Welcome to the second installment of Mike’s Movie Madness, a monthly list of five films that I think are worth your time.

Today I’d like to recommend five movies from the American New Wave that don’t get anything close to, but deserve every bit of the attention of that period’s established classics–Midnight Cowboy, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, Easy Rider, and the films of Coppola, Altman, and Cassavetes. Each of the following movies is a crazy-entertaining, bullshit-free slab of American story-telling, liberally seasoned with criminality and desperation! Eat hearty!

On his third strike.

1) Straight Time (1978), Ulu Grosbard, dir.

Who knew Dustin Hoffman could be so freaking scary? Or that Gary Busey could play sane? Ulu Grosbard knew. Hoffman has never topped his work in this character study of a fresh-sprung California felon. (If “character study of a fresh-sprung California felon” doesn’t appeal to you, probably nothing else on this list will either. But thanks for making it this far.)

Broken heroes on a last-chance power-drive.

2) Two-Lane Blacktop (1971), Monte Hellman, dir.

No offense to Easy Rider but since when do people ride cross-country in choppers? Maybe it’s time Two-Lane Blacktop replaced it as the Great American Road Movie. It’s infinitely deeper and more mature. Hellman’s graceful direction and Rudolph Wurlitzer’s haiku-perfect screenplay manage to turn road-tripping and drag-racing into Buddhist parables.

Rainy day woman.

3) Wanda (1970), Barbara Loden, dir.

Over the last couple years some of the strongest American films have been directed by women, from Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker to Kelly Reichert’s Wendy and Lucy to Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone. Barbara Loden’s Wanda is perhaps the best movie made by an American woman; I say “made” because Loden wrote, produced, directed, and starred in it, shortly before her tragically early death from breast cancer. Austere, fearless, and heartbreaking, it’s a story of criminal codependency like nothing else in movies.

A face you can trust.

4) The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) Peter Yates, dir.

If by some chance you walked out of The Town saying “Man, I wish there was another Boston-set crime thriller about hard-bitten bank robbers, but one that isn’t filled with uniformly beautiful people, one in which no one is virtuous or even trustworthy, one that’s devoid of sentiment and overflowing with betrayal,” well, brother, you’re in luck!

Pittsburgh or bust.

5) Scarecrow (1973), Jerry Schatzberg, dir.

That a movie can be simultaneously as hilarious and as tragic, as bleak and as rich as Scarecrow seems like some kind of insane miracle. Two of cinema’s biggest losers wander through an autumn-colored world of hobo camps, dive bars, and greasy spoons, totally clueless but never hopeless, perpetually fucking up but never losing our sympathies.

Happy viewing!

Mike