The Last Picture Shows

Name: The Last Picture Shows
Duration: 1 h 18 min

1hr 18m

3.6/5 (242)

1hr 18m
3.6/5 (242)

A journey into the American West on a search for traces of what was once a center of small-town life: the movie theater. Director Rustin Thompson travels… More Details »

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Release Date:

Aug 7, 2026

Runtime:

1hr 18m

Synopsis

A journey into the American West on a search for traces of what was once a center of small-town life: the movie theater. Director Rustin Thompson travels 10,000 miles to visit over 100 rural movie theaters in 10 states in the West. He finds the physical remnants of what were once vibrant theaters, now gathering dust or repurposed as gyms, banks etc. He meets the theater owners struggling to keep movies on the big screen while fighting streaming, inflexible distributors, rising costs and many more obstacles to staying open.

Moviegoers are saying

Reviewers describe Rustin Thompson's *The Last Picture Shows* as a bittersweet love letter and elegy for small-town cinemas, shaped by 10,000 miles of travel and 123 theaters visited. Viewers single out the moment a photographed theater slowly dissolves into an empty lot, and the golden-hour shots of lit-up marquees against western skies. Oddly, the numeric ratings (4 to 5 out of 10) sit well below reviews that are almost uniformly warm, so the prose is a better guide to how audiences felt.

Top Mentions

Tear-Jerker

Golden-Hour-Elegy

Marquee-Melancholy

Indie-Theater-Heroes

Sky-Scorched-Sunsets

Small-Town-Lifeline

Summary generated from the text of Atom User reviews

Letterboxd User Reviews

3.6

RATINGS 1 FANS

3.6

Aug 16, 2026

I have spent an embarrassing amount of time on Cinema Treasures. If you're unfamiliar with the website, it's essentially an enormous archive of movie theaters, both the ones that still exist and the ones that have disappeared. You can look up some theater you vaguely…

49 Likes

Paul Thomas

Mar 8, 2026

my thoughts before seeing this: maybe I need to be grudgingly grateful for the mcu for keeping theaters open & people going me now that I know how these studios treat small theaters: I hope I can see the end to the marvel cinematic universe in my lifetime

40 Likes

jordan!

Jun 12, 2026

as a single-screen theater owner, this definitely didn’t have me crying the entire time really heartwarming to see how many other people care about movies and preservation as much as we do

38 Likes

rlobaugh
Jul 30, 2026

Bittersweet, heartfelt, reflective, moving, and beautifully shot. Simultaneously both a love letter and obituary to small town cinemas that really made me appreciate having a place like Hollywood Theatre 🥲 ** followed by a Q&A with the director ** ➕ best of the best…

21 Likes

Cory Haynes 🤍

Jun 12, 2026

I love our big gay communist movie club house.

20 Likes

Dalton

Oct 19, 2026

man, i love movies

7 Likes

Elias Bassett
Oct 12, 2026

There's unfathomable love in every frame, both from the filmmaker for the theaters he captures and from the theater owners who are almost all doing it for the love of the art form. Far from a funeral for the small town indie theater, it's a hopeful look at a changing…

8 Likes

Cody

Aug 25, 2026

A cat named cinema

13 Likes

scaffids

Jul 30, 2026

Really lovely and touching — a road trip throughout 2 lane highways from small Western town to small Western town to document cinemas, movie theaters, and drive-ins, ruined, repurposed, or best of all kept alive for the benefit of the local community. I had expected to…

13 Likes

VJ