Terms of Endearment

Mother’s Day Special: Get 2 adult tickets for the price of 1!

Before he created The Simpsons, James L Brooks won three Academy Awards for producing, directing, and writing Terms of Endearment (1983), based on a novel by Larry McMurtry. (Before that, he created The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda). Spanning three decades in the lives of Aurora Greenway (Shirley MacLaine) and her daughter Emma (Debra Winger), the film chronicles the ups and downs of their romantic liaisons (Emma makes the mistake of marrying someone called Flap; Aurora dates an astronaut named Garrett Breedlove) as well as their own love-hate dynamic. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll give your mom an extra hug.

The most remarkable achievement of Terms of Endearment, which is filled with great achievements, is its ability to find the balance between the funny and the sad, between moments of deep truth and other moments of high ridiculousness.

Roger Ebert

In this pungent and beautifully observed film, the most completely satisfying of this and many another year, life is fascinating, tender, hilarious, catastrophic, healing, warm and, in the main, a faintly absurd predicament in which to find oneself.

Sheila Benson, LA Times

A funny, touching, beautifully acted film that covers more territory than it can easily manage.

Janet Maslin, New York Times