About five years ago, a film called Motherhood was released. It featured Uma Thurman playing an adorably frazzled mother of two who spent her days dashing breathlessly around New York’s West Village, jostling for bargain cashmere at sample sales and trying to organise her daughter’s birthday party. She has a brief existential crisis and drives erratically around Manhattan listening to self-pitying oestrogen rock. But otherwise it’s all pretty sunny in Uma-world. It was precision-tooled to generate a chuckle of recognition in mummies, yummy and otherwise, the world over. Except it didn’t.

Motherhood bombed. Just one person bought a ticket on its UK opening day. It took only £88 during its entire week-long run. It was described as being ‘a feature-length advertisement for abortion’. The whole ‘Oh gosh, I’m so tired I combed my hair with hemorrhoid ointment by accident’ schtick doesn’t really work when you are Uma Thurman and you clearly haven’t missed a pilates class for the last twenty-five years. Even when you were giving birth. British mothers responded by dumping the movie and all its gushing, neurotic platitudes and birthday cake angst into the nappy bin where it belonged.

Now let’s talk about another film about motherhood. Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, released last year, was an Australian horror movie about a young widowed mother and her relationship with her challenging, monster-obsessed son. It’s about the fears and uncertainties of being a mum. That bone-deep exhaustion that makes you question whether you are fully in control of yourself, your life, anything. The niggling doubt that there might be something wrong with your kid, or you, or both. The terror, not only of your child getting hurt, but of the possibility that you might be the one to hurt it.

Certainly there is a demonic creature in the film which is threatening to ensnare the child in some hellish netherworld. But the brilliance of Kent’s approach is that we’re never entirely certain how much of Mr Babadook is real and how much is the product of the broken mind of a single mother wrenched apart by grief and the endless debilitating struggle of being a parent. This is as chillingly perceptive a comment on motherhood as Rosemary’s Baby was about the terrors of pregnancy.

So why is it that the darker, messier side of motherhood is so much richer in terms of cinema than the shiny, happy fulfilling elements? Why did audiences avoid Sarah Jessica Parker’s ‘have it all’ mumspirational comedy I Don’t Know How She Does It (answer: she hires someone else to do most of it) like a toxic spill, and yet embrace Patricia Arquette’s flawed but refreshingly human mum-of-two in Boyhood?

Cast your mind back to your first pregnancy. Do you remember the stories of effortless labour and trouble-free lactation? No, you remember the tales of thirty-six hours of agony; of faecal matter in the birth pool; of botched pain relief. You remember the woman who described her vagina as ‘looking like a combine harvester had driven through it’. We exorcise our fears though the horror stories we hear of other people’s experiences.

We all know that motherhood is full of joyous rewards and is a treasury of sparkly little memories. But we don’t need a movie to tell us that. That’s why they invented Hallmark greetings cards. It’s rather more interesting to acknowledge that we often get things wrong; and parenting is an imperfect science and that it’s frequently scary as hell. Films can provide a safe environment to explore our anxieties. And God, knows, there are enough of them tied up in the job of being a Mum.

So here are six of my favourite films about motherhood. You can be sure that there will be no hilarious jokes about infant vomit on cardigans.

Because: It’s a wrenching film about a mother and her seven children who live on a farm in Southern France. And about the man who makes their lives a misery.

Caveat: It’s devastatingly sad.

Because: It’s a chilling glimpse into the madness that lurks deep inside every mum. Plus it’s utterly terrifying.

Caveat: I’m serious. It’s really frightening.

Because: It’s an unexpectedly candid portrait of a rocky relationship between a mother and her daughter.

Caveat: It’s a cartoon, but a smart one.

Because: It could just as easily be called Motherhood. Patricia Arquette’s character makes the kind of catastrophic life choices that, well, everyone does once in a while. But she pulls herself up, and grabs a kid under each arm and gets on with it.

Caveat: Brilliant, but long.

Because: James Cameron’s sequel pits mother (Ripley takes on the role to orphaned alien survivor Newt) against mother (the alien queen protects her eggs). The result is explosive.

Caveat: Yes, I know. It’s a sci fi action movie.

Because: There are three endearingly flawed mother figures here: pregnant teen Juno, the childless woman who wants to adopt the baby and Juno’s feisty stepmother Bren, played by Allison Janney. And, by dint of her rant at a bitchy ultrasound technician, Bren wins the mum contest hands down.

Caveat: It’s quirky. But try not to hold that against the movie.