"Easy Riders, Raging Bulls", Peter Biskind
New Hollywood (aka American New Wave) was a period in American film history that went from the mid-'60s to early '80s. Famous for a generation of filmmakers that had an unusual amount of creative liberty at the time (Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Paul Schrader...) its films, widely influenced by the European arthouse cinema, were audacious for their character-driven instead of plot-driven stories, technical and stylistic innovations, ambiguous endings and non-linear narratives. It is believed that this period began in 1967 with Bonnie and Clyde , whose violence and liberal portrayal of sex made it a commercial and critical success. It continued with the counterculture hit Easy Rider (1969) and through the '70s with the beautifully nostalgic The Last Picture Show (1971), the paranoid drama The Conversation (1974), the psychological disturbing neo-noir Taxi Driver (1976) among many other films that are still regarded as some of the finest of th...