I'm going to save some time and space here and just say that The Last Picture Show might be the greatest coming-of-age movie I've ever seen. I cannot come up with a single aspect about it I could find fault in, and the amount of content it packs into its two hour run-time is incredible. Heartbreaking, hilarious, moody, moving, Bogdanovich and McMurtry capture that small town feel, and (like Stand By Me or even A Christmas Story) manage to authentically and honestly date the film in a way that nostalgia for a time and place I've never experienced was overwhelming. There's a good deal of humor to go along with the almost physical growing pains Timothy Bottoms goes through. While…

90/100

A feel-bad movie for the ages, shot in shimmering b&w and populated by unlined young faces to make you swoon (plus careworn old faces to make you weep). Sonny's the nominal protagonist but the film bounces around Anarene at will, laying waste to any romanticized notion of small-town America...and yet it doesn't feel cynical, only brutally honest. Ellen Burstyn sets the tone as Jacy's mother, dispensing advice so hard-won and practical that it can only be ignored; Ben Johnson serves as nostalgic counterpoint, in the movie's only nod to outright sentiment. Bogdanovich, meanwhile, demonstrates a mastery of old-school composition—boots jutting from an open car window at foreground left as figures approach from background right—that seems to have been lost…

Y'see? You shouldn't have come here. I'm around that corner now. You've ruined it and it's lost completely. Just your needing me won't make it come back.

Growing up sucks. You lose all your carefree spirit, you get more and more responsibilities, and your life just changes completely that makes you feel uncomfortable. Wouldn't it be nice if we all could've stayed 16 and carefree for the rest of our days? Not a worry in the world? No bills, no kids, no commitments? It's all just a hassle, am I right?

Auteur Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show beautifully personifies this stage of life, with a deteriorating 1950's small town as its backdrop. Like the characters, the town itself is…

This is a film I've always had some sort of a connection with in spirit. Even though I'm not one to speak from the generation to which it presents, there's a specific pleasantness to which Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show creates that has always enamoured me from the first moment I saw it. The Last Picture Show is a film that is drenched in nostalgia, but of a time and a paradise where we saw everything was easier for our own selves. The Last Picture Show's title alone hints at a sort of resentment to what the world around it has become and how its people have found such a comfort. Life without films, life without glory, The Last…

Peter Bogdanovich's 'The Last Picture Show' serves as a time capsule for the '50s in a way that none of the censor-influenced films of the decade truly could. 'TLPS' is sexual and emotionally raw and a far cry from the eternal optimism of Hollywood. Instead we witness the death of a small Texas town that never really appeared to be living in any real sense anyway.

A young cast perfectly display the frustration of growing up in a town which culture has bypassed almost entirely - the closing of the town's cinema marking the end of its connection with the rest of the world. Without any real entertainment, sex is used as a game, which inevitably fractures relationships between friends…

The Ultimate Challenge - Film #16

"One thing I know for sure. A person can't sneeze in this town without somebody offering them a handkerchief."

The Last Picture Show essentially feels like any other 70's coming-of-age drama. It has that tender balance between the tame films from before New Hollywood and the ostensibly more realistic and raw films from the 90's and onwards. It is paced slowly but surely, as it flows between a handful of different characters who live their lives in the last dying breath of a small Texas town. All of them try but none of them seem to succeed in finding that one thing that drives both young and old: love. As they hastily force sex…

What's really left to say about such a magnificent time capsule of a movie? Almost seems surreal that I'd only seen it once before, as my memories of so much of The Last Picture Show were startlingly clear—the ambiance; the sumptuous black-and-white photography; the depiction of a dying town and era, of youthful blooming and sexual exploration; of intensely felt insecurities, manifested in so many different ways by so many different, fascinating characters. There's just no filler—Sonny's (Timothy Bottoms) the ostensible lead, but really, you could make a compelling case for Jacy (unforgettably played by a sultry, coquettish Cybil Shepard, who blends brash projections of her blossoming femininity and her deep sense of self-doubt with astounding assuredness) as the film's…