Kim Cattrall‘s performance in Meet Monica Valour (limited, 4.8) has, I feel, broken her out of that MILFy blonde-sexpot Sex in the City persona and shown she can get down, dig deeply and go for broke. This on top of her less-than-large-scaled but respectable performance Roman Polanski‘s The Ghost Writer, I mean. She’s forgiven, she’s cool…she’s earned entry into the serious-over-40-actress club.

Now, if only I could learn to shut up when an interview subject is talking and not go “hmm,” “uh-huh” and “yeah” all the time. I need to go to school to learn to stop doing this.

From my 2.18 Meet Monica Velour review: “Velour actually has a clear theme — a kid growing up by way of dispensing with illusion. And it offers a genuinely strong and ballsy performance from Kim Cattrall as an aging ex-erotic actress on the skids and heading further down — alcoholic, lumpy-bodied, living in a trailer park. And a relatively steady and affecting one from Dustin Ingram (Glee), who’s 20 or 21 now but plays 17 in the film. (Velour was shot in ’07, it appears.)

“The story is relatively well-shaped and believable as far as it goes, and you can tell right away that Bearden knows how to direct and cut as opposed to just adequately shoot a script. There’s a slight problem in his dialogue having a kind of ‘written’ quality, and some of the scenes feeling a little too ‘acted,’ but both are of a somewhat higher (or at least above-average) order so there’s not much interference

“Bearden persuading Cattrall to gain weight and look extra over-the-hill wasn’t, it turns out, such a bad idea. There’s always an impulse to applaud an attractive actress when she appears in a physically unflattering way, and I’m doing that here, but Cattrall goes the extra distance, I feel, in portraying what feels like despair but to actually be that, so to speak. She shows chops in this film that I’ve never seen before. I’m almost ready to forgive her for Sex and the City 2.”