Thelma

Writer/director Josh Margolin based “Thelma” on his own grandmother, demonstrating this connection with footage of her in the closing credits that matches an earlier scene almost verbatim. Even so, this action comedy belongs to its star, June Squibb. She plays the eponymous 93-year-old Thelma Post who inadvertently mails away $10,000 in a phone scam and then sets out with her semi-reluctant suitor Ben (the late Richard Roundtree) by scooter to cut across the sidewalks of Los Angeles, find the perpetrators, and get it back as her grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger) and daughter Gail (Parker Posey) give chase when she goes M.I.A. (The part of Danny is written with more dimension, presenting someone on the opposite end of the age spectrum, still trying to get his life started, but Posey’s performance deftly, comically embodies being caught in the middle, caretaker to both.) Margolin draws a semi-cheeky comparison between the physical obstacles confronted by Thelma and Ben on their quest with Tom Cruise’s “Mission: Impossible” stunts by briefly having her watch 2018’s “Fallout” on television. This is sometimes cleverer conceptually than it is in execution, but it also innately contrasts the idea of Cruise working so hard to defy aging with Squibb’s unsentimental embracing of it. Just as there is something edifying in the manic intensity with which Cruise runs in those movies, so is there something revealing in the way Squibb walks, one foot in front of the other, a careful determination not to go gently into the good night.