{"id":13048,"date":"2025-09-27T12:05:58","date_gmt":"2025-09-27T16:05:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=13048"},"modified":"2025-11-11T11:48:53","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T16:48:53","slug":"eleanor-the-great","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2025\/09\/27\/eleanor-the-great\/","title":{"rendered":"Eleanor the Great"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Eleanor the Great<\/strong> (2025)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Sony Pictures Classics\/Comedy-Drama\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 98 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG-13 (thematic elements, some language and suggestive references)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Scarlett Johansson\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Tory Kamen\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Dustin O\u2019Halloran\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Helene Louvart\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: September 26, 2025 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: June Squibb, Erin Kellyman, Jessica Hecht, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rita Zohar, Will Price, Lauren Klein, Stephen Singer, Beth Goodrich, Elaine Bromka, Ray Anthony Thomas, Cole Tristan Murphy, Cole Ragsdale, Stephen Bradbury, TJ Lee, Barbara Andres, Sami Steigmann, Mila Falkof.<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: ***<\/p>\n

\u00a0I don\u2019t know about great. Good perhaps, but not great.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The comedy-drama Eleanor the Great<\/strong> marks the directorial debut of Scarlett Johansson, an actress I\u2019ve been following since her first big role in the 1996 indie Manny & Lo. Like Jodie Foster before her, she always had this sense of maturity about her. It allowed her to make the jump into adult roles more easily than the average child actress. I figured it was only a matter of time before she tried her luck on the other side of the camera. The result, it\u2019s a good albeit imperfect first effort.<\/p>\n

\u00a0June Squibb, a remarkable actress in her own right, plays the title role, a feisty nonagenarian with a tongue as sharp as her mind. After losing her longtime best friend and roommate Bessie (Israeli actress Zohar), she moves back to New York to live with her daughter Lisa (Hecht, The Sinner) and grandson Max (Price, Goosebumps). They don\u2019t have a lot of time for her, so Lisa signs her up for a class at the local community center as a way of keeping her out of trouble while she\u2019s at work. It doesn\u2019t quite work out that way.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Eleanor finds herself at a support group meeting for Holocaust survivors. She wasn\u2019t anywhere near the Holocaust. She doesn\u2019t belong at this meeting. She gets up to leave, but decides instead to stick around and pose as a survivor. She passes off the late Bessie\u2019s experiences in the Holocaust as her own. It snowballs from there.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Eleanor\u2019s story catches the attention of Nina (Kellyman, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier), a college student doing a project for her journalism class. She too is dealing with grief. She recently lost her mother and is having hard time connecting with her distant father, prominent new anchorman Roger (Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave). Nina wants Eleanor to be the focus of her project. The older woman initially declines her proposal, but changes her mind. The two women form a close bond which would be nice if it wasn\u2019t built on a lie.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Eleanor the Great<\/strong> works best when it focuses on Eleanor and Nina. They\u2019re both lonely, emotionally isolated by loved ones who don\u2019t understand their grief. Eleanor keeps her new life secret from her family; they have no idea what she does all day while they\u2019re out living their daily lives. Nina tries to talk to her dad, but he consistently shuts down, only showing interest when it comes to her journalism class and later, the whole Eleanor thing. In each other, they find the human connection that\u2019s absent from their lives. It\u2019s a nice story.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Unfortunately, the film falters when it comes to Eleanor\u2019s deception. It doesn\u2019t deal with it like it should. Specifically, it doesn\u2019t explore the ethics of passing oneself off as a surviving victim of a horrific event that killed millions. Eleanor never really expresses any guilt until [NOT A SPOLIER!]<\/strong> her deception is uncovered. Even then, the film attempts to excuse her actions as a result of grief. It\u2019s too pat an explanation. I\u2019m not saying Johansson should have gone all heavy with her film; I\u2019m just saying she should have explored the murky waters of the situation with more depth.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Tonally, Eleanor the Great<\/strong> is somewhat uneven. It\u2019s hard to reconcile Eleanor the feisty old lady with Eleanor the liar. Early on, she gets off some good lines like when she dresses down a lazy teen supermarket employee. She doesn\u2019t let family members off any easier. She has a way of getting under her daughter\u2019s skin. You want to love this woman. Then she goes and does something fairly reprehensible. Suddenly, she\u2019s not so funny or sympathetic.<\/p>\n

\u00a0In the role, Squibb does amazing work. She\u2019s a great actress. Look at her work in Nebraska (2013) or last year\u2019s Thelma. It\u2019s really something when you realize she didn\u2019t start acting until she was in her 60s (her film debut was the 1990 Woody Allen film Alice). She does wonders with the tricky character that is Eleanor. Kellyman is equally great as Nina, a young woman navigating the waters of grief alone until she finds an unlikely kindred spirit. Ejiofor has some good scenes as the emotionally unavailable parent who can\u2019t see past his own silent suffering.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Eleanor the Great<\/strong> is a pretty good movie. I do believe Johansson has a future as a filmmaker with this promising first effort. She has a few rough edges to smooth out, but she\u2019ll get better with more experience. I\u2019m anxious to see what she does next.\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eleanor the Great (2025)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Sony Pictures Classics\/Comedy-Drama\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 98 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated PG-13 (thematic elements, some language and suggestive references)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Scarlett Johansson\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Tory Kamen\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Dustin O\u2019Halloran\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Helene Louvart\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: September 26, 2025 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: June Squibb, Erin Kellyman, Jessica Hecht, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rita Zohar, Will Price, Lauren Klein, Stephen Singer, Beth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13125,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comedies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Eleanor-the-Great-POSTER.jpg?fit=620%2C918&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13048","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13048"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13127,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13048\/revisions\/13127"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}