Eleanor the Great

Watched at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.

June Squibb provides a wonderful, sweet and touching performance about a elderly woman embracing new connections and friendship, in a otherwise, cliched and predictable story and structure.

Throughout, being Scarlett Johansson's debut directing, Johansson's direction feels average as her direction on the atmosphere, writing and style feels unspecial, but maintain it's normality without any issues. With the good production and solid camera work, Johansson does understand how to pull the strings on emotions as there are some solid emotional conversations, chemistry and charm between the characters and performances. Which does offer some sweet moments from June.

As mentioned, June's performance was wonderful as she offers her character to bring out into the light and shine. While the other performances are good, the characters don't feel very fleshed out at times, which made them not particularly engaging or as interesting as Johansson would have liked. Alongside with the cliched narrative, many of the style and choices were pretty cheesy and predictable. If you have seen movies like this before, then you know what will come next without a doubt.

Despite the cliche and predictable style, the general experience was still decent because of June's charmful performance and dialogue energy was able to convey the emotions successfully. She was the absolute best part of this movie. Overall, it isn't something I would see again quickly but it's decently heartwarming.