This spare and beguiling movie directed by Rustin Thompson opens with a quote from Esther Kinsky’s novel “Seeing Further,” which is about a woman trying to revive a gone-to-seed movie theater in Hungary: “A trip to the cinema expands the world and stretches time.” Many have lost sight of the value of that, as streaming services and home theaters have made movie watching a platform-neutral if not platform-indifferent activity.
In “The Last Picture Shows,” Thompson celebrates old-school movie houses while also meditating on their possible extinction. He focuses on theaters in the western United States. As such, he includes a lot of shots of wide-open spaces bisected by narrow highways, with big blue skies overhead. It’s funny, given that the movie is lauding indoor boxes where you sit in the dark.
At dusk, the neon-lit marquees of theaters with names like the Dome, the Gem, and the Eltrym (that last being the original owner’s name, Myrtle, spelled backward) come to life … and many of them are force-fed studio bombs like “Shazam! Fury of the Gods,” which the theater owners clearly resent.
One reason these houses have trouble surviving is that they are obliged by studios to run such arguably uninspiring fare for weeks at a time. The theater owners profiled are a feisty bunch. And Ross Melnick, a professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, chimes in with a history of small-town cinemas. The narratives are compelling, but the movie’s lyrical and elegiac tone makes it truly resonant.
The Last Picture Shows Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. In theaters.
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