Mother’s Day is Sunday, May 11, and the mom in your life probably wants more than just a greeting card from you.
If you’re looking to spend quality time with your mom for Mother’s Day, HBO and Max have a terrific selection of films to watch together.
The Watch With Us team has selected five great HBO and Max movies to watch on this year’s Mother’s Day.
Our choices range from a delightful musical to coming-of-age stories and even a recent box-office hit. No story is the same, but each film was picked because of its exploration of the bonds between a mother and her child.
Check out these five awesome Mother’s Day movies below.
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‘Mamma Mia!’ (2008)
Sophie Sheridan (Amanda Seyfried) has a pretty good relationship with her mother, Donna (Meryl Streep), in the ABBA-inspired musical Mamma Mia!, but Donna has been less than forthcoming about the identity of Sophie’s father. With her wedding to Sky Rymand (Dominic Cooper) right around the corner, Sophie invites the three men who are most likely to be her dad: Sam Carmichael (Pierce Brosnan), Harry Bright (Colin Firth) and Bill Anderson (Stellan Skarsgård).
Although Sophie thought she’d be able to sense which man was her father immediately, all three feel a kinship with her and want to give her away at the wedding. This also strains Donna and Sophie’s bond, as the former isn’t very happy to see her ex-lovers in one place. Luckily, there’s a lot of singing and dancing to get over those hard feelings. If there’s one Mother’s Day movie you watch today, it should be Mamma Mia!
Mamma Mia! is streaming on Max.
‘Crazy Rich Asians’ (2018)
There are some emotional bonding scenes between Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) and her mother, Kerry Chu (Tan Kheng Hua), in Crazy Rich Asians. But most of the drama unfolds between Rachel and her potential mother-in-law, Eleanor Sung-Young (Michelle Yeoh). Rachel came to a Young family wedding unaware that her boyfriend, Nick Young (Henry Golding), is unimaginably wealthy. But Eleanor and several other members of the family believe that Rachel is a gold digger who only wants Nick’s money.
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Things get pretty intense between Rachel and Eleanor, since the only thing they have in common is that they love Nick. For his part, Nick is steadfast in his love for Rachel, even when his family may tear them apart.
Crazy Rich Asians is streaming on Max.
‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ (2024)
For a comedy movie, there’s a lot of anger and resentment between Astrid Deetz (Jenna Ortega) and her mother, Lydia (Winona Ryder), in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. As far as Astrid knows, her mother is a pill-popping fraud who pretends to talk to ghosts for a living. She’s only right about the first part, since Lydia could see ghosts even before she met Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) in the first film back in 1988.
Lydia’s stepmother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara), somewhat giddily reminds her that she was the same way when she was a teenager. But the only way to bridge the emotional gulf between the Deetz women is by thrusting both of them into a wild afterlife adventure. That also gives Beetlejuice the opening to hold Lydia to her promise to get married when she was only a teenager.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is streaming on Max.
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’20th Century Women’ (2016)
20th Century Women is a period dramedy that takes place in 1979 with Annette Bening as Dorothea Fields, the mother of a teenage boy named William (Billy Crudup). Because Dorothea is afraid that she isn’t doing a good job raising William, she asks two of their tenants, Julie Hamlin (Elle Fanning) and Abbie Porter (Greta Gerwig), to help her guide him.
This arrangement is complicated by the fact that Julie is about the same age as William, and he’s desperately in love with her. Abbie isn’t much older than William either, but she can do things for him that his mother can’t. The interconnected relationships between everyone get a little messy, but they do come from a place of love.
20th Century Women is streaming on Max.
‘Janet Planet’ (2023)
Janet Planet explores the nontraditional bond between Janet (Paradise‘s Julianne Nicholson) and her 11-year-old daughter, Lacy (Zoe Ziegler). They aren’t just unusually close— Janet actually takes relationship advice from Lacy and acts upon it. If Lacy doesn’t like one of Janet’s suitors, then they don’t last very long.
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However, Lacy does have some growing up to do, even if she doesn’t realize that she’s doing it. The story doesn’t go in any ordinary direction, but it’s the quirky touches that make Janet Planet stand out as well as the strong performances by Nicholson and Ziegler.
Janet Planet is streaming on Max.
