Cyrus and 5 Other Disturbing Mother-Son Teams

Mumblecore mavens the Duplass Brothers got raves for their first relatively mainstream effort, this summer's Cyrus (out on DVD this week from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment). But while this comedy -- starring Jonah Hill as an overgrown mama's boy who tries to sabotage mom Marisa Tomei's burgeoning relationship with schlubby John C. Reilly -- goes to some wonderfully squirmy places, it fits into a longstanding tradition of moms and sons who are too close for comfort. Ahead, five other worrisome mother-son pairings.

Psycho: Really, you could make this whole list with nothing but Hitchcock movies -- Claude Rains' and Leopoldine Konstantin's queasy closeness in Notorious springs to mind -- but none of the films by the Master of Suspense hinge so heavily on the idea that, as Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) unforgettably puts it, "a boy's best friend is his mother."

Suddenly, Last Summer: We never get to see the thoroughly decadent Sebastian Venable at all in this wonderfully purple adaptation (written by Gore Vidal) of the Tennessee Williams freakshow. But even though he's dead, his memory lingers on, powerfully, with his obsessed mother Violet (Katharine Hepburn), who now wants to sanctify his reputation by having a psychiatrist "take care" of his cousin Catherine (Elizabeth Taylor) before she reveals the true circumstances surrounding his death.

Back to the Future: OK, yes, young Lorraine Baines (Lea Thompson) doesn't realize that the boy she knows as "Calvin" (Michael J. Fox) is actually her own teenage son from 30 years or so in the future when she puts the make on him, but that fact doesn't make those scenes any less awkward (or Oedipal) for the audience.

White Heat: Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) may be the terror of the underworld, but he's utterly dependent on his mother (Margaret Wycherly), who nurses him through his blinding headaches and is the only person in whom the gangster can confide. Ma Jarrett is the kind of matriarch to whom only Shakespeare or Freud could do complete justice.

Spanking the Monkey: Years before David O. Russell's breakout feature, Louis Malle had already touched on the subject of mother-son incest in his acclaimed Murmur of the Heart, but since American audiences think the French engage in that sort of thing all the time anyway, it was seeing a US movie flout such a taboo that garnered lots of buzz. Scandal aside, this is a darkly funny portrait of a messed-up family that features extraordinary performances by Jeremy Davies (in his first major role) and Alberta Watson (who works steadily but deserved a much bigger career boost from this movie).