Title: Last Movies
Foreign Title:
Year: 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Language: In English and French with English subtitles
Director: Stanley Schtinter
Click here to see the cast and crew
Stanley Schtinter’s introduction to his film speaks of “navigating the history of cinema” in terms of life, chance, death and public figures. Oh yes – and also the chance that the one movie that these “most famous” public figures happened to watch in their last days and hours of their lives may be of interest to us. Why? Because we know what they watched. In our day and age, the lives of the most famous on and off the screen is an open book, is it not? and Schtinter is about to turn the pages of their last moments spent with movies into the lasting moments of pictures – moving pictures.
Taking a step back. Before the 2023 publication of his exhaustively researched book, Last Movies (Tenement Press), on which the film is based, Stanley Schtinter had been promoting screenings from his collection of “lost, suppressed, and impossible” titles at London’s Close-Up Film Centre, and neither the audience nor the person introducing the screening would know which film they were about to see until the lights went down.
If Stanley Schtinter has been described as a “detective without an objective,” we may be on the wrong track of movie enjoyment if we are too taken in by the historical data we are fed throughout the film. I say this because I began noticing a different path for admiring this film.
This is a collage film, a compilation, so brace yourself; it’s rich, it’s a rich film and once I understood the rhythm –– facts, leading to other stories, o so many other stories –– I totally escaped the morbid bits and became immersed in the visual, the gaze of these immortal actors and their moments of on-screen glory (because you’re not going to see more of the film, so focus…) It is a rich meal you’re being served; savour the look, examine the gesture, it’s a smorgasbord of lines delivered just so. I found the clips/servings spare but so well chosen. And an extra few seconds of staring back at us was delicious.
There is, of course, the celebrity factor, so let’s record a few names we will attach to the narrative flow: Bette Davis, John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Agatha Christie, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Kurt Cobain, John Dillinger, Betty Grable, plus the one to wake you out of your slumber: Heaven’s Gate members. Godard… (and that’s not all folks).
If they ask, say who saw what last. Or it’s meta-cinema. The story is history.
