- Starring
- Vince Vaughn, Lorraine Bracco, Talia Shire, Brenda Vaccaro, Susan Sarandon
- Director
- Stephen Chbosky
- Rating
- PG
- Genre
- Comedy
- Release date
- May 9, 2025
- Where to watch
- Netflix
Overall Score
Rating Overview
Rating Summary
In Nonnas, we meet Joe Scaravella, a guy who turns grief into purpose the old-fashioned way—by rolling up his sleeves and getting to work. After losing his mother and grandmother, Joe opens Enoteca Maria, a cozy little Italian joint on Staten Island, not staffed by flashy chefs or TikTok influencers, but by real grandmothers—“nonnas”—serving up the kind of home-cooked meals the Food Network forgot existed. With help from his buddy Bruno and four spirited nonnas, Joe fights through red tape and money woes, all while reconnecting with an old high school flame, Olivia.
Nonnas Review
An uncomplicated story that’s almost entirely heart, much of Nonnas is warm homemade bread fresh out of the oven for the soul. That’s as much thanks to the cast as to the premise. Like vine-ripened tomatoes and fresh basil in grandma’s Sunday gravy, Vince Vaughn’s natural charisma blends deliciously with and complements an uncharacteristically restrained and heartfelt performance, displaying subtle notes of loss and hope.
Vaughn leads an all-star cast of well-seasoned actresses whose combined experience spans over 200 years. Their on-screen ease soothes viewers, but it’s the early scenes in which Lorraine Bracco (Goodfellas) and Brenda Vaccaro (Midnight Cowboy) bicker with one another that do most of the heavy lifting of endearing all of the nonnas to the audience. That said, Susan Sarandon, unarguably the actress with the most storied career among them, phones it in. Fortunately, she barely speaks.
As charming as Nonnas is, it could’ve benefited from deeper character, plot, and conflict development. Instead, things mostly fall into place as needed—less contrived than undercooked. The actions make sense, but too much unfolds off-screen, leaving the story feeling surface-level and overly simple.
Still, there are far worse things to watch on Netflix, and, if you’re willing to skip a horrendously bad 5-minute scene in the final third of the film that fits like a shoe three sizes too small, is peppered with the film’s only progressive nonsense (when all of the ladies go to the salon), and adds nothing to the narrative, Nonnas is a fun watch.
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James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
This movie was recommended to me by a friend while I was helping her cook eggplants. That’s no guarantee that I’d like it, but it’s enough to warrant a look. I found it entertaining enough.There are a number of factors that move the needle in the positive direction for me.
For one, in a lot of modern movies and television shows there’s a tendency to play status games; characters are constantly competing for who is the best and most important, with some being artificially propped up and others artificially shoved down; a recipe for disaster and resentment all around. In this movie, Joe and every member of his team are all good and talented people. It’s not that any one character is better than the others; each character is different yet each has a unique skill set to bring to the table, and rather than constantly fighting each other for dominance the characters come together to support each other in pursuit of a shared dream, even when the dream seems daunting and distant. I missed that dynamic.
I also really liked the way the movie showed the development of Enoteca Maria. A lot of modern films tend toward “instant gratification”, a product of lazy storytelling where success is depicted as easy, effortless and automatic. The hero is never challenged, the rewards are unearned, and often I feel that when success becomes too easy, it unfairly implies that anyone who has ever struggled or failed is incurably incompetent. In this film, I thought that the challenges Joe faced felt real, and the many sacrifices he made also felt real. Purchasing and running a restaurant is very hard work, and I appreciated the way they showed the problem-solving processes of buying the building, renovating it, developing the menu and getting the word out, all while Joe was still working at his first job. I could tell that Joe poured his soul into his work to keep the dream alive even as he goes deeper in debt and does everything he can to remain afloat, and even then he is still not immediately successful. He’s very much an ordinary man like us, and what he’s doing is more than just a passing whim with no risk. He’s creating a restaurant to honor his late mother, to relive nostalgic memories, to give aging women who have suffered hardships and made mistakes a new lease on life, and give back to the community, and I wanted to root for him every step of the way.
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