The Last Showgirl

Shelly has danced in the same Las Vegas revue for thirty years when she learns the show is closing. That is the whole plot: the weeks left before it shuts, and the fact that Shelly knows how to do nothing else. Kate Gersten wrote it, out of an unproduced play, and the source is real: the closing of Jubilee, one of the last long-running Vegas revues. Gia Coppola met Gersten in 2020 and came aboard. It was shot in Las Vegas in January 2024, in eighteen days. Backstage and casino scenes were filmed at the Rio. Pamela Anderson plays Shelly, in what was widely treated as the turn of her career: unmade-up, unprotected, and openly in conversation with her own past. Jamie Lee Curtis plays Annette, a cocktail waitress, and Dave Bautista the stage manager. It premiered in Toronto in September 2024. Who it is for: viewers who like quiet films about a trade and a body going out of use at the same time. Who it is not for: anyone who wants structure. The script is loose, several supporting figures are left half-drawn, and the film leans almost entirely on Anderson's face.