Dennis Hopper directed and starred in Easy Rider, which cost almost nothing, made an enormous amount and is generally credited with opening the door for the New Hollywood generation.
He then directed The Last Movie, which was incomprehensible and effectively unreleasable, and spent the next decade largely unemployable through drug and alcohol use he has described in detail.
Blue Velvet was the comeback. Frank Booth is one of the most frightening screen villains ever created, and Hopper reportedly told David Lynch he had to play him because he was him.
Apocalypse Now, Hoosiers and Speed fill out the later work, and he was a serious photographer and art collector.
Carroll BakerGiant (1956) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Three hours and twenty-one minutes of Texas across roughly twenty-five years, James Dean's last completed performance, and a film that starts as a marriage drama and ends as an…
Asia ArgentoLand of the Dead (2005) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. Romero finally got a studio budget after twenty years and used it to make a film about a walled city where the rich live in a…
Dennis HopperTrue Grit (1969) rates 8 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. John Wayne finally won an Oscar for playing a fat, drunk, one-eyed marshal who shoots men in the back, and the performance works because he is willing to…
Dennis HopperEasy Rider (1969) rates 7 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. It invented the modern road movie and killed the counterculture's mythology in the same hundred minutes. The film is loose, self-indulgent and occasionally incoherent, and the ending is…
Barbara HersheyDavid Anspaugh's 1986 small-town basketball drama. Dennis Hopper as drunken assistant.
Dennis HopperLynch's 1986 small-town surrealist thriller. MacLachlan, Rossellini, Hopper as Frank Booth.
Dennis HopperCoppola's 1979 Vietnam Heart of Darkness. Sheen, Brando, Duvall, Hopper.
Dennis HopperRosenberg's 1967 prison drama. The chain gang sequence, the egg-eating contest, the broken man at the end.
Dennis HopperWaterworld had one genuine asset going in: a production design concept that was visually striking and physically coherent. A world covered in water would look exactly like this.
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