Perhaps it was inevitable, but I never thought I’d live to see a pristine, fully-restored print of Dennis Hopper’s follow-up to Easy Rider—heretofore only available in the form of ragged bootlegs. Indiewire recently called The Last Movie “the most meta movie in American history,” and that’s accurate. But it’s also a fascinating intersection of artistic hubris, existential bullshit, cultural tourism, deconstructed hypermasculinity, and the perils of total creative freedom. In other words, a must-see for anyone interested in film as an art form and a soul destroyer. The fact that it was financed by a major studio is only one of its hundred stunning ironies. Hopper plays a Hollywood horse wrangler and stunt coordinator who goes to Peru in search of authenticity, only to find that cinema’s capability for creative destruction is nearly limitless. Also starring Peter Fonda, Kris Kristofferson, and Samuel Fuller. by Sean Nelson