Poms is a 2019 American comedy film directed by Zara Hayes, starring Diane Keaton, Jacki Weaver, Pam Grier, Celia Weston, Alisha Boe, Phyllis Somerville (in final film role), Charlie Tahan, Bruce McGill and Rhea Perlman. The film is about a group of women from a retirement community who choose to start a cheerleading squad.

Martha, a woman dying of cancer, decides to stop further treatment and moves from her apartment in New York to a retirement community in Georgia called Sun Springs. When Martha arrives at Sun Springs, she meets supervisor Vicki, who gives her a tour of the place, who explains to her that every resident must belong to one of their community clubs.

Martha moves into her new house and meets her new next door neighbor Sheryl. That night Martha isn’t able to sleep due to loud noise from Sheryl’s house, forcing her to call the community’s security chief Carl to stop the noise. Sheryl and her friends sneak into Martha’s house to hide from Carl. where she convinces Martha to allow them to hide out there. From then on. Sheryl wants to be Martha’s friend and invites her to different events, but Martha turns them down.

Sheryl learns that Martha was cheerleader but had to quit before her first game to care for her ill mother. Sheryl says that Martha should try cheering again. After thinking about it, Martha visits Sheryl at the school she’s a substitute teacher at and coaxes Sheryl to help her start up a cheer club in Sun Springs.

After getting Vicki to allow them to start the club and recruit the minimum requirement of eight members, Martha and Sheryl hold tryouts, where six women join. When Vicki tells them they need to find a new place to practice, Sheryl gets them a spot at her school’s pep rally, where they go viral online after a school cheerleader videos them and uploads it to the internet. In the video, one of the Sun Springs cheerleaders injures herself during the routine. After club is ended, Martha and Sheryl decide to join a cheer competition and coaxes the other ladies to get the club back together, despite being the oldest squad at the tournament.

This film proves that it’s never too late to try something new or to start over again, to reach out when you need help and that perfect doesn’t exist and that everyone is special in their own ways. This is a fun, cute, funny, heartwarming and heartbreaking (at times) film. It is one that mostly middle aged and elderly women will enjoy. It is fairly entertaining, but mostly cute and has the feel of most comedy films with elderly women like It’s Complicated and Book Club. It’s not awful, but not outstanding either. Just because a movie has an A-list cast, doesn’t mean it’s supposed to be fantastic.

The messages of this film is what really makes it a good, but it still isn’t great, not even close. The cute story, feels like a retired elderly person wrote it and it was their first time as a screenwriter and they tried their hardest to be Nancy Meyers. It is a fun movie, but the cutesiness is too much and takes away from what could have been a really good motion picture. I didn’t love, nor did I hate it. It is a feel good movie and the acting is really good from all of the main cast members. The soundtrack is great and makes you want to get up and dance, which is only a few things great about this movie.

An enjoyable film, but not award winning fantastic. It has its good and not so good. 13+ 3/5