What would film history look like viewed not through the rise and fall of studios, actors, and directors, but according to a different organizing principle — the final movies watched by various cultural figures before they died? Moving from Franz Kafka (The Kid) and John Dillinger (Manhattan Melodrama) to Bette Davis (Waterloo Bridge) and Kurt Cobain (The Piano), British artist Stanley Schtinter embraces this simple concept to remap the entire history of the medium. Narrated by Jeremy Irons, the result is a dizzyingly detailed, mordantly funny, and deliberately skewed love letter to the movies.
Recalling the essay-films of Harun Farocki and Thom Andersen (Los Angeles Plays Itself), Last Movies is scrupulously researched, darkly humorous, and always entertaining. Like avant-garde artists from the Surrealists onward, Schtinter embraces chance as his organizing principle. Recognizing that all of us, too, will have our own last movies, it offers a scintillating twist on Tom Gunning’s concept of the cinema as “a machine for killing time.”
Content Considerations: Death, mortality, self harm
UK
2026
In English and French with English subtitles
Indigenous & Community Access
Indigenous Access Tickets Community Access Tickets Ticket Donation Requests
Credits & Director
Producer
Stanley Schtinter
Cinematography
Stanley Schtinter
Editor
Stanley Schtinter
Stanley Schtinter
Stanley Schtinter has been described as a “houngan of cinematic Vodou” by Sight & Sound Magazine. An artist, filmmaker, and author, his projects include Important Books [or, Manifestos Read by Children] (2021), which screened at Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Lock-In (2022), which screened at The Barbican; and Schneewittchen (2025), which screened at the British Film Institute. Schtinter is the founder and director of the Liberated Film Club and soundtrack label purge. In 2026, he adapted his 2023 publication Last Movies, into a film of the same title, which screened at the Venice Biennale.
Spectrum
See more films in this series
Into the Jaws of the Ogre
Having fled Iran for France, filmmaker Mahsa Karampour now reunites with her musician brother in America. Mixing the structure of a road movie with the brashness of a punk anthem, this intimate documentary is humanist filmmaking of the highest order.
Last Movies
What would film history look like reorganized around the last movies various cultural figures watched before they died? Last Movies embraces this simple concept to offer a deliberately skewed and mordantly funny love letter to cinema.
Jaripeo
Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig set their sights on Penjamillo, Michoacán, where the annual Jaripeo — a rodeo of bull riding, drinking, and dust that serves as the town’s public theatre of masculinity — becomes a stage for queer desire.
Aanikoobijigan [Ancestor/Great-Grandparent/Great-Grandchild]
In Aanikoobijigan, Indigenous repatriation specialists work to bring the remains and funerary objects of Ancestors home from institutional collections. This is a film shaped by memory, dignity, and a duty of care.
Crocodile
In Crocodile, a group of young, self-taught filmmakers turn Kaduna's streets, homes, and residents into the raw materials of sci-fi cinema. This Tribeca Viewpoints winner examines filmmaking as a means to overcome a city's constraints.
Let Them Be Seen
Let Them Be Seen is an absurdist portrait of the town of Tapoleng in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, moving through churches, spaza shops, and a Jam Alley re-enactment to document a village reshaping faith and community in post-apartheid life.
Yo (Love Is a Rebellious Bird)
Winner of the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Contribution at this year's Berlinale, Anna Fitch and Banker White’s exuberant documentary combines vérité interviews with a playful mix of puppetry, collage, and insect actors to memorialize a friend.
Image: © Mirabel Pictures
