Thursday, February 27, 2025

It's all in how Fernanda Torres carries herself in her Oscar-nominated turn in I'm Still Here – shoulders high, brow tensed but not knotted, and jaw jutted slightly forward. She looks as proud and elegant as a marble bust. The world around her character, Eunice Paiva, mother of five and wife of former congressman Rubens, has collapsed into an ugly chorus of helicopter blades, army trucks, and stomping boots. It's 1970, in Rio de Janeiro, and Brazil is under a military dictatorship that would last until 1985. Yet she will remain indefatigable.

Rubens has been ferried away by men in casual leather jackets with guns at their hips to give a "deposition". That's what they say. His family will never see him again. It will be 25 years before Eunice is able to hold his death certificate in her hands. These are all real people and real events, intimately captured by director Walter Salles in his first narrative feature since his 2012 adaptation of Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

Read the full review here. 

Out this week: 

Pamela Anderson makes her mark in Gia Coppola's tender portrait of Vegas workers, The Last Showgirl (****), while Josh Hartnett goes ham in the derivatively bonkers Fight or Flight (**) and Tang dynasty poets find their paths deeply interwoven in the epic Chinese animation Chang'an (****). 

Written by Clarisse Loughrey

The first moments of The Last Showgirl hit like a static shock. We know the face that occupies its frames – shot tight, unnervingly tight – all too well. It belongs to Pamela Anderson, the pop culture behemoth and unfairly maligned bombshell who, in recent years, has wrested back the narrative through a stint in Chicago on Broadway, a paired autobiography and documentary, and a decision to go makeup free at public events. She's come into full ownership, now, of the power that was always hers, generated by that megawatt smile, in those hazy blue eyes and peroxide blonde curls.

In Gia Coppola's portrait of an artist in the midst of identity collapse, though, Anderson's Shelly Gardner, a showgirl we first meet mid-audition, seems shockingly vulnerable. Her smile is a nervous twitch. Her eyes dart left and right. When an offscreen voice (Jason Schwartzman, cousin to Coppola, who's the granddaughter of Francis Ford) asks Shelly her age, it's as if she's just been struck by the interrogator's spotlight. "36?" she whimpers. "Sorry, I lied, I'm 42." She's 57. "Distance helps!" she jokes.

It doesn't feel quite right to say The Last Showgirl is Anderson's comeback role. But it does feel significant – a way to memorialise, on film, the kind of career she's wanted to shape for herself, by playing a character who's less an echo of herself than an echo of what she's had to fight against. There is something raw and honest in all of Shelly's self-effacing giggles. Coppola's film doesn't just tackle the cruel dismissal of women who dare to age, but of every modern artist's deepest fear: that the day will come when the bottom falls out of their industry, leaving them with nothing to show for it but a lifetime of sacrifice.

Shelly has been with the Vegas revue show Le Razzle Dazzle for three decades. Her younger colleagues, Jodie (Kiernan Shipka) and Mary-Anne (Brenda Song), don't value their work beyond the paycheque. But Shelly feels immense pride in it and can barely sustain a conversation without alluding to its prestige origins as "the last descendant of Parisian Lido culture". So when the show's producer Eddie (Dave Bautista, proving he's at his best in quiet, soulful roles) announces its closure, it's accompanied by the drone sound of Shelly's entire universe imploding.

Read the full review here. 

A document of where I've gone and the things I've seen 

Friday, 21 February
I celebrated my friend's 40th birthday with a marathon of the original Jurassic Park trilogy. I'd completely forgotten Alessandro Nivola, astounding in The Brutalist, was in the third one! 

Wednesday, 26 February 

I attended an early screening of One of Them Days, which stars Keke Palmer and SZA as giddily charismatic besties. You'll be able to read my review next week. 

Wednesday, 27 February  

It's near-three hours, and its story is a little stretched, but Chang'an – China's 4th ever highest-grossing animated film – finds real moments of tenderness in its portraits of Tang dynasty poets Gao Shi and Li Bai.

Alessandro Nivola and Adrien Brody in 'The Brutalist' (A24) 

To write about Cruising (1980) in any coherent way involves an act of chemistry. We must refine and separate what the film is, what it was, and what it has become. In today's sexless Hollywood, there's a real thrill to some of its BDSM sequences, and to the constant soundtrack hum of leather against metal against bare flesh. Yet, when its script first leaked, Village Voice columnist Arthur Bell warned that it would be "the most oppressive, ugly, bigoted look at homosexuality ever presented on screen", leading to sustained protests that made it essentially impossible to record sound live on location. 

In the documentary The Celluloid Closet (1996), screenwriter Ron Nyswaner describes how he and his boyfriend were targeted by a group of men, one of whom yelled the words, "If you saw the movie Cruising, you'd know what you deserve." Yet, at the same time, there were men from within the BDSM scene who viewed the protests by gay rights activists as an attack on their own community, centred around certain ideas of "respectability". Several leather bars, namely The Anvil and The Mine Shaft, participated in the shoot. 

In short, there's very little coherence when it comes to what Cruising represents and to whom; especially considering the crucial point in queer history from which it emerged, one at the frontier of liberation, yet so shortly before the devastation of the AIDS epidemic would begin. "It was not the best foot forward, obviously, for the gay movement," its director, William Friedkin would state in 2012. "I understand and recognise that now." 

It is a voyeuristic film – unavoidably so. Friedkin was an outsider to the community, curiously pressing his nose up against the glass. He was always upfront about his intentions, that he was inspired by a string of real-life murders in the BDSM scene (the primary suspect, a radiologic technologist convicted in the death of film industry journalist Addison Verrill, had appeared in a scene in The Exorcist) and found such unfamiliar milieu dramatically alluring. Clearly, the film wants to get some kind of rise out of heterosexual audiences, as it looms over the image of a pre-fisting fist all lubed up and ready, while every patron of these bars wears an expression that can only be described as "confrontational". 

Yet, so much of the discourse around Cruising feels unsettled because the film itself is. Friedkin sprinkles in enough psychoanalysis to make it clear that the murders themselves are an expression of internalised homophobia – the killer's catchphrase is "you made me do that", after all – attached to a distant, scornful father figure. Therefore, the implication that the final murder was committed by the investigating officer, Steve Burns (Al Pacino), also heavily suggests that Burns's admission that "things are happening to me", while undercover in the leather scene, refers to a battle with his own repressed sexuality. 

What exactly is going on in that head of his, however, is a total mystery. Much of that ambiguity is intentional, though inevitably impacted by the 40 minutes cut from the film, which more explicitly showed Burns's seduction into the scene. Cruising is fascinating because it invites its audience to bring much of themselves to its interpretation. It's also frustrating for those very same reasons. 

Cruising is now available on a 2-disc Limited Edition 4K UHD. 

Paul Newman with his wife Joanne Woodward.

(Photo by Alan Meek/Express/Getty Images)

Arrow is set to release Dressed To Kill  on Limited Edition 4K UHD on 3 March. I'll be revisiting the film. 

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