Salute your pops with these exquisite portraits of fatherhood, movies that show how tough it is to do right
Dads love movies. It’s a scientific fact. Give any father a remote and as if by some patriarchal miracle, something involving a submarine or Clint Eastwood will materialize on the television. But this list of the best movies to watch on Father’s Day aren’t ‘dad movies’ per se. These are movies about dads, or at least fatherhood. Some may remind you of your own pater familias, others might make you think of the father you wish you had. In any case, all of them can be enjoyed with whatever father figure you do have, preferably with a cold one in hand - may we recommend a Coors Light?
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Sure, the runaway juvenile clownfish is the one with his name on the marquee of this Pixar classic, but it’s his anxious widowed father (voiced by Albert Brooks) doing the finding - with the help, of course, of a loopy regal blue tang named Dory (Ellen DeGeneres). It will hit home for any dads whose wife and dozens of children were murdered by a barracuda.
A rare remake that edges out the classic original. Steve Martin steps ably into the Spencer Tracy role of a dad blindsided by his daughter’s engagement and subsequent wedding, which he must, of course, begrudgingly pay for. The real MVP, though, is Martin’s forever BFF Martin Short as flamboyant wedding planner Franck Eggelhoffer, rocking one of those vague European accents he does that’s at once annoying and inexplicably hilarious.
We know we said we wouldn’t include any ‘dad movies’ on this list, but this supernatural-tinged sports melodrama exists right in the center of the Venn diagram of movies that are both about dads and decidedly for dads. It stars Kevin Costner - the dadliest actor to ever dad - as a dad with daddy issues of his own who lets a ghost talk him into building a baseball diamond in the middle of a cornfield that ends up attracting all the other dads in rural Iowa. Just be warned: if you watch with your own dad, he will definitely want to have a catch with you afterward.
In this hard-hitting biopic, Will Smith plays Richard Williams, the father of Venus and Serena, who walked straight up to the rich, white world of pro-tennis and smacked it right across the face - metaphorically speaking, of course. Smith won an Oscar for the role, which you may not remember; it was a pretty low-key affair.
Poor Clark Griswold just wants to create a lasting memory for his ungrateful family by driving them cross-country to an amusement park. But God appears to hate him, probably because he’s played by Chevy Chase. He’s presented as a deluded narcissist, but any father who’d voluntarily get in a car with two shitty kids in the backseat deserves a medal in our book.
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