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Featuring exclusive film previews, interviews and much more, this is the place for anyone slightly obsessed with cinema.
Featuring exclusive film previews, interviews and much more, this is the place for anyone slightly obsessed with cinema.
14 Mar 25
Just a few decades into its life, Hollywood found itself old.
In the mid-1960s, spurred on by audiences' growing political sentiment and access to galvanising world cinema (not to mention television), studios that once swore by opulent dramas and lavish musicals were seeking films that were relevant to a younger generation – and lucrative for their producers. Rock 'n' roll was sweeping the nation; the movies needed its equivalent.
Equally crucial was that, for the first time in decades, artists could wholeheartedly embrace challenging subject matter. The 1968 dissolution of the censorious Motion Picture Production Code, known as the Hays Code – guidelines that regulated what was and wasn't allowed onscreen to uphold so-called 'correct standards' – meant ambitious new talent had freedom to create films unlike anything the industry had known.
It's no coincidence that, just a year before, Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde arrived on screens: an all-guns-blazing story of young lovers turned bank robbers, burning bright and fast through an evolving America. Critic Roger Ebert described it as being "like a slap in the face". Audiences had never seen anything like it.
This season journeys through a particularly illustrious period of what came to be called 'New Hollywood' filmmaking, highlighting a range of films from the '60s and '70s that changed the shape of American cinema forever: helmed by innovative, decadent, young auteurs, filled with genre-blending and boundary-crossing (sex, violence, you name it!) with a focus on depicting something closer to real life.
While some involved also bolstered the 1980s blockbuster bombast that came after – who could have known the man behind scrappy coming-of-ager American Graffiti would go on to create Star Wars? – this collection of films epitomises a galvanising, independent-spirited vision of what American cinema can be. We can but hope that a new New Hollywood is on its way. 
Lara Peters
The definitive counterculture movie, Easy Rider sits alongside The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde as American cinema that rallied angrily against the mainstream. Written by Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Terry Southern, it follows two bikers (Fonda and Hopper) travelling through the American Southwest, carrying the loot of a cocaine deal. Easy Rider would become a cinematic symbol of the late 1960s, exploring the socio-cultural landscape of the time with its radical heroes raising their middle finger to the uptight middle classes. Despite featuring in a small supporting role, Easy Rider would also launch a young Jack Nicholson into Hollywood stardom, while Hopper would direct a second film in 1971, The Last Movie – a critical and box office bomb, and his last film for over a decade.
– Rose Butler
During the Summer of Love, a pair of outlaws crashed into cinema. Starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty (also its producer), Bonnie and Clyde's blisteringly violent final shootout was one of the most shocking endings of its time – and now sees it hailed as a New Hollywood landmark. David Newman and Robert Benton's script was inspired by the French New Wave, particularly François Truffaut (who, along with Jean-Luc Godard, they initially approached to direct it). Landing with director Arthur Penn via Beatty, following rewrites by Chinatown's Robert Towne, this cocktail of collaborators meant more sex, more death, and more explosive thrills. Bonnie and Clyde was met with a mixed response upon release, but legendary critic Pauline Kael championed it in a blazing 9000-word New Yorker essay as "the most excitingly American American movie since The Manchurian Candidate". A few months later, it was on the cover of TIME Magazine. The headline? "THE NEW CINEMA: VIOLENCE…SEX…ART…".
– Lucy Fenwick Elliott
Beneath the intersection of a screwball comedy, a scathing class satire, and an elaborate murder-extortion plot, only Elaine May could excavate a big, beating heart quite like she does in 1971's A New Leaf. It was the first female-directed film to score the backing of a big Hollywood studio for nearly two decades, made tenfold more impressive by it being her feature debut, with writing and co-starring credits to boot. We meet May as a bespectacled, hopelessly romantic botanist, whose openheartedness seems to be her folly as she falls for insolvent heir Henry Graham (Walter Matthau), oblivious to his fortune-seeking motives. What emerges is never scornful of her naivety, smuggling gleefully radical rhetoric under the guise of a conventional, studio-approved ending: does a woman need to make a man immortal for him to recognise her as worthy of life?
– Hope Hopkinson
Released just months after Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, Mike Nichols' The Graduate remains one of the most beloved American films of all time, and a touchstone of late '60s Hollywood cinema. Dustin Hoffman is Benjamin Braddock, a recent college graduate already consumed with angst when he becomes sexually involved with a friend of his parents, Anne Bancroft's indomitable Mrs Robinson – before eventually turning his attention to her college-age daughter (Katherine Ross). Impeccably acted and full of rich commentary on the divide between the youth of America and their parents, The Graduate is a cautionary tale of conformity and compliance, and a rejection of the aspirational capitalism that shaped the previous generation. The film earned the late great Mike Nichols a Best Director Academy Award – and brought the music of Simon and Garfunkel to a wide audience.
– Rose Butler
McCabe (Warren Beatty) and Mrs Miller (Julie Christie) are two newcomers to the Pacific Northwest boomtown of Presbyterian Church; as they join forces to become successful business partners, the burgeoning town becomes richer, and ruthless agents from a nearby town attempt to get a cut of the profits. Met with a lukewarm response from its first screenings in New York in 1971, Robert Altman's McCabe & Mrs Miller has since been revisited as one of the most striking and evocative titles from the New Hollywood era and a brilliant example of the revisionist Western. Unpicking the most American of genres, the film's melancholy use of Leonard Cohen songs, overlapping dialogue, and haunting, snow-covered cinematography deftly subverts the traditional Western and dismantles the romanticism of the American frontier.
– Rose Butler
Barbara Loden is writer, director, and star of her first and only feature – and much like this season's other female auteur Elaine May, her trailblazing work was, for a long time, difficult to see. Now restored and acclaimed but having lost none of its vérité texture, Wanda is an intimate portrait of its eponymous heroine, unsentimental but never cold. Loden's Wanda is a softly spoken, solitary housewife in industrial Pennsylvania who unceremoniously abandons her family to reinvent herself, drifting from city to city (and dubious suitor to dubious suitor). What Wanda finds on the road is not dissimilar to what the bikers of Easy Rider and the criminals of Bonnie and Clyde find there – disillusionment and decay – but Loden's tooth-and-nail fight to get her film made brings a resilience that shines through; it's a distinctly feminine perspective on the era's disaffected grit.
– Lara Peters
Fittingly for a director inspired by Akira Kurosawa and Sergei Eisenstein to make the first two Star Wars films, Fellini's I Vitelloni - a coming of age tale of five young men - was the key influence on George Lucas's American Graffiti. Also inspired by his car cruising youth, it follows a group of male teenagers (women very much support them) over one night in 1962. It's surprisingly funny, thanks in part to screenwriters Huyck & Katz – who less successfully reunited with Lucas twenty years later on Howard the Duck. In an America suffering collective whiplash from the Vietnam war, political assassinations, race riots, and more, this was a much needed dose of nostalgia for a happier teenage time.
– Simon Ragoonanan
Bookended by sequences of extreme violence, Sam Peckinpah's masterful The Wild Bunch follows an ageing group of outlaws (William Holden, Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, et al.) attempting to survive by any means necessary. Produced and released at a time when America had sent countless fathers, sons and brothers to war in Vietnam and real-life footage of brutality and death was being broadcast into family homes on a nightly basis, The Wild Bunch is very much a Western made for its time: an emphatic confirmation of the dying days of the wild west and a fierce critique of outdated codes of masculine honour. The film was ground-breaking and controversial at the time of its release, making incredible use of rapid-cut edits and montage to build to a relentless, devastating climax; Peckinpah wanted to give the audience "some idea of what it is to be gunned down".
– Rose Butler
One of the key films of the 1970s, and a pivotal piece of work from film historian and director, Peter Bogdanovich, The Last Picture Show is an aching depiction of crumbling values and the death of small-town America. Co-written for the screen by Larry McMurty and adapted from his 1966 novel, the film is a bleak, complex coming-of-age story following several teenagers in a declining Texas town; notably, it's a classic Howard Hawks Western that closes the theatre at the neighbourhood's heart. A complex character study, the film frankly explores sexual relationships and the existential dread of its young protagonists. Shot in stark black and white, and featuring performances from Jeff Bridges to Cybill Shepherd in early roles, The Last Picture Show captures the end of an era of dreams for young Americans.
– Rose Butler
From beloved classics to unearthed gems, reintroduce yourself to the best films of yesterday with reDiscover — be that last decade, or last century.
