The Evolution of Motherhood and Parenting in Modern Cinema

The first of the movies about motherhood I remember watching with any seriousness was Stepmom, which I saw on a VHS my own mother had taped off the television around 1999, and which I rewatched a few months ago because my nine-year-old wanted to know what his grandmother used to cry at. He sat through it patiently, the way a child sits through an artefact, and at the end he said, with the diplomatic restraint of a small person who has decided to be kind to an adult, "It's a bit slow, isn't it." It is, in fact, a bit slow. It is also a film that the women in my family handed down to each other across a generation, and at some point in the past ten years the conversation about movies about motherhood has stopped being slow, and has started running at a different speed entirely.

Cinema has caught up to something the kitchen table already knew: that motherhood is more interesting, and more difficult, and more various than the films of my own childhood were willing to say out loud. The same is now true of fatherhood, though more haltingly. What follows is one parent's working list of the films that have changed how I watch — and, more often than I expected, how I sit with my own children afterwards.

A short word on matrescence

Before the films, the frame. There is a word for what happens to a person when they become a mother, and the word is not new — the anthropologist Dana Raphael coined matrescence in 1975 to describe the psychological metamorphosis of becoming a mother (The Conversation). For about fifty years it sat where most useful clinical terms sit: in the literature, unread by the people it describes. In the last two years it has stepped, abruptly, into ordinary conversation. Lucy Jones's book Matrescence has been optioned by Barry Crerar and Tara Films for a documentary adaptation (Screen Scotland), and the filmmakers I'll mention below are working — without always using the term — inside its weather. It is the connective tissue under most of what's worth watching about modern motherhood, and it explains why the films that used to be made about mothers no longer suffice.

I should say, before I go further, that there is no equivalent vocabulary for the equivalent transition in fathers. I think there should be. The absence is part of what these films are quietly arguing about.

Mother and daughter

The mother-and-daughter film is the densest part of the catalogue and, not coincidentally, the part where the best 2010s and 2020s work has been done. Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017) is the one I find myself thinking about most often, because Gerwig — and Laurie Metcalf, who plays the mother — refused to settle the argument between the two of them. The film ends with the daughter trying to phone her mother from across the country, and it does not give us the catharsis we expect, because Gerwig knows that the catharsis is what happens in the daughter, alone, fifteen years later. My wife and I watched it the week we were trying to work out how to talk to her own mother about something hard, and neither of us said anything for a while after the credits.

The Joy Luck Club (Wayne Wang, 1993) does for Chinese-American mothers and daughters what nothing else has done since: it builds the entire architecture of the film around the way one generation can hand a wound forward without meaning to. It is honest about migration, about silence, about the particular shape of love that arrives in another language than the one your child speaks. My Lebanese-Australian neighbour told me, when I asked, that it was the first film she'd seen where a mother was allowed to be ashamed and right at the same time.

The rest of the shortlist, briefly: Terms of Endearment (1983) for the long shape of mother-daughter time, Little Women (Gerwig, 2019) for the canon recast with the mother (Marmee, played by Laura Dern) properly written, Janet Planet (Annie Baker, 2024) for the small, attentive register that arthouse mother-daughter cinema does best, The Farewell (Lulu Wang, 2019) for the way grief travels across diasporas, and Stepmom if your own mother taped it off the television in the late nineties and you owe her a viewing.

Netflix curates a rotating mother-daughter selection around Mother's Day each year, and a sensible chunk of the above tends to be on it.

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Mothers alone, mothers carrying it

Films about single mothers have done some of the most honest work in modern cinema, because they cannot afford to be sentimental — the genre's basic premise is that there is no one to hand the child to. A Thousand and One (A.V. Rockwell, 2023), which won the Sundance Grand Jury prize that year, is the one I'd recommend first. It follows a Black woman in 1990s New York raising a son whose biological mother she is not, and it makes the case — without ever stating it — that motherhood is a labour and a choice repeated daily, not a status conferred once.

Tully (Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman, 2018) is the film about the third child that everyone who has had a third child recognises with an exhausted nod. It does something almost no other mainstream film has done: it sits inside the inside of a postpartum experience without softening it for the audience. Stella Dallas (1937) is on this list because it is the foundational text of the genre and because Barbara Stanwyck's final scene, watching her daughter's wedding through a window from outside, still does the thing it set out to do. Miss Juneteenth (Channing Godfrey Peoples, 2020) and Erin Brockovich (2000) round it out.

I should add that "single mother" has done a lot of work in this list as a category, and the category is a kind of compression. Most of these films are about women being the entire structure of a child's life while doing paid work that does not respect them. The word "single" is incidental. The work isn't.

The mothers aren't okay (2024–2025)

The single biggest thing that has happened in motherhood cinema in the past two years is that the films have stopped pretending. Marie Claire frames the 2025 awards season as "an overwhelming sense on screen that the moms are not okay" (Marie Claire), and the films back up the framing.

Hamnet (Chloé Zhao, 2025), adapted from Maggie O'Farrell's novel, gives us Jessie Buckley as Agnes Shakespeare losing a child. Marie Claire calls Buckley's performance "one of the most visceral portrayals of motherhood ever seen on film" (Marie Claire). Die My Love (Lynne Ramsay, 2025) puts Jennifer Lawrence inside a postpartum psychosis that the film refuses to manage on the audience's behalf. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You (Mary Bronstein, 2025) follows Rose Byrne as a mother of a chronically ill child whose life has been narrowed to a corridor. The Testament of Ann Lee (2025) gives Amanda Seyfried an eighteenth-century Shaker who has lost four children. Nightbitch (2024) — which arrived just before the wave — uses magic realism to dramatize the identity loss of early motherhood as literal transformation.

Mary Bronstein, the director of If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, told Marie Claire: "It's a very dangerous thing that we do to mothers where you're not allowed to say these things." (Marie Claire). The wave is, more or less, a refusal of the not-allowed.

There is one observation about the reception of these films that I think matters. Wendy Ide, writing in Screen Daily, argues that dark-motherhood films struggle with awards voters because the (largely male) reviewers tend to "diagnose" the protagonists rather than recognise the universality of the experience (Screen Daily). I have read enough reviews of these films to know what she means, and I have done the diagnosing myself in years past. It is the easier move. It is also, I think, the move that the next generation of male critics will be the ones to stop making.

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Fathers in the frame

The article you are reading promised something its predecessor barely delivered: a real look at fathers. Variety's 2025 awards coverage explicitly bundles fathers and mothers together as "films exploring parenthood", and cites Train Dreams, No Other Choice, All That's Left of You, Hamnet, and One Battle After Another in a single breath (Variety). The pairing is recent enough that the search engines are still catching up — Google's trend for "best movies about parenthood" rose 150 percent year-over-year, from a small base — and it tells you something about where critical conversation is moving.

The films themselves are a mixed register. The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) is the one most parents I know first reach for, because Will Smith's Chris Gardner is doing the long unglamorous work of solo fatherhood under economic pressure, and the film respects how slow that work is. Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022) is the film I cannot watch without putting the kids to bed first. Wells builds it out of holiday camcorder footage, and the question the daughter is asking — was my father okay, and did I see it — is the question I am most afraid my own children will ask about me one day. Lion (2016) is the long story of an adoptive Australian father and a son trying to find the mother he lost. Manchester by the Sea (2016) sits with a father who cannot, after what he has done, parent the way he was raised to. One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025) puts a father played by Leonardo DiCaprio in the middle of a political and parental disintegration that the film treats as one problem, not two.

I will say plainly what the films are doing in aggregate. They are admitting that the father is not the absent supporting character in the motherhood story. The father is a parent with his own work to do, and the screen has finally started showing him at it.

Unconventional families

The films my own father would not have known what to do with. The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko, 2010) gave Hollywood, finally, a same-sex parent household drawn with adult specificity and the same emotional grain we extend to heterosexual ones. 20th Century Women (Mike Mills, 2016) puts a single mother (Annette Bening) at the centre of a chosen-family household and treats every adult in the house as a parent, in different registers. Tully doubles as an unconventional-family film because the night nanny is, in the film's logic, a kind of co-parent. Nonnas (2025) takes the grandmother-as-mother thread that is the everyday reality in many of the homes my own grandparents kept in Cork and treats it as a serious subject rather than a punchline. Stepmom — yes, again — was an early entry in this lane, when stepmothers were still mostly the antagonists of cinema.

Mothers and sons

The under-served corner of the catalogue. Boyhood (Richard Linklater, 2014) is the longest mother-and-son film ever made, in literal time on screen and in the time of its production, and Patricia Arquette's performance won the Oscar that the film's quiet ambition deserved. Manchester by the Sea contains the most painful mother-and-son scene in modern cinema, the one in the police station with Michelle Williams; you will know which one I mean if you have seen it. Mommie Dearest (1981) is the iconic monster-mother text and worth knowing as the thing the modern films are reacting against. Lion I have already mentioned for the father, but it is just as much a film about a mother lost and a mother found.

I notice that the mother-and-son catalogue is shorter than the mother-and-daughter one, and I notice that I had to think harder to assemble it. I do not know what to do with that observation yet. I am leaving it here.

Outside the Anglo frame

The films that most of the English-language listicles do not get to. Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018) is the household drama I would put first on any modern motherhood list, full stop — the way it widens "motherhood" to include the indigenous Mixtec domestic worker raising someone else's children alongside her own grief is something Hollywood has not yet matched. Parallel Mothers (Pedro Almodóvar, 2021) gives us two Spanish women whose maternity-ward swaps reverberate down through historical memory. Past Lives (Celine Song, 2023) is a Korean-American film about what motherhood does to the friendships that preceded it. Minari (Lee Isaac Chung, 2020) is a Korean-American family drama where the grandmother (Yuh-Jung Youn, Oscar-winning) is the mother the film is most interested in. Daughter's Daughter (Xi Huang, 2024) is a Taiwanese mother-and-daughter film that asks what we owe the children we did not choose to have.

A note that probably belongs in this section. The Anglosphere talks about motherhood in cinema as if it invented the conversation. It did not. The conversation has been happening in Mexico City, Madrid, Seoul, Taipei, Lagos, and Tehran for as long as cinema has existed, and the more films from those places I watch, the smaller and stranger the conversation in Melbourne and London starts to look.

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A small note to close

What strikes me, after a year of paying attention, is that the films are now doing what the kitchen table has always done. They are admitting that the work is hard and that the workers are tired and that the children are watching. They are letting mothers say things they were not allowed to say, and they are starting — slowly, awkwardly, with more silences than sentences — to let fathers do the same.

I will know we have got somewhere when my nine-year-old is the one who picks the film, and the film he picks is about a parent who looks like me, and the parent in the film is allowed to be uncertain in front of his children, and to say so out loud. We are not there yet. The films of the last two years are pointing the way. I am in the room, watching them.