTF?
I’ve seen people make arguments that the Dursleys sucked because Harry was a horcrux, but nah. They just sucked, and Petunia was the worst of the bunch.
What, they argument that thebit of Voldemort’s soul in Harry corrupted the Dursleys somehow? Yeah, I don’t buy it, either. Vernon was always an asshole, and Petunia had been seething with rage against the wizard community ever since her sister was chosen for Hogwarts.
Yeah they were just run-of-the-mill shitty, petty people. Also, I didn’t draw the line between Dudley and Harry Melling as an adult actor for way too long. I was watching The Queens Gambit and couldn’t for the life of me figure out where I’d seen the guy.
Harry Melling is an adult actor? Oh, wait, not in that sense.
You know what? Why ISN’T Petunia on this list?!
There’s a distinct lack of ‘The Manchurian Candidate.’
She’s probably the worst pop culture mom this side of Norma Bates.
Seriously, she’s the OG terrible mom, absolute Mt. Rushmore stuff.
Toweringly terrible.
Also a distinct lack of Gladys Cooper in Now, Voyager. Bad recency bias with this list.
Angela Lansbury was one cold bitch in that. No wonder she found killing all those people so easy in Murder, She Wrote.
Sometimes I wonder about if the AVClub actually watches the movies before making these lists. Some of the characters eventually get to good mom status but I’d hardly give them that moniker. Evelyn from EEAAO whole journey is partial about realizing what her daughter means to her and that she hasn’t always been a good mother. For Father’s Day I would 100% approve Waymond being listed as a good dad though Sarah Conner trauma drives her so far that she ends up institutionalized and John ends up in foster care. That’s after years of hanging out with some real questionable people to prepare for the robot apocalypse. Ellen Ripley left her own daughter to go on a job that takes her away from her for years at a time. Because of the events of the first film she ends up gone decades and finds out her daughter died. I realize this was cut from the theatrical cut but it frames the Newt/Ripley relationship very differently.
I think all three are bad ass but flawed moms. Which maybe all moms are or should be. Maybe that makes them good. Damn now I’m not even sure what I’m complaining about. Happy Mother’s Day, go hug your moms
All moms start terrible, because they had no idea what to do.
But the best moms keep getting better and better, in the worst of situations, the best moms just don’t give up.
“All moms start terrible, because they had no idea what to do.”
No, they don’t. Not knowing what to do isn’t the same as doing the wrong thing.
Evelyn Wang only *kind of* becomes a good mom when her daughter is a fully grown woman, about to entirely give up on her — and maybe about to give up on life altogether. Before that she has spent her life making her daughter feel awful about herself, picking at her for being fat, gay, etc. Even at the end, it never seems like Evelyn really likes or understands her daughter. She loves her, and it’s progress *for them.* But a good mother? An iconically good mother? Nah. She is an iconically complicated mother. That is what spoke to people about EEAO.
Before even starting the list I thought they needed a Best and Worst category for exactly this reason. From a more comedic direction I’d put Lane Meyer’s mom from Better off Dead on that list, she tries her damndest but is utterly clueless. There are probably some best moms from the John Hughes collection; Sam’s from 16 Candles comes to mind. Sure they forget her birthday but she otherwise has her shit together and is pretty cool in general.
Helen Griswold is a goddamn saint considering the shit she puts up with.
“It’s got raisins in it. You like raisins!”
I came here to say. I love all three of these characters dearly. They’re all very flawed and complex, with interesting arcs, and they’re all absolute badasses, but they’re all pretty absent mothers. (Which is part of what makes them flawed and interesting.)
“but they’re all pretty absent mothers.”
How the FUCK is Sarah Connor and absent mother? SHE WAS TAKEN AWAY FROM HER SON, that was not a bad mothering decision, that was a result of her KNOWING THE FUTURE and nobody else around her believing her.
Jesus fucking Christ, have none of you seen these fucking movies?
“Sarah Conner trauma drives her so far that she ends up institutionalized and John ends up in foster care. That’s after years of hanging out with some real questionable people to prepare for the robot apocalypse.”
Sarah Conner has knowledge that NOBODY else has. She did EXACTLY what she had to do with the knowledge that she had.
To say she was a bad mother is to ignore the world the movie takes place in, the world in which she KNEW someone who came from the future and should FOUGHT a fucking killer robot that came from the future.
The fact that she was institutionalized and had her kid taken away is a function of the world not understanding what she understood, not a function of her being a bad parent.
Thanks for stating the exact reaction I had to this.
The weirdest thing about Amy Ripley (Ellen’s daughter) is that apparently (if we take the events of the video game Alien Isolation seriously) is that while Ripley was frozen and before the events of Aliens she fought some aliens on a space station. I know Burke was an asshole, but you’d think that would be useful information to add besides the fact that she apparently died as an old woman is Wisconsin. Seriously, it’s a weird thing to add to Aliens lore. If I had designed the game I would have set it after Aliens and have the protagonist be an adult Newt (retconning her pointless death off screen in the prologue of Alien 3).
Cinderella’s step mom is glaringly absent from the “worst” list. Gothel from Tangled, too.
Yes to Tangled! “Mother Knows Best” is a truly great wicked-parent anthem.
I guess that’s because this is about mothers, not step-mothers.
Feel like Disney needs its own category.
Most of the other Disney mothers are dead or at worst, negligent. I think the queen in Snow White was her stepmom, but they never really spell it out.
Hey! Cool. Some unpaid interns just threw together another slideshow article.
But how did they hear of “Terms Of Endearment”?
Marmee is a terrible Mom for not drowning Amy at birth.
Catherine O’Hara in Home Alone should be on the list. . Besides that one little thing, she’s a pretty dedicated mom, and she’s a saint for putting up with that enormous family.
When I think “great movie moms” I automatically think of Ralphie’s mom in A Christmas Story. So put out (“My mother hadn’t eaten a hot meal for herself in fifteen years”), tough (the lifebuoy soap) but affectionate (“Daddy’s not going to kill Ralphie”), and just generally doing her best against impossible odds (“Well, put your arms down when you get to school”)…
Great mom. Maybe not the best wife considering what she did to that lamp.
There is major recency/American bias with this list, as not including Anna Magnani’s titanic characters in either Bellissima or Mama Roma renders this list moot.
Magnani is an absent mother for most of the child’s life in Mamma Roma. She’s great to him in the film, but that’s at least partially out of guilt. I’d agree with that character being absent from this particular list.
Too early to add Mona Wasserman from Beau is Afraid as a Worst?
Hang on to something because I’m going to say something that people will most likely disagree with. Neither Ellen or Sarah deserve to be on this list. Yes, they were badass women, but pretty shitty mothers. I’m not saying they deserve to be the worst side either, hence why I simply left it at “the list”. But at the end of the day they were absentee mothers who had no hand in the way their kids were raised. To me that’s not the mark of a good mother.
Throw Mama From the Train i watched recently. She is such a bitch.
That movie is REALLY uncomfortable any time Devito is on screen.
Mama Rose from Gypsy would definitely qualify as one of the worst!
Weaver always said she saw the Ripley/Newt relationship as more like sisters, fwiw.
That Ma Joad isn’t here makes me mean mad
Cody’s mom in White Heat is a ball busting mom in the worst way.
Shirley Maclaine deserved two Oscars for her performance.I’m still pissed off Sigourney Weaver didn’t win Best Actress for Aliens.
Once, after watching Carrie, I was in bed with a girl who had inexplicably consented to have sex with me. The boner killing “dirty pillows” came into my mind AND, that’s the end of that. I really wish Stephen King hadn’t thought of that.
Pamela Voorhees is the best mom. If I die I hope my mom also goes on a bloody vengful rampage againt innocent horny teens.
Good boy. Ticked the box with Tanya Anderson. Good boy.
Who’s the black private dick the A.V. Club neglected to put on this list?