The late American indie film auteur Monte Hellman was fond of a quote from Jean Cocteau that poetically summed up the fate of any real work of art: “A work of art should also be ‘an object difficult ...

Joseph Ornelas is a former freelance features writer at Collider, where he explored the worlds of film and television through in-depth essays, lists, and analysis. Passionate about storytelling across ...

Monte Hellman, the maverick director of such films as “Two-Lane Blacktop,” “The Shooting” and “Road to Nowhere,” died April 20 at Eisenhower Medical Center in Palm Desert, Calif., following a fall in ...

Months before completion, this 1971 story of an existential cross-country drag race was hailed “an instant classic” by Rolling Stone, while Esquire prematurely declared it “movie of the year.” The ...

1971 was a great year for the American road trip. Brock Yates and Dan Gurney successfully raced from New York to Los Angles in a day and a half, and cinema saw the release of three cult classic road ...

Before it even saw the light of day, Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop was already being immortalized. Months before the film’s release, Rolling Stone called it “an instant classic.”Esquire went a ...

During a short-lived period following the success of such youth-oriented films as “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The Graduate” and especially “Easy Rider” in the late 1960s, Hollywood executives financed — with ...

The late American indie film auteur Monte Hellman was fond of a quote from Jean Cocteau that poetically summed up the fate of any real work of art: “A work of art should also be ‘an object difficult ...

Influential director Monte Hellman, whose 1971 film Two-Lane Blacktop starring musicians James Taylor and Dennis Wilson became a counterculture cult classic, died Tuesday. He was 91. His death at ...