The Last Shift

It sort of ambles along with no great imprint until a sharpish left turn as Cohn tries to transform his small-town drama into something far greater.

Trying to get a spark from a damp match is a lot harder than holding a flame to dry kindling.

It's another tour de force performance from Jenkins, in the same week as his headturning performance as the pater familias of a clan of grifters in Kajillionaire.

It's a low-key rest-stop story that appreciates life's banalities and the struggles of ordinary people.

So far, so good in the mismatched maybe-eventual-buddy-comedy department. But the movie... wants a deeper dimension.

The Last Shift is not nearly as challenging a production, both for Jenkins and audiences, but it is highly watchable.

The highly persuasive performances leave us with much to ponder, not least the suggestion that, for these two, as for America as a whole, mutual understanding will be a challenging process.

It gets the usual good performance from the character actor Richard Jenkins.

A wonderfully performed, if somewhat downbeat, portrait of the underbelly of the American Dream. It examines issues of white privilege, racial bias and how, despite the best of intentions, sometimes things just don't work out.

The writer and the elder try to open each other's eyes to reality, and their colliding minds add up to a thoroughly entertaining take on race, class, age, retirement, and morality.