The Last Showgirl
Roadside Attractions | Release Date: December 13, 2024 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
66
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 44 Critic Reviews
Positive:
29
Mixed:
14
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
Entertainment WeeklyMaureen Lee LenkerSep 9, 2024
[Coppola] crafts an elegy to a Vegas of a different era and the tarnished reality of once sparkling dreams. Read full review
90
The New York TimesManohla DargisJan 9, 2025
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. Read full review
90
Screen DailyRobert DanielsSep 9, 2024
The Last Showgirl is an achingly vulnerable picture that both catapaults Pamela Anderson into the awards conversation and stands as Gia Coppola’s best film to date. Read full review
85
Film ThreatSabina Dana PlasseJan 9, 2025
The Last Showgirl is a grand moment for Coppola, which she does well, especially with Anderson and Curtis, who are fully committed to their characters and well-studied for their roles. Read full review
83
ConsequenceLiz Shannon MillerJan 13, 2025
It’s a performance worthy of all the acclaim it’s received, not just because of the emotional impact that Anderson’s involvement brings. Her work is instead a reminder that none of us are obsolete as long as we keep breathing. We always have a chance to tell our stories. Read full review
83
IndieWireKate ErblandSep 9, 2024
The Last Showgirl is both the role of a lifetime for Anderson, one that can fully capture her incredible emotional intensity and vulnerability, and (we can only hope) the start of a brand new career for her. Read full review
80
The IndependentClarisse LoughreyMar 10, 2025
The director shows great empathy for the pull of self-romanticisation, even when it wounds the dreamer. Read full review
80
The Observer (UK)Wendy IdeMar 10, 2025
Anderson, whose character is left questioning not just what the future holds, but also the costly choices that shaped her past, is excellent, delivering a performance that has single-handedly rewritten the way she is viewed as an actor. Read full review
80
NMENick LevineFeb 28, 2025
It’s a rich character study that doesn’t sugarcoat the ageism Shelly faces, but also grants her a defiant sense of agency. Whatever you think of her choices, she’s lived life on her own terms. Read full review
80
Time OutElizabeth WeitzmanJan 8, 2025
The Last Showgirl may begin – as its ever-romantic heroine exclaims – with a shiny celebration of ‘breasts and rhinestones and joy!’ But in Gia Coppola’s (Palo Alto) sensitive telling, the glitter swiftly disperses to reveal an elegiac meditation on memory and age, femininity and beauty. Read full review
80
Screen RantGraeme GuttmannSep 9, 2024
The Last Showgirl isn't perfect - it's melodramatic by design, and it wears its heart on its sleeve. But Anderson's raw and unfiltered performance, one clearly tailor-made for her, makes up for the film's weaker elements, as does the chemistry between the cast. Read full review
80
BBCCaryn JamesSep 9, 2024
Coppola depicts their lives with sympathy but also with clear-eyed honesty about the dreams they never achieved and the youth that's impossible to reclaim. Read full review
80
ColliderShaina WeatherheadSep 9, 2024
With stunning performances, perfect needle drops, and thoughtful, loving direction, The Last Showgirl is a stylish, emotional, and visually striking work, and a worthy exploration of its impossible protagonist. Read full review
78
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerJan 9, 2025
Las Vegas may demolish its own history, but The Last Showgirl will break your heart by showing you a woman clinging to the rubble of her life. Read full review
75
Washington PostJen YamatoJan 10, 2025
Anderson is radiant playing this daffy optimist who rambles in breathy clips about past glories, as if the world around her hasn’t moved on since the days of Siegfried & Roy. Read full review
75
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldJan 8, 2025
Anderson, who may well have been waiting her entire career for a role this rich, finds something sweet and haunting in Shelly, whose whispery voice sounds like a shadow and who sees art and value where Hannah sees tacky exploitation. Read full review
75
Chicago Sun-TimesRichard RoeperJan 7, 2025
It’s not shocking or groundbreaking or attention-getting; it’s just consistently good at telling the story of a handful of characters who feel fully lived in and utterly real. Read full review
75
ObserverRex ReedJan 2, 2025
Sensitively directed by Francis Ford Coppola’s granddaughter, Gia Coppola, it’s a film about a familiar subject, but with a heart as big as the Vegas strip and a style of its own that holds interest from start to finish. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comSheila O'MalleyDec 13, 2024
Anderson’s accomplishment here defies easy comparison. It’s not a comeback. It’s a beginning. Read full review
75
The Film StageChristopher SchobertSep 9, 2024
The result is a smart, emotionally satisfying exploration of people who may no longer have a place in modern Las Vegas. Read full review
70
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeFeb 26, 2025
The dialogue in one pathetically desperate audition sequence is withering in its authenticity. But credit must go to Anderson for turning this staple of drama – like Olivier in The Entertainer, a hopeless victim of changing fashion – into a living, breathing human being. Read full review
70
New York Magazine (Vulture)Roxana HadadiJan 10, 2025
The Last Showgirl is reluctant to abandon the limelight. Amid its hesitation for resolution, though, it proves how much more Anderson has left to give. Read full review
70
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneySep 9, 2024
Even if The Last Showgirl feels slender overall, more consistently attentive to aesthetics and atmosphere than psychological profundity, there’s moving empathy in its portrait of Shelly and women like her, their sense of self crumbling as they become cruelly devalued. Read full review
67
Original-CinThom ErnstJan 16, 2025
Yes, Anderson is good, but it’s the film that ultimately lets her down. Read full review
67
The A.V. ClubBrianna ZiglerDec 12, 2024
It’s Pamela Anderson’s deceptively fragile performance that shoulders The Last Showgirl, her breathy, girlish rasp the perfect match for Shelly’s fluttery chatterbox personality. She is captivating, fully dissolved in the character, and it’s evident the extent to which Anderson is injecting her performance with her own complicated feelings towards aging, success, and spectatorship. Read full review
67
The PlaylistGregory EllwoodSep 9, 2024
Coppola packs a lot into the film’s 85-minute runtime, but in many ways, the complete experience feels like a slight tease. There is more to explore. There are other portions of Shelly’s life or Coppola’s increasingly poetic perspective of Vegas itself that are calling. But some moments overcome the film’s thin narrative facade and not just Anderson’s triumphant climax, either. Read full review
65
ABC NewsPeter TraversJan 3, 2025
Gia Coppola’s film has no more than a sketch of a plot, but soars on the quietly devastating performance of former Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson as an aging Vegas showgirl who learns her hopelessly outdated dance revue has been given the hook after 30 years. Read full review
63
Chicago TribuneMichael PhillipsJan 10, 2025
The results in this, Coppola’s third feature, are roughly half-good, half-less. The good comes when the director, working with cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, focuses on evocative silent footage serving as interludes and visual grace notes capturing Shelly, primarily, in moments of reflection. The dialogue and the dramaturgy, in contrast, strain for jokes and over-ladle the pathos. Read full review
63
Slant MagazineRocco T. ThompsonDec 8, 2024
The film is less a character study than a numbly tragic workaday fantasia held aloft by Pamela Anderson in a performance that seems to grasp beyond the bleary-eyed edges of Gia Coppola’s screen for larger truths about the choices women make to feel seen. Read full review
60
Little White LiesMark AschFeb 28, 2025
Like Imitation of Life, The Last Showgirl treats high-gloss femininity as a form of false consciousness, an ideal imposed upon women that ends up alienating them from each other, particularly mothers from their daughters. Read full review
60
The TelegraphRobbie CollinFeb 28, 2025
It’s an absorbing but disappointingly tasteful watch. Read full review
60
iChristina NewlandFeb 28, 2025
There is a lot to garner from Anderson’s performance as a woman who has spent her life as the vessel of other people’s lust and projection; that is the main attraction of The Last Showgirl. But without the narrative scaffolding or depth to surround her character, Coppola’s film can often feel like a message in search of a movie. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawFeb 26, 2025
It is a strong turn from Anderson, though, whose fans are entitled to wonder if it is she, and not Demi Moore, who deserves this year’s “comeback queen” crown. Read full review
60
EmpireMiriam BelanescuFeb 24, 2025
Not quite a showstopper, but this reflection on womanhood boasts noteworthy performances across the board, especially from Pamela Anderson and a surprisingly tender Dave Bautista. Read full review
60
Los Angeles TimesAmy NicholsonJan 9, 2025
Only Anderson’s part with all its hazy contradictions — neither comic nor tragic, neither pathetic nor heroic, neither subtle nor showy — seems, to transcend. More than the film around her, Anderson earns our respect. Read full review
60
Arizona RepublicDina KaurJan 7, 2025
Ultimately “The Last Showgirl” is worth watching for its final scene alone, but a lack of character and relationship-building leads to the film being as deep as a kiddie pool. Read full review
56
Paste MagazineRory DohertyDec 12, 2024
At once Coppola’s most coherent and least interesting film to date, The Last Showgirl feels designed for pre-release award body screenings, where its most unique elements – a worthy, game ensemble cast! An arresting lead performance! A careful, loving attention to showgirl decor and costuming! – can be itemized and lauded on a voting ballot, rather than them adding to a complex and effective film. Read full review
55
The Daily BeastNick SchagerSep 7, 2024
A shallow and slender tale of lousy dreams, worse decisions, and painful regrets, all of it predicated on a lead turn that’s too one-note to wow. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Saffron MaeveJan 17, 2025
The sentiment of being thrown to the margins of an industry that seemed predestined to carry you is certainly an interesting point of departure, but the resulting film often feels stagnant, unable to square its romantic impulses – as a frustrated Shelly puts it in one scene, “this is breasts and rhinestones and joy!” – with the fraught realities of these characters. Read full review
50
Boston GlobeOdie HendersonJan 6, 2025
The movie is big and ostentatious when its delicate, sad story needed to be more quietly told. Anderson definitely understands this idea; despite playing a chaotic and unlikable character, she’s the most stable element here. Read full review
50
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliDec 25, 2024
Anderson’s performance is the selling point but one can rightly question whether it’s enough to bolster the malnourished narrative. Read full review
40
Wall Street JournalZachary BarnesJan 9, 2025
Did the film fail the actress? Or vice versa? In the case of The Last Showgirl, I’d say they failed each other. Read full review
40
Rolling StoneDavid FearJan 8, 2025
For a movie that continually asks its main character to recognize where dreams end and delusions begin, you wish it knew when to heed its own lessons. Read full review
20
The GuardianBenjamin LeeSep 9, 2024
The commentary on gender and age feels easy and unspecific and the world of the Vegas showgirl created from too great of a distance to really ring true. Read full review
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