Dancing queen: Pamela Anderson in ‘The Last Showgirl’.
THE LAST SHOWGIRL ***1/2 (89 minutes) M
In a terrific latter-life performance, Pamela Anderson (Baywatch; Borat; Barb Wire; the underrated comedy series V.I.P) plays Shelly Gardner, an ageing, down-on-her-luck Las Vegas dancer who has been appearing in the same show for 38 years.
Rather stupidly devoting her life to the show, the bubble she’s been living in pops like a sonic boom when she’s told by the venue manager (Dave Bautista) that the new owners of the casino want the show closed.
With the rug pulled from under her, Shelly becomes the recipient of a series of revelatory body blows about what a mess her life is and how much of it she has wasted, due chiefly to bad decision-making and absolutely no planning abilities.
A visit from her estranged daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd; Star Wars 7,8,9; Booksmart) offers some hope of connection, but the reality check only intensifies.
Her sole source of succour is her life-long friend Annette (Jamie Lee Curtis), a casino game-room drinks waitress whose life trajectory shadows Shelly’s. If anything, she turns out to be an even sadder sack, her dance routine in the casino as patrons pass by oblivious to her presence being one of the film’s many heart-breaking highlights.
It’s a gruelling portrait of late-life disillusion from director Gia Coppola (Palo Alto) who, working from a screenplay from Kate Gersten (based on her unproduced play Body of Work), details the crippling effects of desperation and uncertainty as it dawns on Shelly how tenuous her sense of self actually is.
In an audition where she competes with dancers a fraction of her age, including 19 year-old fellow showgirl Mary-Anne (Brenda Song), Shelly is served a series of sugar-coated truth bombs from a reluctant director (Jason Schwartzman) who wants only to do her the kindness of getting her off the stage – a humiliation Shelly believes she is immune to.
It’s the scene where you can virtually see the woman’s heart cleave in two. Great stuff. Would love to have seen Anderson land an Oscar nom for her fine work here.
THE MONKEY **1/2 (98 minutes) MA
Hot on the heels of Heart Eyes comes another laugh-driven horror offering, only with added gross-out gore designed to elicit squeals of “Ewww!”
Based on the 1980 Stephen King short story and directed by Osgood Perkins (Longlegs), this jaunt involves an old-fashioned toy monkey that – would you believe? – is possessed by a curse that kills people in especially creative and distinctly gory ways.
Twin brothers Hal & Bill (Theo James) discover the dreaded thing as kids and as adults must put their differences aside to rid the world of the metallic simian once and for all, even though it appears indestructible.
Fun for most of its length and proficient in delivering the excesses horror fans love to be repulsed by, this is a perfectly passable time killer, though it is yet another genre piece where there’s a trade-off between the humour and the horror, so while there are laughs there ain’t many scares.
It puts oldies in mind of the days when films like An American Werewolf in London (1981), Creepshow (1982) and Return of the Living Dead (1985) showed you could have both.
Ah, the eighties. What didn’t that decade deliver?
BIRD ***1/2 (119 minutes) MA
In a lyrically directed social realist tract from superb British independent writer/director Andrea Arnold (Red Road; Fish Tank) we are immersed into the jagged, squalid world of Bailey (Nykiya Adams), a 12 year-old girl whose life is defined by aimless time-killing in a decrepit, semi-abandoned, graffiti-strewn housing estate.
Angry with her tattoo-covered dad (Barry Keoghan) about his impending marriage to a flaky woman he met only three months prior she’s in full-on defiance mode, eager to join the gang of her brother (Jason Buda), which likes conducting daring daylight home invasions and bashing people who, they believe, are abusive towards kids and spouses.
Into her jangled headspace – which, significantly, is completely unperturbed by truant officers or welfare officials – enters an enigmatic wanderer called Bird (Franz Rogowski), an eccentric soul in search of his lost family who Bailey bonds with, his unanchored existence being similar to hers. They each appear to ground each other, emotionally and even spiritually.
In a singular achievement, Arnold and cinematographer Robbie Ryan (who has shot five of her films and three for Ken Loach) use rough hand-held imagery to create the illusion that everything we see was caught on the fly, yet the film builds to a daring final reel that has been deftly built to with impressive subtlety. In lesser hands, the gift the film bestows on viewers wouldn’t have worked so beautifully.
As for Bailey, the arc she traverses that reveals how the value of friendship, family and love can lie beneath the surface of a hard life and not only make life on the bottom rung bearable, they can allow even a meagre soul such as her to transcend her circumstances and be blessed with truly touching moments of magic.
GRAND TOUR **1/2 (129 minutes) M
In this deliriously fractured arthouse behemoth, British civil servant Edward (Goncalo Waddington) is overwhelmed by a major case of cold feet while awaiting the arrival of his wife-to-be Molly (Crista Alfaiate) at a port in Rangoon.
It’s 1918, the Brits are in charge and Edward heads for the hills away from the confused and deluded Molly, who embarks on an ill-defined quest to locate him.
That reasonably coherent story strand, filmed in monochrome, is then intercut with full-colour footage of modern South-East Asian streetscapes, people and places.
The time-jumping vision of director Miguel Gomes amounts to an intermittently engaging but ultimately diffuse and diluted art movie jumble sale with a deliberately disjointed flow, discordant jump cuts and timeline mashing.
It’s a diverting sit for about half its running time before it slowly dawns on you that the so-called Grand Tour is essentially a stream of prettily packaged waffle, often beautifully shot, but adding up to little more than a ramble that gradually peters out.