Despite the prominence of family relationships in cinema, fatherhood remains a surprisingly underexplored area of academic film study.

There are a few exceptions. Charting the emergence of the paternal protector as a key masculine archetype is Katie Barnett’s Fathers on Film: Paternity and Masculinity in 1990s Hollywood. And crucially, Gershon Reiter’s Fathers and Sons in Cinema considers the lasting impact of absent fathers on cinematic characters.

This Father’s Day will be my first without my dad who passed away earlier this year. We bonded over many films together, which I now find myself rewatching in order to feel that closeness once more. Here’s a list of films featuring onscreen fathers that meant something to us and will hopefully strike a chord with you too.

When we first watched De Niro’s directorial debut in the late 1990s on VHS video, I remember it having a greater impact on my dad than me – my first impression was a kind of Goodfellas lite.

As a father myself, I now recognise the complexity of his interest in A Bronx Tale, a film about a law-abiding patriarch (De Niro) trying to retain influence over his nine-year-old son (Lillo Brancato) as he is beguiled by local mobster and surrogate father figure Sonny (Chazz Palminteri).

There was one particular scene my dad, a working man, liked: “It don’t take much strength to pull a trigger, but try and get up every morning day after day and work for a living … then we’ll see who’s........

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