Photo © Roadside Attractions
Pamela Anderson in ‘The Last Showgirl’
Pamela Anderson in ‘The Last Showgirl’
Afloat
(IndiePix DVD/Digital)
With quick, brilliant strokes, director Aslihan Ünaldi’s Afloat (2023) establishes the setting, the characters and their history. In Afloat, a Turkish family “reunites” for a vacation on the father Yusuf’s sailboat, but the fissures between them widen and grow painfully acute. Documentary filmmaker Zeynep, living in New York for the past decade, brings along her husband, a Columbia professor. She wants to make a film about the refugee crisis, but Yusuf, a controversial but beloved columnist, cautions her. Yusuf is politically progressive, with a dubious personal life, and the threat of his imprisonment by Turkey’s increasingly repressive regime hangs over the vacation. With its broad human sympathies, Afloat is closer to a Chekov play than anything Hollywood has produced in the past few years. (David Luhrssen)
Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
(In Theaters Jan. 10)
Writer-director Christian Gudegast returns with this sequel to his 2018 Den of Thieves. Gerard Butler and O’Shea Jackson Jr. also return as Big Nick and Donnie, respectively. With Nick’s cop job gone and his domestic life in tatters, he's motivated to seek out Donnie, the one criminal Nick couldn’t catch, now living in Europe. Although Nick is being pursued by shadowy forces, he’s determined to make a big score when he muscles his way onto Donnie’s crew. Donnie's employed by a well-funded syndicate that includes thieves played by Evin Ahmad, Salvatore Esposito and Swen Temmel. Paced at breakneck speed, the relentless action and morally dubious characters eat up much of nearly three hours. The film is most engaging when focused on the complex crime at its core, itself modeled on 2003's Antwerp diamond heist. (Lisa Miller)
The Last Showgirl
(In Theaters Jan. 10)
Shelly (Pamela Anderson) personifies the dying milieu of Las Vegas showgirls. At 57, she’s spent 35 years relying on boobs and feathers, only to learn her show is soon to be closed. Shelly isn’t interested in the one man who cares for her. He’s her show producer (Dave Bautista). Shelly’s best friend is an aging, (hilariously caricatured) cocktail waitress (played fearlessly by 65-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis), whose alcohol-fueled rage is a disaster-in-waiting. Add to this Shelly’s efforts to land another gig while trying to reconnect with the resentful daughter she neglected as a child. The film, directed by Francis Ford Coppola’s granddaughter Gina, and written by Coppola in-law Kate Gersten, gets a further lift from Gina’s cousin, Jason Schwartzman, making a brief appearance as a Vegas show director. The film’s cost-conscious budget blends appropriately with its neon and rhinestone locations. While the characters feel familiar, this peek behind the curtain rates a look. (Lisa Miller)
Vixen
(Severin Blu-ray)
Vixen (1968) can be seen as a take-down of the era’s Hollywood conventions—from industrial films to soap operas and B-minus biker flicks—complete with a know-it-all voiceover narrator. The eponymous Vixen is a male libido fantasy gone bonkers, a woman who’ll have sex at almost any time with almost any man—almost, because she’s a raging racist. The movie takes a sideways glance at the Vietnam War and other contemporary issues. Director Russ Meyer got his start in the World War II Signal Corps (some of his footage showed up in Patton) and made bushels of cash on the ‘60s-‘70s grindhouse, drive-in circuit. Unlike, say, Edgar Ulmer, he was a low-budgeted filmmaker with no apparent artistic ambitions. He quit filmmaking when he made enough money to retire. Nevertheless, this 4K restoration was sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art. Also reissued are Meyers’ sequels, SuperVixens (1975) and Beneath the Valley of the UltraVixens (1979). (David Luhrssen)
