Easy Rider

Fonda and Hopper’s now-classic film hit the old guard with the force of a rifle shot to the head. [Review of re-release] Read full review

The film may be a relic now, but it is a fascinating souvenir - particularly in its narcissism and fatalism - of how the hippie movement thought of itself. [Review of re-release] Read full review

Someday it was inevitable that a great film would come along, utilizing the motorcycle genre, the same way the great Westerns suddenly made everyone realize they were a legitimate American art form, Easy Rider is the picture. Read full review

Tune in, turn on and drop out with Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda as two down-and-out motorcyclists in this classic road film about the 1960s counterculture. Joining them on their cross-country trip is a young Jack Nicholson, whose charismatic performance keeps the movie rolling through some of its more experimental moments. [22 Jun 2012, p.C6]

Not only emblematic of independent American cinema, but, released in 1969, is the definitive statement on the death of the 60s. Read full review

This is about as opposite of 1956's big-budget Around the World in 80 Days as you can get. Read full review

While you cannot dismiss its place in history, its power is in what it represented rather than what it did. Read full review

Biker classic, with memorable counterculture monologues. Read full review

This legendary tale of a motorcycle odyssey gone wrong remains timeless for its diagnosing of the early stages of a social ennui that has now fully bloomed. Read full review

Many of the movies made in the wake of Easy Rider were more accomplished, more sophisticated, and more aesthetically mature. But Easy Rider itself still feels vital, because it was made by people who’d spent years learning what couldn’t be done, before deciding to do it anyway. Read full review

Easy Rider is very likely the clearest and most disturbing presentation of the angry estrangement of American youth to be brought to the screen. Read full review

With the exception of Nicholson, its good things are familiar things - the rock score, the lovely, sometimes impressionistic photography by Laszlo Kovacs, the faces of small-town America. Read full review

The film was infused with an elegiac sense of American failure, and it had a psychedelic pull to it.

The film has refurbished the classic romantic gospel of the outcast wanderer. Read full review

A finely observed film but insufficiently developed as a satire of middle America. [Review of re-release] Read full review

Looked at from the vantage point of more than three decades later, the movie is frequently incoherent; the dialogue sounds like it was being made up on the spot; and the acting is spotty in many cases. [01 May 2004, p.70]

Fonda himself has given this a fine production dress, with associate Bert Schneider, and the brilliant lensing, excellent music background ballads, especially Bob Dylan's "Easy Rider," are fine counterpoints to this poetic trip along Southwest America. Read full review

Easy Rider displays an assortment of excellences that lifts it above the run and ruck of its genre. [03 Jul 1969, p.45]