5 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

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5 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

‘The Last Showgirl’

Pamela Anderson stars as Shelly, a Vegas showgirl facing her final curtain call.

From our review:

Directed by Gia Coppola (“Palo Alto”) from a script by Kate Gersten, “The Last Showgirl” tells a familiar story of bad luck and outwardly questionable choices with gentleness, a great deal of love for its characters and an obvious appreciation for the affirming highs and bitter lows that age and beauty afford. Modestly scaled and loosely plotted, it is an unusually tender movie and an ideal vehicle for Coppola’s gift for expressing the intangible and the ephemeral.

In theaters. Read the full review.

A diamond heist in the rough.

‘Den of Thieves 2: Pantera’

In this sequel, Big Nick (Gerard Butler) teams up with the expert thief Donnie Wilson (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) to rob the World Diamond Center.

From our review:

Nick and Donnie’s sudden friendship gives the writer-director Christian Gudegast’s film a shaggy hangout movie feel not unlike “Fast & Furious” (2009). Cop and robber party together, share their pained back stories and unoriginal jokes about French cuisine and evade a local police squad known as Pantera. … “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” isn’t groundbreaking, but it delivers what it promises: lovable scoundrels trading bullets and traversing borders.

In theaters. Read the full review.

An elite agent, a second-rate thriller.

‘Ad Vitam’

Franck (Guillaume Canet), a former elite agent, must rescue his wife from a group of mysterious armed men.

From our review:

“Ad Vitam,” directed by Rodolphe Lauga, is torn between allegiances. The film tries to emulate its peers’ lean, gritty formula but can’t resist sneaking in glamour locations like the Sacré-Coeur Basilica and Versailles. The minimal plot purports to endorse spartan storytelling but after a promising start the movie detours into an overlong flashback. This may be to give Franck emotional weight, but it only creates belly ****.

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. Read the full review.

Virtual connection, real-world consequences.

‘Eat the Night’

Apolline (Lila Gueneau) and her brother, Pablo (Théo Cholbi), bond by playing the same video game together every day. But as the game servers shut down amid Pablo’s new romance and his involvement in a drug-dealing turf war, the siblings’ relationship is tested.

From our review:

“Eat the Night,” set in Le Havre and directed by Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel, fidgets on the precipice of compelling. The young actors are excellent, their bland surroundings coolly captured by Raphaël Vandenbussche’s easygoing camera. The central gay romance has a rough-and-tumble warmth, and the videogame sequences are crafted to highlight Apolline’s growing loneliness. Yet with no actual life — or none that we see beyond an unexplained hostility to her father — Apolline remains as blank a canvas as her warrior avatar.

In theaters. Read the full review.

Cuban contemplations.

From our review:

The much-in-vogue hybrid mode proves more cryptic than edifying this time around. “Oceans Are the Real Continents” bears a significant resemblance to Roberto Minervini’s more galvanizing “What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?” — another case of an Italian filmmaker’s finding raw material in real lives in North America. Both films are shot in ******-and-white, and both unfold on parallel tracks.

In theaters. Read the full review.

Compiled by Kellina Moore.

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