Overview

• Johansson makes her feature directing debut with a character-driven drama centered on grief, compassion and the need to communicate, themes she and star June Squibb underscored in interviews.
• Squibb, 95, plays a widow who, after relocating to New York, enters a survivors’ group at a Jewish community center and retells her late friend’s Holocaust account as her own without revealing the deception.
• Critics praise Squibb’s warm, wry lead turn while describing Johansson’s direction as serviceable and Tory Kamen’s screenplay as predictable or uneven.
• The film co-stars Erin Kellyman, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Rita Zohar, carries a PG-13 rating and runs 1 hour 38 minutes.
• Johansson and Squibb learned Hebrew for synagogue scenes, though a sequence of Eleanor reciting Hebrew was cut from the final edit.