The modern cinema screen is a peculiar kind of mirror. It shows a country not as it exists in the light of day, but as it dreams itself to be when the house lights go down.
In The Last Picture Shows, director Rustin Thompson takes a camera through ten Western states, logging 10,825 miles across two summers. He works alone as writer, director, cinematographer, and editor, tracking down 123 single-screen movie houses. Some sit abandoned, their plaster peeling in the dry heat. Others remain lit through sheer local stubbornness. Thompson lays licensed archival clips from Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 The Last Picture Show directly over his own footage. Bogdanovich used the death of the Royal Theater in Anarene, Texas, to mark the end of a social ritual. Thompson looks for what stands in the shadow of that loss. Neon marquees flicker against empty Main Streets while an acoustic soundtrack of traditional acoustic tunes plays underneath. The film moves through independent theaters across the country, showing inside the very spaces it documents.
Further down the pavement, Filip Grujić and Aleksa Borković take a different machine across the map in Yugo Goes to America. They drive a 1985 Zastava Koral, the low-cost Yugoslav import that arrived under the ambition of entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin. Armed with commentary from historian Jason Vuic, author of The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History, the filmmakers cover 23 states and more than 10,000 kilometers from New York to California. The vehicle breaks down, overheats, and sputters along state highways, prompting conversations with roadside mechanics and local communities. A cheap automobile, once marketed to the Reagan-era budget consumer, becomes a lens to view the geography it was built to navigate.
Then there is the road that leads to the coast. Tyler-Marie Evans opens Pretty Babies with a quiet, arresting image of Hedy Lamarr from the 1938 film Algiers. That single archival frame sets up the romantic illusion that propels two young women, played by Emily Alyn Lind and Sadie Stanley, out of Texas. Heading west toward California, their journey fractures against the reality of the landscape. Drawing from the tradition of gritty independent cinema, Evans bypasses the standard narrative of success. The highway leads instead into vulnerability and sex work, stripping away the Golden Age mythology frame by frame until only the bare asphalt remains.
These films look at the structures, the vehicles, and the myths that were built along the way. They show a nation still driving across its own wide, open spaces, looking for the light on the screen.