Nonnas (2025)

Nonnas arrives from Netflix with the soft landing of a Sunday gravy, a Vince Vaughn vehicle in which a grieving MTA mechanic spends his mother's life insurance on a Staten Island restaurant staffed entirely by grandmothers. Stephen Chbosky directs with the gentle hand of a man who knows precisely which heartstrings to pluck and plucks them in order. The result is warm, edible, and almost aggressively inoffensive, which for the purposes of this classification makes it a curiously barren specimen.

The picture's cultural furniture is Italian-American and regional. A Sicilian and a Bolognese bicker over methods before bonding at a salon, and the kitchen becomes a small congress of grandmothers from different provinces. That is representation of a sort, though it is heritage rather than a contemporary statement, and the film treats these women as custodians of memory instead of agents of any modern program. Their authority is genuine and entirely domestic, which is why the feminist reading stalls at the doorway. The plot does gesture at a small business squeezed by local vendors and market forces, a mild anti-establishment murmur that never hardens into an argument. Nobody lectures. Nobody preaches. The film wants only to feed you.

What remains is a sincere, well-reviewed comfort object that hit number one on Netflix over Mother's Day weekend, a scheduling decision so on-the-nose it deserves its own trophy. The closing credits show the real Enoteca Maria, open fifteen years, staffed by grandmothers from everywhere. It is a lovely coda. It is also the entire thesis, delivered without a single raised voice. We score it accordingly, and we go make dinner.