Mrs. Miniver (1942) The peerlessly lovely Greer Garson is unjustly notorious as merely the prototype of genteel, stiff-upper-lip British resolve in wartime. That’s may be why she won an Oscar for this homefront melodrama, but today her character is a revelation – a wife and mother of three radiating lusty playfulness, real-woman warmth and pre-feminist strength. Luminous, almond-eyed and honey-voiced, Garson never sounded the acting trumpets like Katherine Hepburn or Bette Davis did; she just was, and here she’s the ultimate Mom, confident and unruffled by chaos and yet still stirringly sexy and sweet. William Wyler’s movie is, otherwise, laced with propaganda and hokum, but between Garson’s maternal light and Teresa Wright (another Oscar) as her grown daughter, the movie veritably glows.

I Remember Mama (1948) The story of a dead-poor Norwegian immigrant clan living in San Francisco circa 1910, whose matriarch is wise, firm, funny, loving and, of course, self-sacrificing. The family could just as well have been Scottish or Asian or shtetl-Jewish – mothers want more for their children the world over and why should they have a new coat when the children need books? Irene Dunne, in her last significant role, flashes that ironic smile as she bustles about with her brood, but she’s fully committed to the woman’s limitations and the feeling of family intimacy. There’s no defense from tearjerking once she sneaks into a hospital children’s ward pretending to be a nurse, just so she can to croon to her sick daughter, and, helplessly, the other sickbed kids as well.

Italianamerican (1974) Early in his career as New York’s signature movie voice, Little Italy-bred Martin Scorsese shot this 49-minute beauty featuring little more than a plastic-wrapped-couch interview with his aging parents in their apartment on Elizabeth Street, in which they detail their lives as second-gen Sicilian-Italians, and life in the lower neighborhoods during the first decades of the century. The movie, like the Scorsese family itself, defers to gregarious, no-nonsense Mama Catherine on most counts, and that includes the credits, which feature her recipe for spaghetti sauce. Mrs. Scorsese appeared in several of her son’s films, but this document is as thorough and priceless as portrait of mother-son love as any ever made.

The Joy Luck Club (1993) Amy Tan’s multi-generational saga about Chinese mothers, Chinese daughters, and Chinese-American daughters gets a compressed-shorthand Hollywood treatment, but the actresses are all dynamite, and the dramatic circumstances of their travails – feudal-era oppression, betrayal, infanticide, abuse, you name it – is a tell-your-Mom-you-love-her emotional bludgeon in any package.

Rugrats ("Mother’s Day," 1997) Chuckie, you will recall if you were lucky enough to have children when this brilliantly inventive and eloquent cartoon series first ran, is the lisping, bespectacled scaredy-cat whose mother died – and in this episode, which can hit you like a truck if you let it, the toddlers try to find, amid the Mother’s Day gift-giving, a mom for Chuckie, until it is realized that she is all around them already, in the garden she planted before she got sick. Whew.

Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) As European settlers took to slowly decimating Aboriginal society in Australia, what began as just one manner of oppression – kidnapping Aboriginal children from their families "for their own good" and training them as servants – became, in the case of "half-caste" children, official state policy. This program persisted, astonishingly, into the 1970s, but Philip Noyce’s film, based on a true story, is set in 1932, when three girls, aged 14, 10 and eight, were snatched from their family and sent to a slave camp 1200 miles away. Indignantly, they escaped, hellbent on returning to their mothers, walking for months back north along the continent-dividing fence, one step ahead of the law. Based on a memoir by a grown daughter of the eldest girl and rarely digressing from the journey itself, the movie is a primal trial, visually arresting and sociopolitically devastating.

Lovely and Amazing (2002) A caustic film about a family of insecure women plagued with the same flaws and body-image hang-ups nearly every woman has. The mother (Brenda Blethyn) subjects herself to liposuction while fantasizing about the dishy doctor, while each of the daughters flounders in their own lives: the eldest (Catherine Keener) has a disastrous with a teenager, the middle child (Emily Mortimer) is helplessly vulnerable to anorexia and male criticism, and the youngest daugher, an adopted African-American (the painfully genuine Raven Goodwin), overeats to assuage her confusion with life. The film is aptly titled, because it boils down to the mother-daughter bonds keeping everyone’s head happily above water.

Since Otar Left... (2003) A Georgian film, shot in Tbilisi (apparently, the Frenchest city in the ex-Soviet regions), and a vivid portrait of a cultured, all-woman family (cranky, reactionary grandmother; bitter, pragmatic mother; rebellious teen daughter) struggling to survive in the new nation after the clan’s son/brother/uncle hightailed it to Paris. Between the three women (in masterful performances across the board), every love-hate tangle we’ve ever had with our mothers is hashed over and healed.