“Omaha” landed in New York theaters yesterday, and the reviews keep circling back to the same 11-year-old. Molly Belle Wright, who shot the film at age 9 opposite John Magaro, plays Ella, a girl who slowly figures out that her dad’s spontaneous family road trip is anything but. Greenwich Entertainment opened the film in New York on April 24 and rolls it out nationwide in May.
The numbers are real. “Omaha” is sitting at 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes off 44 critic reviews, and the festival haul Wright has racked up since the film’s January 2025 Sundance premiere is, frankly, ridiculous for a kid in her second feature.
She picked up the Special Jury Prize for Performance at the Hamptons International Film Festival and a Rising Star award at Richmond International Film Festival. The film itself collected the Deauville Jury Prize, Nashville’s Audience Award, the Jordan Ressler First Feature Award at Miami, and Best Film honors at Jakarta World Cinema, among others.
If you’ve been following her since “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” in 2024, this is the leveling-up. The Lionsgate Christmas movie was a charmer. “Omaha” is a different animal.
Director Cole Webley, making his feature debut from a script by Robert Machoian (“The Killing of Two Lovers”), shot the movie on location across Utah, Wyoming, and Nebraska. Magaro plays an unnamed dad. Wright is Ella. Wyatt Solis plays her younger brother Charlie. Their golden retriever, Rex, comes too. The setup is plain enough: it’s 2008, the family has just been served eviction papers, and Dad wakes the kids before sunrise for what he calls a trip.
What it actually is, the film waits a long time to tell you.
Webley, who first met Machoian at Sundance years before they made this together, has been blunt about Wright’s range. “Molly’s like a professional actress,” he told Filmmaker Magazine during the Sundance run. “She was 9 at the time, and she’s incredible. I can’t wait to see her blossom.”
That’s the part producers tend to say about every kid actor. In this case the reviews back him up. Indiewire called the film a “heartbreaking family drama” anchored by Magaro and praised Wright and Solis for the depth they bring. Punch Drunk Critics, in an interview posted Thursday, described Wright’s work as a “breakthrough performance.”
Wright, born in Manchester and raised mostly in Queensland, Australia, became the youngest person to deliver a mainstage TED Talk back in 2021. She was seven. The talk, about early childhood development, ended up the most-watched TED Talk of that year. Acting came shortly after, starting with a guest run on the Australian series “Upright” playing the young version of Milly Alcock’s character.
Then came the U.S. work. In 2023 she shot three features back to back: “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever,” then “Deep Water,” then “Omaha.” Magaro, asked by Gold Derby this week about the kids on set, said working with new dads and new actors changes you. He’d just had a child himself when production started. “I think that just subconsciously drew me into the world even more than it might have before I was a dad,” he told the outlet.
Magaro is having a year. “September 5,” “The Bride!,” the Showtime series “The Agency.” But the conversation around “Omaha” keeps dragging the spotlight back to the kids in the car next to him.
The film runs 83 minutes, rated PG-13, with a score from Christopher Bear and cinematography by Paul Meyers, ASC. It opens in Omaha, Nebraska, on April 30 (an obvious nod), with the wider rollout following in May.
Wright doesn’t slow down after this one. She’s playing the title role in “Flavia,” a Sky family feature based on the Flavia de Luce mystery novels, and takes a supporting lead in the sci-fi feature “Black Box (Flight 298).” “Deep Water,” her thriller with Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley, also lands later this year.
For now, “Omaha” is what people are talking about. And by mid-May, it’ll be in a theater near most of the country.
