With Mother’s Day being a time to spend some much-needed quality time with your mom and letting her know just how much of a fantastic woman she is, a great way to spend some time with your mama is cozying up on the couch with tons of snacks and a movie or two. Take a look at these 10 binge-worthy movies to watch this Mother’s Day with your mom.
Freaky Friday
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZ8KJ4MzzOw
In this classic remake, the single mother, Tess Coleman (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her teenage daughter Anna (Lindsay Lohan), couldn’t be more different, which causes them to be at one another’s throats constantly. After receiving a cryptic and magical fortune cookie one night at a Chinese restaurant, the two wake up the next day to discover that they have somehow switched bodies. Because they are unable to switch back at first, they are forced to masquerade as one another until the fortune cookie spell can be broken, which of course causes nothing but confusion and sticky situations. In the end, the two must come to some sort of truce to work together and try and understand one another until things return to normal.
Step Mom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z73WMzLjtvU
Grab your box of tissues for this one because you are definitely gonna need them. Jackie (Susan Sarandon), is a divorced mom of two, who gets some devastating and life-threatening news. To make matters worse, Jackie’s ex-husband Luke Harrison (Ed Harris) decides to take the next step with his much younger girlfriend, fashion photographer Isabel Kelly (Julia Roberts) and pop the question. Unfortunately, when Kelly meets Harrison’s kids, the line is pretty much drawn in the sand as Kelly doesn’t know a thing about being a prospective stepmom and the kids don’t want anything to do with Kelly. This one will definitely have you and your mom grabbing for tissues by the end.
Hidden Figures
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wfrDhgUMGI
In this historical biopic, three incredibly intelligent Black women at NASA – Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer) and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe), serve as the brains behind one of the most significant operations in history: the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit. This stunning achievement restores the nation’s confidence, turns around the Space Race and galvanizes the world.
In the film, Johnson proves her self to be one badass mom as she represents the embodiment of strength and tenacity. She overcomes work adversity, finds love, and takes care of her children all on her own. You go, mom!
Soul Food
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpWvmWISCzA
Your taste buds may be watering by the end of this film. Told in the narrative of Ahmad Simmons (Brandon Hammond), this movie shows the importance of having a strong mother figure as it’s carried down from generation to generation and the importance of having a solid familial foundation all the while being represented with some good old fashioned southern soul food! When Ahmad’s diabetic grandmother, Josephine “Big Mama” Joseph (Irma P. Hall), falls into a coma during an operation to amputate her leg, it throws the Joseph family into chaos. Ahmad watches as his mother, Maxine (Vivica A. Fox), and aunts Teri (Vanessa L. Williams) and Tracy (Nia Long) struggle to adjust to the family matriarch’s sudden absence, fall into old rivalries, share memories and work to maintain the long-standing tradition of Sunday family dinners.
Enough
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gS2nXsB_jY
Jennifer Lopez showed strength and proved that she refuses to be another victim of domestic violence when she starred as Slim in this drama/thriller. When her abusive husband Mitch (Billy Campbell) behaves so terribly toward her (a.k.a. beats her repeatedly when she refuses to bow down) she’s forced to fight him and search for a better life for her and her daughter.
The Joy Luck Club
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nYDMp1LdT8
Reminisce with your mom with this film which focuses on a group of aging Chinese women (Kieu Chinh, Tsai Chin, France Nuyen and Lisa Lu) who meet regularly to trade familial stories while playing Mahjong. In a series of sixteen vignettes that spans generations and continents, the film explores cultural conflict and the often-turbulent relationships between four first-generation Chinese-American women (Ming-Na Wen, Tamlyn Tomita, Lauren Tom and Rosalind Chao) and their mothers.
Kidnap
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-Ht8VRPRvU
Hell hath no fury like a woman in search of her kidnapped child, and that’s exactly what Halle Berry does. Playing Karla Dyson, Berry raises nothing but hell as the newly divorced mother whose son gets kidnapped at a carnival. Karla goes through hell and high water and prepares to go to the ends of the earth to fight her child’s abductors and get her son back.
The Parent Trap
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLmrMWExi28
In this update of the 1961 film, twins Annie and Hallie (Lindsay Lohan) are strangers until sleepaway camp brings the two together. The preteen girls’ divorced parents, Nick (Dennis Quaid) and Elizabeth (Natasha Richardson), are living on opposite sides of the Atlantic, each with one child, completely unaware of the other child. After meeting and joining forces, Hallie and Annie swap identities, giving both the chance to spend time with the parent they’ve missed and plot to reunite their divorced parents once again.
Mamma Mia!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RBNHdG35WY
Imagine preparing to get married and having your father walk you down the aisle only to realize that you have not a single clue who your actual father is. Well, that’s actually the real case in this instance when Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) the bride-to-be preps for her wedding. Sophie, determined to have her dad give her away hatches a plan and secretly invites three men from her mother Donna’s (Meryl Streep) past in hopes of meeting her real dad to walk her down the aisle on her big day.
The Second Mother
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5WzbcjBQtE
Get your reading glasses on for this international film that follows a live-in housekeeper named Val who takes care of a wealthy family and their son. Unspoken class barriers become a huge subject of the film and are heightened when Val’s own daughter comes to stay with Val and the family at their home. Now Val and her daughter must learn to understand one another after being apart for so long.