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....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....-David Thomson, PFA '83