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…

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…

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…

Watched after reading about Bogdanovich's involvement in The Other Side of the Wind . Funny that the decision to go without color and in favor of deep focus was a collaborative decision between Bogdanovich and Welles. The latter seemed to have his hands in so many projects that weren't his own...

The film itself is enjoyable, though not as gripping as I'd been expecting. An admirable commentary on the decay of Old Hollywood and, in many ways, small-town America. While good, I think The Last Picture Show is missing something; it seems to lack an intangible intensity /uncompromising creativity that separates the impressive from the spectacular. As Welles would say, "A film is never really good unless the camera is…