“As the years go by, Peter Bogdanovich's film seems less and less American, despite its exact, dusty rendering of Panhandle flatness and hot streets where the wind frets for an accident, and despite the director's conjuring up of the spirit of classic Hollywood movies. The Last Picture Show is more affected by Renoir: it has a group of characters, all as important and as flawed and foolish as anyone else, and all of them right and wrong, trudging through life beneath the clouds of their own reasons.
“If everyone in the cast seems familiar or famous today, that is a testament to Bogdanovich's casting and to the performances in The Last Picture Show. Moreover, it is so rare to see a picture with equal understanding for and interest in the young and the generation of their parents, and with the desire to mix them together. Timothy and Sam Bottoms, Cybill Shepherd and Randy Quaid all show us the struggle between awkwardness and romanticism in teenagers. But where is there another movie with three women as lived-in but still as ardent as Cloris Leachman, Ellen Burstyn and Eileen Brennan? Ben Johnson's Sam the Lion is as bleak as he is warm, a man who can look out across a small lake on a cloudy day and recall the moments of a fine youth. When the film at last explains that reminiscence to us, The Last Picture Show is something Renoir might have claimed with pride.” David Thomson