Nonnas (2025) Review – When Comfort Food Becomes a Language of Love
Header illustration for the film review essay of Nonnas (2025).
Illustration created for editorial movie review purposes.
π₯ Film Overview
Title: Nonnas
Director: Stephen Chbosky
Release: May 9, 2025 (Netflix)
Runtime: 103 minutes (1 hour 43 minutes)
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Biographical
Screenplay: Liz Maccie
Studio: Fifth Season, 1Community, Madison Wells, Matador Content
Country: United States
Rating: PG (suitable for general audiences)
Rotten Tomatoes: 82% (Critics), 75% (Audience)
IMDb: 6.8/10
Netflix: #1 Global Film (week of May 5-11, 2025)
Cast: Vince Vaughn (Joe Scaravella), Susan Sarandon (Gia), Lorraine Bracco (Roberta), Talia Shire (Teresa), Brenda Vaccaro (Antonella), Linda Cardellini (Olivia), Joe Manganiello (Bruno)
π Plot Summary
Joe Scaravella works as a mechanic for the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority. His life is ordinary, predictable, and tinged with quiet loneliness—especially after losing his mother, whose cooking defined his childhood memories of warmth and belonging.
Unable to shake his grief, Joe finds himself drawn to an open-air market on Staten Island, a place he used to visit with his mother and grandmother. There, surrounded by the sights and smells that remind him of family dinners, he makes an impulsive decision: he buys a closed-down restaurant.
His plan is unconventional. Instead of hiring professional chefs, Joe wants to staff his kitchen with actual Italian grandmothers—"nonnas"—who cook the way his mother and grandmother did: with recipes passed down through generations, made with love rather than culinary school precision.
He enlists his childhood friend Bruno, a contractor, to help restore the space. Then he begins recruiting: Roberta, his mother's best friend from Sicily who's as stubborn as she is talented; Antonella from Bologna, whose regional pride clashes instantly with Roberta's; Gia, a glamorous former hairdresser who hides deep pain beneath her confident exterior; and Teresa, a former nun with a gentle presence and surprising culinary skills.
The restaurant, named "Enoteca Maria" after Joe's mother, faces immediate challenges. The nonnas bicker constantly over whose region makes the best pasta. Staten Island locals are skeptical of the newcomer. The health inspector fails them after a kitchen fire. Joe and Bruno fight. Money runs tight.
But slowly, something shifts. The grandmothers begin sharing their stories—of lost loves, of sacrifices, of the meals they cooked for families who have since scattered or passed on. They bond over the shared language of food preparation: the rhythm of kneading dough, the patience required for slow-cooked sauces, the memory embedded in every recipe.
And Joe realizes that what he's created isn't just a restaurant. It's a space where grief transforms into something generative, where strangers become family, and where the simple act of cooking for others becomes an act of healing.
πΈ Key Themes
Food as Memory and Grief
Joe opens a restaurant not because he loves the food industry, but because he's trying to resurrect something irretrievable: the feeling of sitting at his mother's table. Food carries memory in ways language cannot. A particular sauce doesn't just taste good—it tastes like childhood, like safety, like being loved unconditionally.
The nonnas, each carrying their own losses, recognize this immediately. They cook to remember, to honor, to keep the dead alive through rituals of preparation and sharing.
The Slow Rhythms That Heal
The film lingers on cooking scenes—dough rising, sauce simmering, vegetables chopped with practiced precision. These aren't aesthetic choices; they're the film's thesis.
Healing, like good cooking, cannot be rushed. Joe's journey is about showing up every day, kneading dough, stirring pots, making the same gestures his mother made, until slowly the grief becomes bearable.
Love and Labor Are Inseparable
Joe's mother's cooking wasn't just an expression of love—it was work. Hours of preparation. Repetitive motions. Physical exhaustion. The film doesn't romanticize this labor or pretend it wasn't difficult.
The nonnas are elderly. Cooking professionally is physically demanding. Yet they continue, because for them, feeding people is inseparable from caring for them. Joe begins to understand that longing for his mother's cooking means honoring not just her affection, but her effort.
Community Built Through Shared Tables
Enoteca Maria becomes more than a business. It becomes a gathering place for people seeking connection. The film suggests that the simple act of sharing a meal prepared with care can create community—not through grand gestures, but through the quiet ritual of sitting together, eating together, remembering together.
π¬ What Makes This Film Special
Vince Vaughn's Tender Performance
Known for fast-talking comedy, Vaughn surprises with restraint and vulnerability. His Joe isn't charming or clever—he's just a middle-aged man navigating grief. Vaughn lets Joe be ordinary, awkward, uncertain, making him deeply relatable.
The Nonnas and Direction
Susan Sarandon, Lorraine Bracco, Talia Shire, and Brenda Vaccaro bring decades of experience to roles that could have been one-dimensional. Each nonna feels fully realized—proud, flawed, funny, resilient.
Director Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower) shoots cooking sequences with reverence, allowing the camera to linger on hands working dough, steam rising from pots. These scenes aren't filler—they're the film's heart.
True Story and Success
The real Joe Scaravella opened Enoteca Maria in Staten Island in 2007 and continues operating it today. The restaurant has since expanded to include grandmothers from around the world. Scaravella appears in a cameo.
Released on Mother's Day weekend 2025, Nonnas became Netflix's #1 global film with 15.4 million views in its first week, topping charts in 71 countries.
π Where to Watch (2025)
Streaming: Netflix (exclusive worldwide release)
Note: Nonnas is a Netflix original film and is available exclusively on the platform in all regions where Netflix operates.
π Final Thoughts
Nonnas doesn't reinvent cinema. It's predictable—you can guess most plot beats before they arrive. But sometimes, comfort doesn't require surprise. Sometimes we need stories that remind us of simple truths: that grief is universal, that food connects us across generations, that community can be built one meal at a time.
The film succeeds because it understands that the meals which sustained us weren't just about affection. They were about someone choosing, day after day, to put in the work of caring.
Joe's mother didn't cook because it was easy. She cooked because love, for her, meant feeding people. And in building Enoteca Maria, Joe learns to honor not just the love, but the labor that made it real.
For viewers, Nonnas offers gentle permission to grieve what we've lost while celebrating what remains. It suggests that healing doesn't require forgetting—it requires finding new ways to carry what we've lost forward.
π Personal Film Reflection
When working full-time and eating out routinely, the meals craved most weren't from fancy restaurants—they were simple dishes from home. Kimchi stew. Soybean paste soup. Nothing exotic, just the food that someone who loved us had made countless times.
But when the time comes to prepare meals ourselves, the film's insight becomes clear: those meals we longed for weren't just expressions of love. They were work. Repetitive, time-consuming, physically demanding work.
As meal kits become more sophisticated and "hand-made taste" becomes nostalgic language, there's less willingness to invest the effort our mothers routinely gave. Shortcuts appear. Convenience beckons. Which makes the gift we took for granted suddenly visible.
Watching Nonnas brings to mind those hands—Joe's mother's hands, the nonnas' hands, the hands of those who fed us—that spent decades chopping, stirring, kneading. Hands that ached and kept going anyway, because the people at the table were worth the effort.
The film doesn't sentimentalize this. It shows the labor clearly. And in doing so, it honors something we often overlook: that the meals we remember with such warmth were built on someone's consistent, unglamorous work.
Perhaps what we're really mourning when we miss "mother's cooking" isn't just the taste. It's the knowledge that someone cared enough to put in that labor—not once, but over and over, until it became the background music of our lives.
μλ§μ μμμ μλ§μ μ¬λμ΄κΈ° μ μ μλ§μ μκ³ μλ€.
(A reflection in my native Korean—because some truths about care and labor feel truer in the language of your heart.)
Nonnas gently reminds us that the comfort we received came from someone's choice to keep showing up, keep cooking, keep caring—even when it was hard.
π¬ Join the Conversation
What meals from your childhood do you miss most? Have you tried to recreate them? When did you first realize that the food you took for granted required real work from someone who loved you? Share your thoughts below.
π¬ More from Cinematic Sanctuaries
If Nonnas reminded you of food, memory, and quiet labor, explore:
- Chef – Rediscovering joy through simple, honest cooking
- Julie & Julia – Finding purpose through culinary rituals
- Little Forest – Seasonal cooking as meditation and healing
- The Taste of Things – A Quiet Aftertaste
- The Chef of South Polar – Finding Warmth in the Coldest Place on Earth
Each film in our collection reminds us that healing comes in many forms—through food shared, effort honored, and the quiet recognition that love often looks like work.
π€ About the Author
Young Lee has spent years quietly collecting and sharing films that offer comfort rather than answers—stories that value slow rhythms, unglamorous effort, and the transformation that happens when we honor the labor behind the love we received. As an everyday viewer, they believe cinema can remind us to see the work that makes care possible.
Read more articles from this author on Cinematic Sanctuaries.
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