Shelly (Pamela Anderson) is a dancer. She’s been with Le Razzle Dazzle, an outdated Las Vegas show that’s full of “breasts, rhinestones and joy”, in her words, for 30 years. And now it’s closing. Where can she go, at the age of 57?
film reviews
Nick Hasted
Longlegs’ trapdoor ending snapped tight on its clammy Lynchian mood, reconfiguring its Silence of the Lambs serial-killer yarn into a more slyly awful tale. Osgood Perkins’ hit fourth horror film seemed sure to elevate his career, but follow-up The Monkey is a resolutely minor, down and dirty B-movie, relishing cartoon gore and comic excess.
Demetrios Matheou
Just like Britain’s ‘stiff upper lip’, that indominable spirit in the face of adversity, Brazil has a dominant personality trait – open-hearted, ebullient – that tends to obscure the reality of its many social, economic and political travails.
Nick Hasted
In his first weeks in office, Harrison Ford’s US president survives an assassination attempt inside the White House, goes to war with Japan and mutates into Red Hulk when he gets mad, trashing said White House with a Stars and Stripes flag-holder. How unrealistically reasonable this looks, you may wistfully think. If only Ford, or a 10-foot monster, was in charge.
James Saynor
The Refugee Movie is rapidly becoming a genre unto itself, with elements of suspense and humanism woven together into something that’s very properly cinematic.
Films like Io Capitano and Green Border, tracking the tragic migrant trail to and through Europe, prick consciences and sweat palms in equal measure, but those two fine examples from last year were made by European directors on helicopter missions, as it were, to raise consciousness and to mine fresh seams of character.
Helen Hawkins
Bridget Jones has grown up: v.v.g. Our heroine is still prone to daft pratfalls and gaffes and bursts of sensational idiot dancing. But passing time has lent her an enhanced self-awareness that has nothing to do with calories consumed. This Bridget can bring the pinprick of tears to the eyes as well as make you laugh.
Markie Robson-Scott
“You know what they say: where there’s livestock, there’s dead stock,” says Jack (a brilliant Barry Keoghan). Never a truer word. There’s an awful lot of dead and maimed stock – sheep, to be precise – in Christopher Andrews’ gory, gloom-ridden directorial debut. Animal lovers will want to avert their eyes. The film is undeniably powerful, with fine performances, but the unremitting violence ends up feeling cartoonish and empty.
Demetrios Matheou
There’s a common understanding about journalists, especially ones at the top of their game, that they’re flying by the seat of their pants – propelled by adrenalin, deadlines, ambition and, just occasionally, righteousness.
September 5 encapsulates all of that, bar the virtue perhaps, and with the concrete deadline replaced by another practical pressure – of live broadcast – and the ethical decisions that arise when the story in front of the camera is literally one of life or death.
David Nice
A colleague once told me that I shouldn’t take Mike Leigh’s films with contemporary settings as slices of everyday life. He was right: they’re hyperreal. Especially Hard Truths, in which his take on a woman both depressed and angry – it’s possible to be both more or less simultaneously – packs years of grievances and unacceptable verbal abuse into a very short period of time.
Helen Hawkins
“A countercultural sketch show full of unknowns, with no script, no structure.” The verdict of NBC’s head of talent about the embryonic Saturday Night Live expresses everything audiences loved about it when it first aired in 1975.
To capture the anarchic birth of this TV institution, Jason Reitman has made a stylish film that initially seems as wayward as the show. But it gradually comes to seem like the obvious way to handle the material.