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If John Ford had ever made a rock and roll road picture, it would probably have looked alot like Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop , from 1971 -- which is a crude way of trying toevoke Hellman's unique blend of formal mastery and eccentric invention.

Hellman was one of the directors who re-invented American movies in the Sixties, applyinga deep understanding of film history and film technique to new subjects and attitudes.Unlike a number of the other rebels of his generation, Hellman never became a mainstream

commercial director. His highest profile film, Two-Lane Blacktop , became an instant cultclassic and remains one to this day, considered one of the seminal works of Seventiescinema, but the studio distributing it refused to promote it and it did not make money.

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Hellman has made a number of highly-regarded independent features since then, but therewas a twenty year gap between the last of them and his new feature R oad To Nowhere ,which was released in 2010 on the festival circuit and has been hailed as Hellman's return

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to the height of his powers. It has been theatrically released in France and is about to get alimited theatrical release in the U. S.

It's an extraordinary film -- the first feature shot on the Canon 5D, essentially a stillcamera with breathtaking HD video capabilities, in locations all over the world, but mostlyin North Carolina, and starring the stunning Shannyn Sossamon, who here achieves thestatus of an authentic screen goddess.

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It's a film about filmmaking, in which a real-life crime infects a movie being made aboutthat crime. The tale becomes a hall of mirrors, a complex intellectual puzzle thatnevertheless delivers a shocking visceral jolt at the climax. You won't, however, walk awayfrom the film dwelling on its devious structural intricacies. What you will rememberinstead, I suspect, is a film that delights and amazes from shot to shot, sequence tosequence, with the pure joy of making images, pictures that move, spaces that seduce you

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into emotional involvement with characters and situations with or without your consciousconsent.

I think you will feel privileged to have spent a couple of hours with a cinematic master,someone who reminds us that it's still possible to make real cinema today. This is aproposition that can only be argued on screens in darkened theaters, by an advocate who isboth passionate and supremely skillful -- by an artist like Monte Hellman.