Johansson's Eleanor the Great Opens Nationwide

Scarlett Johansson’s scripted feature directorial debut, Eleanor the Great, is a dramedy that stars June Squibb as 94/95-year-old Eleanor Morgenstein, who, grieving the death of her best friend Bessie, mistakenly joins a Holocaust survivors support group and begins to claim Bessie’s survival story as her own. Erin Kellyman plays Nina, an NYU journalism student who befriends Eleanor and helps escalate the lie into a fraught cross-generational relationship that anchors the film. Johansson, drawing on her Jewish roots and work with the USC Shoah Foundation, frames the movie as an exploration of grief’s volatile and complicated manifestations; the screenplay is written by Tory Kamen. The film premiered at Cannes to a five-minute standing ovation and has opened in theaters nationwide. Critics and audiences have been divided — the film holds about a 64% critics score — with widespread praise for performances by Squibb, Rita Zohar and Kellyman alongside debate over the ethics and potential appropriation of Holocaust trauma in the story.