In the movies, as in real life, there are fabulous moms and horrible moms. Here's our take on the five best and the five worst. And happy Mother's Day either way.

Moms you'd love to have

One Mother's Day a year is not nearly enough to thank Mom for her innumerable sacrifices. She has fed you and clothed you. She has cleaned you, nursed you and trained you to lead the resistance against a robot uprising.

Well, that's what Mom does in the movies, anyway. As you pay tribute to the joys and pains of motherhood, celebrate these 10 wonderful mothers on the big screen.

5. 'Terminator 2: Judgment Day' (1991)

Give James Cameron at least this much credit: The man directed two essentially flawless action films featuring strong mother figures. And although Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley from "Aliens" could just as easily have made this list, I'll give the edge to Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor, who not only becomes pregnant with her son, John, after sleeping with a man sent from the future, but raises him to be a warrior for his future role as the leader of the human resistance against a robot uprising.

How to watch: Stream on HBO Max.

4. 'Terms of Endearment' (1983)

Sometimes the strongest mother-daughter relationships also are the most contentious, and few movies nail that dynamic, the simultaneous clashing and melding of two bright minds and strong wills, as this classic '80s James L. Brooks melodrama does. Shirley MacLaine's widowed Aurora Greenway is as singular a woman as her only daughter, Emma (Debra Winger), and she supports and disapproves in equal measure as her girl wends her way through a messy life of marriage, child-rearing, infidelity and separation. But it's when Emma receives a cancer diagnosis that MacLaine really earns that best-actress Oscar, striking everything in her path with all the ferocity of a grizzly bear protecting her cub.

How to watch: Stream on Showtime.

3. 'Bambi' (1942)

Disney's fifth animated feature film, about a fawn coming of age with a cohort of woodland creatures, remains one of the studio's most gorgeous, a restrained and painterly celebration of the beauty, and fragility, of nature. Of course, nature can also be cruel, and so this is also one of Disney's most traumatizing films, teaching a generation of impressionable young viewers that even mothers die. "Man was in the forest," Bambi's mother warns, casting us, the viewers, as the most dangerous villains of all.

How to watch: Stream on Disney+.

2. 'Rosemary's Baby' (1968)

There are many terrors that come with the joy of motherhood. That you might not be a good parent. That you'll lose your job. That you'll get sick. That you might be secretly incubating the spawn of Beelzebub. OK, maybe not that last one, or at least not until you've seen Roman Polanski's intense, psychological-horror film about a pregnant woman who realizes that fear — but loves her baby no less. The film is a master class of claustrophobic paranoia as willowy Mia Farrow, with her big eyes and pixie-cut hair, begins to suspect that something is amiss in her New York City apartment. Never has maternal instinct been a more terrifying force than in this film's final moments.

How to watch: Stream on Paramount+.

1. 'Stella Dallas' (1937)

Olive Higgins Prouty's novel has been adapted for film three times (most recently as 1990s "Stella," starring Bette Midler). But it was best realized as a three-hanky melodrama starring Barbara Stanwyck as a coarse, social-ladder-climbing woman who marries far above her station. The marriage lasts long enough to produce a daughter, Laurel. As Laurel comes of age in a deeply class-conscious America, Stella's breeding and social status become a hindrance to her happiness, a situation that resonated deeply with Depression-era audiences. There are few portraits of a mother's love as devastating as this film's final moments, as the wedding music swells and Stella, out in the rain with tears in her eyes, looks in on her daughter's happiness from the outside.

How to watch: Rent on Prime Video.

Moms you'd hate to have

5. 'Mommie Dearest' (1981)

Discounting for a second that this all ostensibly is based on a true story, the dramatization of Christina Crawford's tell-all memoir about life with her Oscar-winning adoptive mom, Joan, is cult-comedy gold. Faye Dunaway turns the crazy up to 11, playing Mommie Crawford with a snarling relish rarely seen outside a horror movie. It has all the weight of tabloid trash, but it should still make you want to give your mother a hug, now matter how much she abhors wire hangers.

How to watch: Rent on Prime Video, iTunes.

4. 'Animal Kingdom' (2010)

David Michod's Australian crime drama (and debut film) was one of the best movies to come out that year (and certainly represents the best use of the Air Supply song "All Out of Love" to inspire goose bumps of dread). A teenager named J loses his mother to a heroin overdose and moves in with his estranged grandmother, Smurf, the blood-chilling matriarch (played by Oscar-nominated Jacki Weaver) of a Melbourne crime family whose grown sons dote on her with a fealty that borders on incestuousness. They're like trailer-park Coreleones.

How to watch: Rent on Prime Video, iTunes.

3. 'Cinderella' (1950)

The evil stepmother from "Cinderella" has been giving a bad name to stepmothers everywhere at least since Charles Perrault set quill to paper in the 17th century. It does take a special kind of evil to force your dead husband's orphaned daughter to do all your housework and mercilessly mock her efforts to go to the Prince Charming's ball. Just a little kindness, and Cinderella would have set her and her daughters up for life in Charming's castle. But you can't expect much from a woman who would name her cat Lucifer.

How to watch: Stream on Disney+.

2. 'Carrie' (1976)

Brian De Palma does right by Stephen King's tale of adolescent alienation and telekinesis, casting a fragile-looking Sissy Spacek as the abused high schooler who exacts prom-night revenge on her tormenters in a manner outsiders everywhere have wished they could mimic for nearly 40 years. But she's tormented by far more than thrown sanitary napkins and buckets of pig blood; her fundamentalist mother (Piper Laurie) denounces her daughter's "dirty pillows" and will not suffer the witch to live.

How to watch: Stream on Prime Video.

1. 'The Manchurian Candidate' (1962)

Long before she was Jessica Fletcher ("Murder, She Wrote"), Miss Price ("Bedknobs and Broomsticks") and that kindly singing teapot Mrs. Potts ("Beauty and the Beast"), sweet, lovable Angela Lansbury was a blood-chilling communist agent in this classic Cold War thriller. She manipulates her politician husband, a McCarthy-esque pawn, with her own son brainwashed into an assassin, in a plan to "sweep us up into the White House with powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy." Lansbury's Oscar-nominated performance dominates the movie and makes her (Mrs. Potts!) one of history's most frightening film moms.

How to watch: Rent on Prime Video, iTunes.

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Reach the reporter at bvandenburgh@gannett.com or 602-444-8371. Twitter.com/BabsVan.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: These are the best and worst movie moms and where to watch them