Quick Synopsis: Thelma loses $10,000 to a con artist, she is not very happy about this.

June Squibb is pretty damn cool. She’s best known to me for her role in the (criminally under-appreciated) Table 19, which is still near the top of my list for confusion at the negative reviews. She’s also been utilized in a lot of recent Pixar movies, recently voicing Nostalgia in Inside Out 2: Inside Harder. Yes, she was also in Father Figures but I can’t hold that against her. Thelma is her first chance to lead, and at the age of 94, it’s (as the great philosopher Lizzo once said) about damn time. The only disappointing part about June’s performance is if it was bad I would have had the perfect opportunity to make a “damp Squibb” joke, and now I can’t, stupid actresses ruining my jokes by being talented.

The script does help Thelma too. In the wrong hands it would risk coming off as condescending, or alternatively going too far the other way and having a message of “no, 94-year-old women can still parachute out of a burning helicopter whilst smoking meth, and if you try to stop them then you’re a terrible person”. It also doesn’t attempt to do an “old people swearing/rapping/sex references=comedy” thing, which is a relief. The title character feels real, and her interactions with her grandson (played by Fred Hechinger) are so lovely that I want to watch a road movie featuring the two of them. The two actors share surprisingly good chemistry, there is no sense of distance between them and the warmth radiates off the screen. Not so much with the two parent characters, but they’re not as fleshed out as the main two so that’s to be expected.

Anybody who has spoken to me for more than twenty seconds will know that I’m quite a moody and cynical person. So in many ways, a film like Thelma is the opposite of what it’s expected I’d like. But in another, more accurate, way, this is the exact type of shit I love. Sometimes it’s nice to have “Hey, stop being a condescending dick to your elderly relatives” as a message. It’s not exactly subtle with that message, having characters openly discuss moving Thelma into a home whilst she’s in the room, but discussing it like she’s not there. The moments where it plays like a pseudo-action film are fun to watch too, but it never goes quite as far as you feel it could.

A part of the film I didn’t think worked out that well was the sections in the nursing home. They feel a bit too sitcom-like as if they belong in a lower-quality film with a completely different tone. The director’s use of soft focus on the edges of the frame may be annoying to quite a few people too. It also sucks that this was Richard Roundtree’s final film role, and I’m not a fan of how it reminded me of my grandmother and hence now I’m sad.

Overall, Thelma is delightful. A bit too cutesy at times, but it would take a heart of stone to not be charmed by it. It is not among the best of 2024, but it is certainly among the films that made me feel most warm inside. It’s definitely the best of the two “Old person gets scammed by someone on the phone” movies of the year. Here’s the other one if you were wondering.