Mothers are precious. In fact, they're super-heroines...except when they haunt you, beat you or sell you into government office. (And even then, there's some love there.) From nurturing and strong to manipulative and murderous, moms do some crazy things in the interest of protecting (or betraying) their brood, and this list -- hotly contested in the RT office, by the way -- features five good eggs and as many rotten, with a few honorable mentions and iffy selections thrown in for good measure.

Not that this list could (or should) change your Sunday plans, but it might make you feel differently about your where your mom lands on the tolerability index. She may not be Mrs. Incredible, but your dear old mom can't be so bad she doesn't deserve a call on the one day a year that's dedicated especially to her, right?

Well, maybe you'll feel differently after you read about Bad Mom #1.

Good Moms
 

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Helen Parr (aka Elastigirl) Appears in: The Incredibles (2004) Portrayed by: Holly Hunter Moms perform superhuman feats every day. They dispense valuable advice. They're protective of their children, but know when to let go and allow them to forge their own paths. And they're always true to their own values. Thus, Elastigirl (voiced by Holly Hunter) in The Incredibles is the distillation of maternal excellence -- and she's great at crime-fighting to boot. (Alas, she probably shouldn't have left the poor babysitter alone with super-infant Jack Jack.)

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Mrs. Gump Appears in: Forrest Gump (1994) Portrayed by: Sally Field Six years may not seem like a long time, but for Sally Field, they were the difference between playing Tom Hanks' friend (in 1988's Punchline) and playing his rock-solid, long-suffering mother (in 1994's Forrest Gump). From the film's first act, in which she does some implied horizontal boppin' with the dean of a private school to ensure her son's admission, you know you only wished your mom loved you as much as Mrs. Gump loved Forrest. For Field -- who is, for the record, only 10 years Hanks' senior -- the role capped a string of positively received roles that brought her back from the squishy rom-com territory she'd wandered into during the mid-'80s (1987's Surrender, anyone?).

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Peg Boggs Appears in: Edward Scissorhands (1990) Portrayed by: Dianne Wiest How's this for maternal instinct? Tim Burton's 1990 suburban fable hinges on Peg Boggs, the housewife/struggling Avon lady played by Wiest, and her impulsive decision to enter the local Creepy Old Mansion on a Hill on a sales call. She doesn't sell any makeup, but she does wind up adopting the house's sole resident, a lab-created boy with scissors for hands, and taking him home to live with her family. It sounds positively daffy if you've never seen it -- or even if you have, actually -- but all of Burton's best movies need a sweet anchor to keep them from drifting completely off into Weirdsville, and Wiest -- whose early addition to the cast Burton credits with helping to get Edward Scissorhands made -- plays that role perfectly here.

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Sarah Connor Appears in: Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) Portrayed by: Linda Hamilton It's easy to forget now, but before Linda Hamilton's bicep-flexing turn as Sarah Connor in Terminator 2, women in science fiction films -- heck, in pretty much all films -- were relegated to stereotypical domestic support roles, or damsels in distress (Ripley excepted). Hamilton may not have been the first of the fairer sex to hit the gym and kick a little bad-guy tush in a major motion picture, but she was certainly one of the most convincing -- and the film's $500 million-plus gross helped convince filmmakers all over Hollywood that maybe the time had come to write female roles that involved more than screaming and baked goods.

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Elaine Miller Appears in: Almost Famous (2000) Portrayed by: Frances McDormand Early on in Almost Famous, Mrs. Miller's hard-nosed mothering is hard to read; however, when she lays down natural selection to a presumptuous Billy Crudup, you can't help but marvel. She doesn't just protect her 15-year-old son, a rising celebrity music journalist; she extends the stern rules to his possible bad influence. Even a rock star can become a "person of substance," if properly guided. Lioness mothers don't typically quote Goethe, which is only a tiny part of why this one is so memorable.

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To Be Determined

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Bren MacGuff Appears in: Juno (2007) Portrayed by: Allison Janey Okay, so her dialogue during the first third of the film drifts perilously close to the brink of the stilted, see-how-hip-we-are patois traditionally favored by screenwriters putting words in the mouth of "real" teens -- but Diablo Cody's script quickly redeems itself, giving Ellen Page the rare opportunity to play a pregnant teenager whose journey to delivery avoids all the stereotypical Afterschool Special plot devices that Hollywood can't seem to live without.  In fact, Juno's decision to give the baby up for adoption is one of the least dramatic decisions she makes during the course of the film; it takes her no time at all to decide that she is, in her own words, "ill-equipped" to give her progeny the life she wants for it. If that isn't motherly love, folks, what is?