Thelma Review: June Squibb Turns Aging Into an Action Hero Origin Story

Is Thelma good?

Yes — Thelma is one of 2024’s most purely enjoyable surprises, and the data lines up with the enthusiasm. With a 98% Critic Score and an 88% Audience Score, plus a 77 Metascore, a 3.7 on Letterboxd, and a 7.0 on IMDb, the consensus is unusually consistent across every measure the site tracks. That kind of agreement between critics and everyday viewers is rare, and it signals a film whose appeal isn’t limited to a niche audience — it’s the sort of movie that plays just as well on a Friday night at home as it does in a packed theater.

What is Thelma about?

Thelma follows a 93-year-old woman who sets out, largely on her own terms, to track down and confront the people who scammed her out of a significant sum of money. Drawing loosely on a real experience in director Josh Margolin’s own family, the story borrows the shape of a heist or spy thriller and shrinks it down to the scale of one determined grandmother and her reluctant grandson, who ends up along for the ride. It’s less interested in the mechanics of the scam itself than in what the chase reveals about independence, trust between generations, and the indignities that come with being underestimated because of age.

Should you watch Thelma?

If you’re in the mood for a comedy with real emotional weight behind the laughs, this one is an easy recommendation. The near-unanimous critic response and the strong audience turnout suggest a film that delivers on two fronts at once: it’s genuinely funny in a low-key, character-driven way, and it treats its elderly protagonist as a fully realized person rather than a punchline. The modest gap between the Critic Score and the Metascore hints that a few reviewers found the plotting familiar, but nothing in the numbers suggests the film oversells itself — this is a crowd-pleaser that mostly earns the description.

How does Thelma compare to The Straight Story?

David Lynch’s The Straight Story offers the closest comparison: another film built around an elderly protagonist undertaking an improbable solo journey that outsiders assume is beyond them. Both movies resist sentimentality by staying grounded in specific, stubborn character detail rather than broad statements about aging, and both let the humor and pathos come from the same source — a lead character who simply refuses to be talked out of doing things her own way. Where The Straight Story is quiet and elegiac, Thelma leans into genre playfulness, but the emotional throughline, an older person reclaiming agency on their own terms, is nearly identical.