The Last Picture Show

Jeff Bridges, Cybill Shepherd and director Peter Bogdanovich all made their names with this touching coming-of-age tale.

Peter Bogdanovich's second film is a classic of the 'New American Cinema', the 1970s scene that represented a golden age of American movies made by a generation of cinephiles. Set in a small Texan town in the early 1950s, it centres on two friends - popular Duane, who's dating wealthy Jacy, and the sensitive Sonny, who embarks on an affair with the school coach's wife.

Adapted by Bogdanovich and Larry McMurtry from the latter's novel, it succeeds both as a funny, touching, psychologically astute coming-of-age tale and, thanks partly to Robert Surtees' magnificent monochrome camerawork, as a wonderfully vivid evocation of period and place.