The Last Movie

Director: Dennis Hopper, Dennis Hopper

1971 / 108min / DCP

Fresh off the success of Easy Rider, Hopper took his newfound bankability and made a million-dollar bonfire out of it, fucking off to South America to star in his fever dream sophomore feature as Kansas, a stuntman working on the set of a Western shooting in the backwaters of Peru, where the local peasants begin to absorb the action of the shoot into their ritual and folklore, and cinema melts into life itself. A radical, balls-to-the-wall career suicide like no other, with old kamikaze cineaste Sam Fuller in the action for good measure, and a film where behind-the-scenes anarchy infects in-front-of-the-camera action, resulting in something which still feels volatile and fresh and in danger of glorious collapse at any minute.