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New Hollywood Unravelings

Watch these together for the rawest strain of New Hollywood — loose, lived-in character studies of Americans who can't hold the shape their lives demand.

Film-school touchstones rather than crowd favorites: Dog Day Afternoon is the easy way in, while A Woman Under the Influence is a raw, exhausting emotional endurance test worth saving for the right night.

• Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
• Five Easy Pieces (1970)
• Nashville (1975)
• A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
• Faces (1968) — The overlooked Cassavetes that A Woman Under the Influence grew straight out of — a marriage cracking open over one raw LA night, shot in the same unsparing, exhausting close-up.
• Opening Night (1977) — If Gena Rowlands wrecked you in A Woman Under the Influence, this is the under-seen companion to finally pull down — an alcoholic actress coming apart as opening night bears down on her.
• Husbands (1970) — The least-seen Cassavetes to pull off the list — three suburban husbands bury a friend and find they can't climb back into their own lives, as abrasive and lived-in as anything here.
• Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) — The overlooked Scorsese that rhymes with Five Easy Pieces — a widow loose on the road remaking a life that no longer fits, before the diner sitcom flattened its memory.
• Easy Rider (1969) — The New Hollywood origin point sitting forgotten right beside Five Easy Pieces — two riders chasing an America that turns out to have no place for them.
• Short Cuts (1993) — If Nashville's mosaic of quietly unraveling Americans landed, this is Altman resuming the exact sensibility two decades on, across twenty-two LA lives in various states of disrepair.