The first of at least four films paying tribute to old movie theaters, The Last Picture Show (Peter Bogdanovich, 1971) involves a relationship between a middle-aged woman (Cloris Leachman) and a teenaged boy (Timothy Bottoms). Sam Mendes has updated the story to a tourist town on England’s South Coast in the 1980s. Stephen (Michael Ward), who is Black, is trying to get into college when he takes a job at the local movie palace, whose upper floors are shuttered. He begins an affair with co-worker Hillary (Olivia Colman), a mentally fragile, middle-aged woman, whose love-life consists of having sex with their married boss (Colin Firth) in his office. Stephen frees Hillary from that bad relationship, but his own with her has no future, either. Shattered when Stephen breaks off their sexual liaison, Hillary must find her way to a more appropriate friendship with the ever-loyal Stephen, who is forced to face down discrimination and violence on his way to being accepted into college.
The film moves slowly, punctuated by two loud and jarring episodes: Hillary’s breakdown upon Stephen’s withdrawal from their affair and the attack on Stephen, in the theater, by a group of skinheads; both involve the violent smashing in of doors. Parallels, in fact, structure the film: Hillary’s two affairs; the “family” of theater workers, frequently shown sitting around the table in their break room, and Stephen’s small family, also shown sitting at their kitchen table; Hillary’s dead but formerly philandering father and her boss; Stephen’s absent father and the projectionist’s confession that he, too, had run out on his wife and son. These parallels anchor the story and, along with its evocation of goodwill and tolerance, keep it from floating away on the tides of Hillary’s mercurial personality even as its strength comes from the uncompromising depiction of her instability