We find ourselves in a bit of a thin patch for new movies – all the big summer releases have come and gone but it's still a little early for most of the awards season bait to make an appearance. Such is the dearth of new content that a couple of subtitled movies have slipped into the schedule at more than one of the local cinemas.

Fair enough, you might think, but it doesn't quite explain why an extremely watchable new English-language movie featuring recognisable faces seems to by have bypassed the major chains entirely and only surfaced at the local independent. (Obviously the indy picking this up is just down to good management and especially ownership, and yes I am going to mention my 0.07% stake in the place again.) I'm quite lucky in that nearly everything I want to see usually ends up at one or other of the four surviving cinemas in or near the city centre – though Sasquatch Sunset was a notable exception earlier this year, going down so badly at the members' preview at the Phoenix that it never got a full release – but I genuinely think that Josh Margolin's Thelma would have found an appreciative audience if it had played somewhere more mainstream.

Most of the advance publicity for Thelma has focused on the participation of leading lady June Squibb, who started comparatively late in movies after a forty year career in theatre. Films you may have seen in which Squibb has appeared include Nebraska, About Schmidt and Far From Heaven – and you may already have surmised from the careful phrasing of this sentence that she's usually playing supporting parts, rather than starring. Getting your first leading role at the age of 93 probably counts as leaving it a bit late, but fair play to June Squibb for following this career path anyway.

Squibb plays Thelma, a redoubtable old lady living in a Los Angeles retirement community after the death of her husband. This is not some dismal account of geriatric neglect and misery, though: she is in regular contact with her family and has a particularly good relationship with her grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger). When she gets a phone call informing her that he has been arrested after a road accident and needs $10,000 bail money, she posts the money off without a second thought – which is admirable, but proves to be unwise, as Danny is not in trouble at all and she has just been scammed.

The last time something like this happened in a film I watched, it all ended up with Jason Statham burning down several buildings and giving the Secret Service the runaround (and this was back when their reputation was still pretty good). Thelma takes a more low-key approach – Thelma's family take an it-could-have-been-worse attitude, but start to wonder if this isn't just a sign that Thelma needs more intensive supervision. Thelma, however, is quietly outraged by this aspersion and sets out to hunt down the scammers herself and get her money back. Now, obviously the assistance of a streetwise Black private dick who's a sex machine to all the chicks would be very handy, but in the absence of one of those she calls on the help (and mobility scooter) of her old friend Ben, played by screen icon Richard Roundtree in his final role. Together the two elderly crime-busters set out to get tooled up and find some justice. . .

There are two less than ideal directions that Thelma could have gone in, I think: it could have been an extremely whimsical sort of cosy crime film, all about the cute old people going off and getting into various scrapes. Alternatively, it could have been a full-on revenge thriller parody, the joke coming from the fact that the action heroes in this case are both knocking on rather (Roundtree was a comparatively sprightly 81 when the film was made; Squibb really was 93). But it manages to avoid the excesses of these two extremes and find a way to use the best elements of both, in addition to including some genuinely moving moments of drama as well as some good jokes too.

Some of the best gags are of the old-people-action-movie kind – there's what's functionally a car chase between two people on electric mobility scooters, while moments of genuine tension result from Thelma having to go up some poorly-carpeted stairs or make her way across a room full of trip hazards – but a lot of good character stuff too. And it never shies away from the harder truths of older age – the subtext to much of the plot is a discussion between Thelma and Ben about whether they should just accept they are diminished vestiges of the people they once were, or if they should still try to have agency and some degree of autonomy in their lives.

It is very well played – Jean Squibb is reportedly looking forward to the career opportunities her marvellous performance has opened up, while Roundtree's turn is a dignified conclusion to a ground-breaking career. Playing the next generation down are Clark Gregg and Parker Posey, who are both very good; the conclusion has a nicely-pitched turn from Malcolm McDowell (who, it must be said, is himself unlikely to be mistaken for a spring chicken under normal circumstances). Hechinger (who also executive-produced the film) gives a warm performance as the grandson, and there's a cameo from Coral Pena (given she's convincingly aged nearly twenty years across three seasons of For All Mankind it's slightly startling to realise she's only just into her thirties).

The moral thesis you'd expect from a film like Thelma is that old people are much more capable than you'd expect and they shouldn't be abandoned to moulder in retirement establishments. While the film is largely in agreement with this, it's a little more nuanced – it's about respecting the elderly and ensuring they retain the dignity due to everyone, irrespective of age, while still acknowledging that life can get harder. (Though the plot makes heavy use of various pieces of modern technology, it's not always just for gags about Thelma struggling to use them.)

This is a very humane, good-natured film, and a lovely tribute to the writer-director's grandmother, who inspired it. The failure of the big chains to pick it up is a genuine shame, as it's one of the best films I've seen this year. Well worth hunting down.

Also Hardly Showing Anywhere...

. . . Baltasar Kormakur's Touch (this is essentially a fridge title, although I suppose lots of people do touch different things in it). If you enjoyed Past Lives last year then this might be one for you. Egil Olafsson plays Kristofer, an Icelandic chap on the brink of old age. Incipient dementia leads him to seek out unfinished business from his youth, despite the fact that the world is on the brink of the Covid pandemic. He flies to London, where he worked in a Japanese restaurant and had a passionate romance with the love of his life back in the sixties, when he was a much younger man.

And, it appears, a much taller man. Normally films can get away with this sort of thing, but the dude playing the young Kristofer looks so totally unlike Olafsson it's really quite distracting. Still, this is a chunky, mostly satisfying romantic melodrama (though not close to the standards of Past Lives). It's a little bit slow and some of the plot elements concerning Japanese history have a leaden earnestness which kept my eyes regularly a-rolling, but it all pays off with a genuinely moving conclusion which took me quite by surprise.

Awix

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