Scarlett Johansson sits in the director’s chair for the first time with Eleanor The Great, a saccharine melodrama whose heart is in the right place but whose brain is nowhere to be found. It’s a film that hinges on the sort of contrivance that could play fine in a 20th century romantic comedy but makes absolutely no sense in 2025 here on planet Earth. Working from an overwrought script by Tory Kamen, Johansson doesn’t do herself any favors by choosing a story with weighty themes and heavy subject material for her first time out as a storyteller. It’s commendable that she’s able to establish and mostly maintain a palatable tone with which to tell this tale and she manages to land a few hard-earned poignant moments along the way. The opening 5 minutes and closing 5 minutes are especially powerful but there’s too much in between that doesn’t pass the sniff test.

June Squibb is terrific as the titular nonagenarian, living the dream on the shores of sunny Florida with her best friend Bessie (Rita Zohar). During their weekly trip to the grocery store, Bessie faints and passes away soon afterwards, leaving Eleanor devastated. She decides to head back to New York City 40 years after leaving, staying with her divorced daughter Jess (Jessica Hecht) and her son Max (Will Price) in their apartment. Unsure what to do with her free time in Manhattan, Eleanor finds herself at the local Jewish Community Center, intending to attend a singing class but inadvertently stumbling into a counseling group for Holocaust survivors. Having heard many firsthand accounts from her recently departed best friend when she was alive, Eleanor tells Bessie’s harrowing story of survival as if it were her own.

Touched by Eleanor’s words, NYU student Nina (Erin Kellyman) approaches Eleanor after the group session and asks if she can be the subject of an article she’s working on for her journalism class. Reticent to dig deeper into her lie but desperate for friendship, Eleanor agrees to be interviewed and subsequently spends a substantial amount of time around Nina. Despite their 70-year age gap, the two have more in common than it would seem, most notably that Nina also recently lost someone close to her: her mother. Nina is doing her best to work through the grief, while her father Roger (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a prominent news anchor, buries himself in his work and can’t even bring himself to say his late wife’s name. Can Eleanor help them process their loss while finding her own closure in the process?

Eleanor The Great gets off to a strong start, with a well-realized portrayal of two inseparable friends with a lifelong bond who play off each other beautifully. While Bessie is straight-laced and unassuming, Eleanor isn’t above the occasional white lie to keep things interesting. When Bessie is waiting for treatment in a hospital bed, Eleanor fibs to the nurse about her family owning the hospital to push along some speedy service. “You’re interesting enough, you don’t have to lie about who you are,” Bessie chastises with a sentiment that foreshadows the moral quandary upon which the movie is built. But after Eleanor tells one mistruth too many and ends up on Nina’s radar, it simply makes zero sense that a 20-year-old journalism student wouldn’t do a quick Google search to vet her source. When Roger inevitably gets drawn into Eleanor’s orbit, she technically ups her duped journalist count to 2.

Of course Eleanor is eventually found out and so we’re meant to slog through a third act packed with sappy monologues and untangling of misunderstandings. Through it all, Eleanor The Great ends on a final scene that doesn’t quite get the bad taste out of one’s mouth but at least brings home the movie’s message about connection and transference. Scarlett Johansson reportedly worked closely with the USC Shoah Foundation in order to impart sensitivity toward real Holocaust survivors who could understandably be put off by Eleanor’s deception. While Johansson’s intentions seem pure and Squibb does an outstanding job with a tricky protagonist, the film can’t overcome foundational lapses of logic that needed to be ironed out of the script earlier in production.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is The Smashing Machine, a sports biopic starring Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt, telling the true story of former wrestler and mixed martial artist heavyweight champion Mark Kerr.
Also playing in theaters is Bone Lake, a horror thriller starring Maddie Hasson and Alex Roe, in which a couple’s vacation at a secluded estate is upended when they’re forced to share the mansion with a mysterious couple.
Premiering on Netflix is Steve, a drama starring Cillian Murphy and Tracey Ullman, following the headteacher in charge of a school for boys with societal and behavioral difficulties who faces his own demons while battling for the reform college’s survival.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

One Battle After Another, the latest masterpiece from one of the finest filmmakers working today, is a testament to what can be achieved when a major studio puts their money where their mouth is and backs the best. Wielding a budget roughly 4 to 5 times the amount he typically gets for his projects, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson applies the passion and thoughtfulness of his comparatively modest productions to this prodigious IMAX spectacle. It’s a one-of-a-kind epic: larger-than-life while never losing sense of scale, breathlessly-paced but detail-fixated, funny without being frivolous, eerily timely while already feeling timeless. Most importantly, it’s an action movie that isn’t just about car chases and explosions — don’t worry, it has those and they’re outstanding — but also about the exhilaration behind finally taking justified action.

Working within a revolutionary group known as the French 75, explosions expert Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) enraptures the posse’s leader Perfidia (Teyana Taylor) with his spitfire charm and dedication to the cause. Things seem to be heading toward domestic bliss after the birth of their daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) but along with French 75 cohort Deandra (Regina Hall), Perfidia pushes through with a bank heist that goes sideways in a hurry. Pressured by Col. Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who’s been on the French 75’s tail for years, Perfidia trades intel for reduced prison time and forces Pat and Willa to go on the run. 16 years later, Pat’s assumed a new identity as Bob Ferguson while he raises his daughter solo and evades Lockjaw’s troops as they try to snuff out each member of the French 75. When Willa goes missing, Bob frantically recruits her karate teacher Sergio (Benicio del Toro) to locate her whereabouts.

This is Paul Thomas Anderson’s second time adapting counterculture novelist Thomas Pynchon, the first resulting in the neo-noir stoner comedy Inherent Vice and One Battle After Another being a loose adaptation of his 1990 book Vineland. The protagonists of the two films ostensibly overlap in certain regards, both being affable burnouts who get in way over their heads, but their respective narratives push them in much different directions. Where Inherent Vice‘s Doc is trapped in a shaggy dog story, Bob Ferguson’s tale is one marked by galvanized purpose and the hope for redemption. At times, it seems there is no obstacle too small to trip Bob up in his conquest to find his imperiled Willa but the failures only makes the victories that much more sweet. Leonardo DiCaprio’s made comedic poetry out of pathetic protagonists before with The Wolf Of Wall Street and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood but this may be his finest work in that category yet.

On the other side of the moral coin, Sean Penn is unforgettable as the often buffoonish but nonetheless formidable colonel dead set on the French 75’s demise. Fitted with a janky gait and anxious oral posturing that would make Roger Stone seethe, he’d come across as a cartoonishly overplayed villain if the real-life inspirations for his character weren’t so similar. After a revelation of a performance in 2023’s A Thousand And One, Teyana Taylor is an absolute force here as a firebrand insurgent who can’t concede to the path of convenience and compliance. In her film debut, Chase Infiniti does a terrific job in balancing a teenager’s desire to distance themselves from their parents with their need for guidance during tremendously scary circumstances. Even in limited roles, James Raterman and D. W. Moffett make the most of their interrogation scenes and sell the menace behind Lockjaw’s relentless operation.

Reteaming with his Licorice Pizza cinematographer Michael Bauman and editor Andy Jurgensen, Paul Thomas Anderson makes every inch of screen and every minute of runtime count. As he did with Boogie Nights, Anderson imbues One Battle After Another with a Scorsese-like sweep that makes every moment feel major. There’s undeniably a grandeur to the proceedings that Anderson hasn’t been afforded the opportunity to attempt until this point in his career. You’ve seen him do sprawling character studies and you’ve seen him do psychological chamber pieces but you’ve never seen anything like the bravura car chase sequence he pulls off late in the film. Warner Bros. has bet big on storytellers this year, evidenced by superb releases from Ryan Coogler and James Gunn over the past several months, and they’ve saved the best for last.

Score – 5/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Eleanor The Great, a drama starring June Squibb and Erin Kellyman, telling the story of a 94-year-old Floridian woman who, after a devastating loss, strikes up an unlikely friendship with a 19-year-old student while visiting New York City.
Only coming to theaters is The Strangers: Chapter 2, a horror sequel starring Madelaine Petsch and Gabriel Basso, wherein a couple’s vehicle breaks down on the final day of their cross country road trip, forcing them to take refuge in a remote Airbnb.
Premiering on Apple TV+ is All Of You, a sci-fi romance starring Brett Goldstein and Imogen Poots, about two best friends who harbor an unspoken love for one another, even after a test matches one of them up with their supposed soulmate.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Like fellow relationship comedy Oh, Hi! from earlier this summer, the outstanding screwball farce Splitsville opens on a car-confined couple belting out lyrics of soft rock duets to one another. The former features the Parton-Rogers classic “Islands In The Stream” and the latter opts for the Loggins-Nicks hit “Whenever I Call You ‘Friend'” but in both scenes, life seems to be perfect. You’re en route to a weekend getaway and you’re singing cheesy pop songs with your partner; what could go wrong? Oh, Hi! takes a bit longer to unpack that question but Splitsville answers it early and often, with a car wreck and accidental public indecency being just the first of many misfortunes. 14 months into their marriage, Ashley (Adria Arjona) has considered divorce so thoroughly that she’s handwritten a letter she’s finally built up the nerve to read to Carey (Kyle Marvin). Pulled over on the side of the highway, Carey decides to run away as she starts reading it. After all, if he can’t hear her message, then they can’t be over.

After trekking on-foot for some time, Carey finds his way to the beach house of his best friend Paul (Michael Angelo Covino) and his wife Julie (Dakota Johnson). They’re happily married with a son, so surely they must have the answer for how he can keep things going with Ashley. Carey finds the supposed secret of their success is that Paul and Julie are in an open marriage, an agreement with which the two seem comfortable as long as they don’t have to hear details about the other partners or the trysts. Paul gets exponentially less comfortable with the arrangement when Julie chooses to sleep with Carey while he’s at their place trying to forget about Ashley. All the while, Ashley has taken Carey’s running away as tacit permission to take on other lovers and as luck would have it, Carey expresses his desire for their relationship to be open past monogamy.

Written by Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin, and solo-directed by Covino, Splitsville is a hilarious highwire act that feels like it could spiral out of control at any moment but never does. The script is a thing of beauty, packed with consistently clever and sneakily insightful exchanges about the trickiest dynamics of romantic relationships. As Ashley’s suitors stack up, they begin hanging around the house, even after she seems to have lost interest in them. Carey unwittingly ends up befriending some of them, playing video games and listening to records with some of the gentlemen in an increasingly crowded apartment more akin to a himbo harem. He even lends an ear to their romantic woes with his wife, as a clueless chiropractic hopeful laments “it feels like the universe is out of alignment and I’m not able to adjust it.”

Covino corrals an impressive amount of comedic performances from the sprawling cast while concocting bravura sequences you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a swinging indie comedy. A visually dense montage of Carey and Ashley’s home life once the latter takes on the company of other men employs a head-spinning but steadily-paced 360 degree camera motion. A slow-motion dolly shot — one that would feel right at home in Rushmore — across the front of a private school takes its time showing Julie and Carey canoodling in the carpool drop-off before eventually settling on Paul’s dejected face. There’s even a knock-down drag-out fight between Paul and Carey set within the sun-dappled opulence of a Hamptons home that is both sidesplitting in its comical escalation and accomplished in its choreography.

All four members of this quartet, along with single-scene-stealers like Nicholas Braun and Tyrone Benskin, make this material sing but I was particularly impressed with the performances from Kyle Marvin and Adria Arjona. Marvin is a new face to me and following Splitsville, I thought to myself “where’s this guy been?” He has the sadsack puerility of John C. Reilly’s goofier characters and understated sensitivity found in Will Ferrell’s dramatic roles, so perhaps it’s no surprise that we just became best friends. Arjona certainly made her mark with leading roles in three releases last year but this is the best work that I’ve seen from her so far. Playing a young woman contorting her personality manically in an attempt to find herself within the arms of other men, she mines wicked humor from her character’s desperation. In a year alongside other terrific comedies like Friendship and The Naked Gun, Splitsville may be the finest yet.

Score – 4/5

More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is The Conjuring: Last Rites, a supernatural horror sequel starring Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson, concluding the saga of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren as they take on one last terrifying case involving mysterious entities they must confront.
Being re-released in theaters is Hamilton, the filmed version of the Broadway smash biographical musical about one of America’s foremost founding fathers and first Secretary of the Treasury.
Streaming on Apple TV+ is Highest 2 Lowest, a crime thriller starring Denzel Washington and Jeffrey Wright, remaking Akira Kurosawa’s High And Low as a titan music mogul is targeted with a ransom plot and conflicted by a life-or-death moral dilemma.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup