Avis Metacritic

On the surface, Grandma is a simple story, but the script imbues it with deep reserves of emotional depth and meaning that are slowly, organically revealed over the course of the plot.

It gradually settles and deepens into something nuanced and moving, a character study that's not so much about aging, specifically, as it is about the great and awful process of getting to know yourself.

Sam Elliott, Marcia Gay Harden, and Judy Greer supply sharp cameos, but this is Tomlin’s movie, and she obliges with a spiky, refreshingly unvarnished performance.

There's admirable frankness, intelligence and sensitivity here. Additionally, the film is a thoughtful, funny reflection on the gains and losses of growing old.

Lily Tomlin works miracles. She's comedy royalty whose best films (Nashville, The Late Show, All of Me, I Heart Huckabees) always cut deeper than a smile. But no Oscar. Maybe Grandma will do the trick. It's a Tomlin tour de force.

It’s an artful, funny, endlessly surprising little acting and writing showcase that shows just how far it’s possible for writers to take tired, clichéd characters, by treating them as human beings and caring what goes on underneath the surface of the easy jokes.

Though likely to be variously praised and pilloried as a pro-choice film, Weitz’s film is really a movie about choice in both the specific and the abstract — about the choices we make, for good and for ill, and how we come to feel about them through the prism of time.

Grandma is fun and brisk, though sometimes the encounters seem a little pat, and Elle’s grief about the death of her partner a year earlier is way overdone.

As Elle, Tomlin is Tomlin, which is to say great. Garner’s Sage is whiny, wise and winsome, which is to say an excellent 18-year-old.

Writer-director Paul Weitz's proudly boisterous star vehicle for Lily Tomlin has about as many ambitions as it does delusions.