| Sony Pictures Classics | Release Date: September 26, 2025 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
11
Mixed:
17
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
Sep 25, 2025
Sep 25, 2025
Eleanor the Great never quite grapples with the ethical dilemmas that it raises, either in Eleanor’s stories, Nina’s efforts to turn them into a news project, or Roger’s usurping of their wishes for a segment on their show. But if the narrative logic falls apart, at least its emotional core remains solid, much of it bound together by Squibb’s warmth and charm.
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IndieWireMay 21, 2025
It adds up to a fascinating, if often baffling first effort from Johannson and Kamen, one not afraid of big emotional wallops, but not always able to carry them into truly revelatory spaces. It’s a little predictable, a little bizarre, a little funny, and very sad, but it’s also an ambitious swing at what movies can still be.
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Sep 26, 2025
Johansson capitalizes on her cast’s innate chemistry. An accomplished performer herself, she is unsurprisingly an actor’s director. She guides the story with tenderness — perhaps to a fault, because even the most capable directing of a talented cast can’t save this movie from its central premise.
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Sep 24, 2025
The less enamored of Eleanor the Great you become, however, the more and more thankful you are for the presence of June the Magnificent. There’s a lot of joie de vivre she injects into even the most morose moments, and Squibb knows exactly how to use spoonfuls of sugar to help the regret, the side-eye snark, and the heartache go down. The film’s just good enough. She’s great.
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Movie NationApr 23, 2026
Sep 25, 2025
Johansson’s direction is serviceable if unremarkable, and one has to wonder why this particular script spoke to her as a directorial debut. Though it is morally complex and modest in scope, it doesn’t dive deep enough into the nuance here, opting for surface-level emotional revelations. It’s Squibb’s performance and appealing screen presence that enables this all to work — if it does.
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Sep 25, 2025
This tonally tricky comedy-drama tackles aging, loss, the Holocaust, Jewishness, and the difficulty of determining the truth in a fake-news world. But Johansson’s well-meaning film couldn’t be more aggravating, and its biggest problem is its insistence that we find Eleanor so damn endearing, no matter what.
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Dec 12, 2025
The images within the film are too general and familiar – there is nothing new about what Johansson is attempting in her directorial debut, which leads one to wonder why she bothered making it at all. It’s not a disastrous film – in fact, it’s quite inoffensive. But this glaring niceness reflects a crucial lack of ambition, and that seems more egregious than taking a big swing.
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The GuardianMay 21, 2025
This frankly odd film is misjudged and naive about the implications of its Holocaust theme. Its bland, TV-movie tone of sentimentality fails to accommodate the existential nightmare of the main plot strand, or indeed the subordinate question of when and whether to put your elderly parent in a care home.
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