ELEANOR THE GREAT

Yes — with eyes open about one brief moment. Scarlett Johansson's directorial outing is a lovely, uplifting film about grief, friendship, and family reconciliation, anchored by a superb performance from June Squibb and set against the sober backdrop of Holocaust remembrance.

The film earns real emotion honestly: it follows several generations of loss — a brother lost to the Holocaust, a husband, a friend, a mother — and lets that grief breathe without cheapening it. A late TV essay on mourning, delivered by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a genuine high point.

What holds it back from a clean bill is small but real: some foul language runs through the dialogue, the plot itself is built on a well-meaning lie that spirals out of control, and one scene has a college student tell Eleanor "I'm gay," met with an approving, politically correct response — a single exchange, not repeated. For teens and adults, this is a rich, worthwhile film. For younger children, wait.

Eleanor, 94, has just lost the friend she shared an apartment with for years — a Holocaust survivor named Bessie, who never stopped grieving the brother she lost to the camps. Eleanor moves back to New York to live with her estranged daughter and grandson, hoping for a fresh start.

At a local Jewish center, Eleanor is mistaken for a Holocaust survivor herself and gently pressured into sharing her story with a support group. Under pressure, she tells one of Bessie's stories as her own — and a young journalism student in the room is instantly drawn in. What happens next is where the movie earns its title.

Four stars, and it earns every one. Scarlett Johansson directs with a sure, warm hand, and June Squibb gives Eleanor both comic timing and real vulnerability — one of the year's best performances in either register. Rita Zohar, as Bessie, matches her scene for scene.

The film's best structural choice is its simplest: every time Eleanor retells one of Bessie's Holocaust memories, the movie cuts to Bessie herself telling it to Eleanor years earlier. It's a small device that does enormous emotional work, honoring the source of the story even as Eleanor claims it. Chiwetel Ejiofor's grief-stricken TV journalist adds another strong thread. This is a film that is funny, sad, and well-built all at once.

This is a film that takes grief seriously and treats it as something to be shared, not buried — the daughter's cold detachment, the journalist father's suppressed mourning, and Eleanor's own decades of loss all eventually give way to honesty and reconciliation. The Holocaust backdrop is handled with real reverence; remembering the dead, and telling their stories accurately, is treated as sacred work. That's the film's moral center, and it's a good one: Eleanor's lie, however sympathetic its origins, cannot stand, and the story insists she come clean.

The one place the film steps outside a biblical framework is brief but worth naming: a young character announces she's gay, and the film has Eleanor respond with unquestioning approval, offered as the model reaction. It's a single exchange, not a running theme, but families should know it's there.

Underneath the comedy sits a true ache — the fear that when someone we love dies, their story dies with them, unless someone else carries it forward. Scripture speaks directly into that longing: "The memory of the righteous is a blessing" (Proverbs 10:7). Eleanor's real sin isn't remembering Bessie — it's forgetting to tell the truth about whose memory it was.

This is a rare thing: a genuinely funny, genuinely moving film about grief and truth-telling, anchored by one of the year's best performances. It isn't spotless — some foul language and one politically correct exchange are worth knowing about going in — but for teens and adults, it's well worth your time. Worth the trip — teens and up.