Critics reviews

The greatest strengths of The Last Picture Show are its warm (and cold) sense of environment, community, and character. Although it is a beautifully made film, it rarely feels self-consciously so. There is a true sense of authenticity and realism in its casting, sense of place, and combination of sound and image.

Peter Bogdanovich’s elegiac masterpiece... The Last Picture Show is a coming-of-age movie set in a dead town, which might technically qualify it as a zombie movie... There’s no getting around the fact that [the film] is a bleak affair, made all the more piercing for cinephiles when the film inevitably follows through on its title. What does survive this existential decline are the small kindnesses that still pass between the citizens of this town.

Through the detailed, formal but never stodgy, and incredibly lived-in excellence of Bogdanovich's direction (and production designer Polly Platt) we are immediately transported right into this world that, at the time, was 20 year ago, but we don't feel simple nostalgia about it (though we wished these places still existed. I do anyway). As beautifully shot and as intriguing as this town is, it also appears hard and unforgiving.

To watch the The Last Picture Show is to step inside it. Once you're over the threshold, its heavy truths continue to disconcert long after the credits. Best cancel your post-screening plans and build in some recovery time, especially if you've aged any since you last saw it. Few movies are more poisonously enveloping; the only antidote I know is to cue up Hank Williams and lie on the floor.

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW is a beautiful evocation not only of old times, but also of the possibility--whether great or small--time once held.

The Last Picture Show was one of the first films to employ a song score, comprised exclusively of period-specific tunes... Though this sort of thing has been done to death since... it’s never been handled with as much impactful subtlety.

The Last Picture Show is an unfaltering masterpiece... the film stands apart from its contemporaries, in ‘that 1970s New Hollywood era’, as one which effortlessly blends classic Hollywood filmmaking with the kind of restless anger and angst which typified other features of the period.

When "The Last Picture Show" opened in 1971, it created a sensation... It felt new and old at the same time... The film has an unadorned honesty that came as a jolt after the pyrotechnics of the late 1960s. While the "Easy Rider" generation was celebrating a heedless freedom, Bogdanovich went back to the directness and simplicity of Ford, who he admired no less than Welles.

Bogdanovich's perfect recreation of the sense of time and place, and his ability to mix wit with poignancy that make this such a charming, timeless film.

The film tells a series of interlocking stories of love and loss that are on the sentimental edge of "Winesburg, Ohio," but that illuminate a good deal more of one segment of the American experience than any other American film in recent memory.