TIFF '25: Eleanor the Great

If 2024’s Thelma quietly marked the beginning of a June Squibb renaissance, 2025 has made it official. In mere months, the 96-year-old actor long beloved for scene-stealing supporting roles landed her first Broadway leading role and continued her run of unexpected genre turns, including Scarlett Johansson’s feature directorial debut Eleanor the Great. At TIFF, the film played like a coronation: a tender dramedy built around the singular gifts of a performer finally being treated as a lead.

The film opens in Florida, where Eleanor lives in routine with her best friend Bessie (Rita Zohar). They gossip, run errands, trade barbs: two women carving out a simple but sustaining intimacy. When Bessie abruptly dies, the ground drops out. Eleanor relocates to New York to live with her daughter and teenage grandson, a move that Johansson frames as neither magic nor burden but disruptive for everyone.

Seeking connection, Eleanor stumbles into a support group for Holocaust survivors and shares her late best friend’s survival story as her own. Her fib catches the attention of Nina (Erin Kellyman), a young journalism student determined to convince Eleanor to share her full story for a class project. The attention clouds Eleanor’s judgment, leading her into a complicated web of lies. However, despite her deception, the connection Eleanor forms with Nina, whose mother recently passed away, is honest. 

It’s worth spotlighting Kellyman’s performance. The moments I cried were because of her and how authentically she conveyed her own grief. I would love to see her in more things. And her father, played by the wonderful Chiwetel Ejiofor, gets his opportunity to shine as well with one emotional monologue. 

Writer Tory Kamen, a young Jewish screenwriter, was inspired by her own grandmother, who she assures us “...would never lie about something like this in a million fucking years.” However, Kamen’s grandmother did move from Florida to New York at 95 and struggled to find community outside of her immediate family. Kamen notes that the film was written with June Squibb in mind, but never with the assumption that she’d ever really star in it. “Because how would I have possibly contacted her? I had no credits,” says Kamen in an interview with Hey Alma. As a first-time director, Johansson’s decision to work with a young first-time screenwriter is refreshing.

And as a first-time director, Johansson casting a magnetic lead like Squibb feels strategic. Even if all of her directorial decisions don’t pan out, you still have a powerhouse like Squibb to carry the film. Admittedly, I was excited to see what Johansson could bring to the table. From Greta Gerwig to Jodie Foster, she had some great examples of actresses-turned-directors to look to. Going by direction alone, Johansson at least seems uninterested in announcing herself.

My primary critique was that I wanted more time with Eleanor and her friend Bessie, who passed away at the beginning of the film, and is the catalyst for Eleanor’s journey. Their chemistry feels authentic and funny and exactly what I’d hope for in my golden years. And while we get some flashbacks, allowing us more insight into their connection would have given me more understanding for Eleanor’s later deceptions. Without spoiling too much, the punishments do not match the crime here. What Eleanor does is particularly baffling, and she is offered many opportunities to remedy. And because we don’t get a lot of insight into her character before this transgression, it’s hard not to just see this as June Squibb herself lying. And well, I don’t believe she would do anything this heinous.

At times, I also struggled with the central thesis of the film. There’s how grief in late life is less about the terror of mortality and more about the shrinking of one’s world, and the lengths we’ll go to for connection. But also, the importance of telling each other our stories, and it’s never too late to reframe a relationship. Ultimately, there is an interesting story to tell here but the tone and delivery felt unfocused and forced. 

For Johansson, I think it’s a debut that will have more praise than should be attributed to her but I’m still interested to see what she does next, and for Squibb, Eleanor the Great isn’t a career capstone but a thesis on what we’ve been missing. Stories built around older women, not as gimmick but as human focus. They can be complicated and gently unruly, and Squibb proves she’s more than capable of leading them.

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