1971 Directed by Peter Bogdanovich
High school seniors and best friends, Sonny and Duane, live in a dying Texas town. The handsome Duane is dating local beauty, Jacy, while Sonny is having an affair with the coach's wife, Ruth. As graduation nears, both boys contemplate their futures. While Duane eyes the army and Sonny takes over a local business, each boy struggles to figure out if he can escape this dead-end town and build a better life somewhere else.
Timothy Bottoms Jeff Bridges Cybill Shepherd Ben Johnson Cloris Leachman Ellen Burstyn Eileen Brennan Clu Gulager Sam Bottoms Sharon Ullrick Randy Quaid Bill Thurman Jessie Lee Fulton Helena Humann Barc Doyle Gary Brockette John Hillerman Joe Heathcock Kimberly Hyde Noble Willingham Janice O'Malley Grover Lewis
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…
The Last Picture Show is one of those films I see becoming one of my favourites. It's on the depressing side and is a little askew movie from Peter who like a QT or Richard Linklater just blows out his love for film in each and every cut of the frame.
The scene coverage is next to none, each and every time it cuts or switches between an already established shot; it is annoyingly poised and purposed. There are elements and dimensions in some scenes you haven't begun to notice. Somthing as simple as a foot peddle jolting you out and back in makes this film one of the finest performances from a director since I last watched Full Metal…
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…
I did not expect this movie to be such a bummer.
For many years, my grandfather would tell me this was his favorite movie. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m pretty surprised. It’s about a bunch of horny teenagers.
The cinematography is stunning, as are the leading ladies. Shepherd, Burstyn, and Leachman are all so beautiful here, especially juxtaposed against the desolate scenery. It feels longer than it really is, but there are some great moments, and Leachman certainly earned that Oscar.
In 1951, a group of high schoolers come of age in a bleak, isolated, atrophied West Texas town that is slowly dying, both culturally and economically.
A masterful film. The story is heartbreaking mostly but features such compelling characters and such humane decisions on their part. It's difficult not to identify with some of them, if only on the sense of alienation they feel. While all the actors are marvellous, Cloris Leachman steals the picture with her portrayal of a broken hearted woman.
This movie is a thousand times hornier than I expected.
Cybill Shepherd is so beautiful, it’s insane. This movie really makes a case for her as the American Jeanne Moreau. No wonder it’s such a Horny Film.
At first stark.
What am I watching? It's like a play.
This is darker than I remember my teen years being.
Trashy.
Everything is awkward.
Two back to back awkward undressing scenes.
Inept sex everywhere.
A masterful moment suddenly, at the fishing tank. What we live for when watching movies. The sun comes out at just the right moment.
A bleak and uncouth experience in some ways, and clumsy at times. But the film comes together in the end...I find I've grown attached to everyone, and wish I could spend a little more time with them.
I seem to be in the minority, but I was not at all charmed by this the way so many other people appear to have been.
A technically proficient film about coming of age set in a basically dead small town in Texas from a bygone era, depicted in what felt like a very realistic way. The performances were mostly impressive, and the production design, the sepia tinted (I may have imagined the sepia from how dusty the town looked) black and white cinematography and the lighting contributed to a great looking film as well. That all sounds fine, but for 2 hours we just see a bunch of younger dudes and Cybill Shepherd being awful humans, and a bunch of older women getting chewed up and spit out by life. Oh and everyone being way too chill about that guy that abducted a little girl! Wtf.
To quote a Ben Folds song, “it hurts to grow up, but everybody does.” This movie is that sentiment made into film.
This movie may have been released in 1972 and may take place in 1951-1952, but the feelings are universal. Growing up sucks, and it hits you fast. In your late teens, everything seems great—you’re having fun with friends, you don’t have much in the way of responsibilities, and all the adults who tell you to start thinking about the future sound like stiff old people who forgot how to have fun.
And then you grow up and you realize they were right, and you slowly turn into one of them.
You feel for these characters, especially for Sonny…
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