It’s fitting in a perverse kind of way that Francis Ford Coppola’s TETRO opens this Father’s Day weekend. After all, it’s about the long-term destructive impact a horrendously vain father has on his adult children.

TETRO is just the latest in a long distinguished line of bad fathers in the movies. No doubt the most notorious dad on celluloid is STAR WARS’ Darth Vader. Imagine poor Luke Skywalker’s dilemma. Many sons harbor secret resentments against their more powerful fathers but how many dads so blatantly embrace the dark side as Pops Vader. What’s a young buck to do when his father is damn near all powerful AND represents all that is wrong in the galaxy? Luke may not want to sleep with his mother (it’s his unknown sister he’s apparently attracted to), but he’s clearly got Oedipal issues with his father, issues that can only be magnified by the fact that Dad’s voiced by James Earl Jones and he’s stuck with Mark Hamill. That Darth has also hidden his parentage from Luke for so many years and then springs it upon him in the middle of a life-or-death situation only compounds the psychological double whammy that is our nascent Jedi warrior’s lot in life. Darth Vader may qualify as a “cool” Dad, thanks to his stylish black outfit, but on all other counts, he’s THE WORST FATHER IN THE WORLD.

Coming in a close second in my book is Robert Duvall in THE GREAT SANTINI, the greatest disssection of fatherhood the movies have ever seen. Santini, a drill sergeant by trade and inclination, terrorizes his kids by preaching discipline above all. It’s tough love run amuck. His wife, played by Blythe Danner, tries,, to convince her children that their father treats them so harshly because deep down he loves them. The kids remain unconvinced and so do we. Duvall finds some humanity in the character but what he finds is pretty dark and twisted.

And speaking of dark and twisted, I nominate Daniel Day Lewis’ Daniel Plainview in THERE WILL BE BLOOD to complete my trio of terrible dads. A ferociously driven oil man, Plainview unofficially and surreptitiously adopts an orphan and uses him as a kind of kindly “front” for his rather cut throat business practices. When an oil derrick accident permanently deafens his son (H.W.), Plainview is personally shattered but is unable to show his love. Instead, without any warning, he sends him across the country to a deaf school and cuts off all communication with him for years. This is all preliminary to a much later confrontation when father and son square off as adults. When H.W. tells him he wants to strike out on his own as a businessman, Plainview spews forth such hatred it amounts to a veritable verbal slaughter. It’s a Daddy Dearest moment that would put Joan Crawford to shame.

But Hollywood is not all about bad dads. In fact, the movies are rife with great fathers, or at least men who learn how to be great fathers. Chief among them is Dustin Hoffman in KRAMER VS KRAMER. Ted Kramer is your typical workaholic father until his wife (Meryl Streep) suddenly walks out on him and their son. He then must completely re-orient his life to take care of his child. Starting from scratch, Kramer learns what it means to raise a son. Whether he’s making “crunchy” French toast because he can’t keep the eggshells out of the egg mix or teaching his boy how to ride a bike, Ted Kramer learns the joys and heartbreaks of fatherhood. In the process, he grows up as much as his kid does.

A more recent cinematic example of the ideal father shows up rather unexpectedly in JUNO. J.K. Simmons is spot on as Mac MacGuff, the father of the precocious Juno. When his high school daughter winds up pregnant, MacGuff doesn’t react like the stereotypical (and overly simplified) outraged dad. Instead, he reacts like the complex human that he is. You can tell there’s a part of him that wants to knock her upside the head. At the same time his heart is breaking for her. He never lets her off the hook for her actions but he also lets her know he loves her to the moon and back. He continues to make little cracks about her to her face but when she needs him, he really delivers. For all of Juno’s hipster cred, the scene at the kitchen table when he talks to Juno about the possibility of long-term commitments is as square as anything you might have heard on FATHER KNOWS BEST. And it’s refreshing as hell to hear. Whatever the future may hold for Juno, and she’s admittedly off to a rocky start, with a dad like hers, you just know she’s going to turn out just fine.

And finally, no discussion of fathers in the movies would be complete without an acknowledgement of a film that has brought more men to tears than any other: FIELD OF DREAMS. When Kevin Costner asks his long-dead father if he’d like to play catch, he expresses what a lot of dads and sons see as the ultimate form of bonding. There’s something archetypal about playing catch with your dad and FIELD OF DREAMS expertly taps into that, a universal longing to belong. Kids want to know they have a place in the world, and nobody represents the world’s acceptance better than dads.