Cult director Monte Hellman drove the post-Easy Rider road movie straight through all narrative conventions and directly into the heart of abstraction with Two-Lane Blacktop. Although certainly not to everyone’s tastes, if you can get into the groove of its minimalist trip down Route 66 as portrait of American alienation, it reaches amazing levels of profundity. James Taylor and Dennis Wilson can’t act to save their lives, but somehow their woodenness serves, rather than detracts; meanwhile, stalwart character actor Warren Oates embodies aimless self-delusion in a truly great performance. Skirting meta-pretension, the final shot, which burns out right before our eyes, is one of the American cinema’s great endings. (DVD)