Speed Cinema Screenings: Cockfighter 7/29/26 6PM

“Hellman embraces, with visual nuance, a world of back roads and forests, grim motels and ramshackle arenas, and he approaches the intricacies of the subculture ... with a cool Hemingwayesque moralism.”—Richard Brody, The New Yorker

New Hollywood’s abstract poet Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop) delivers a powerful tale of the pains of drifting in his 1974 classic Cockfighter. Frank (Warren Oates, The Wild Bunch) is a chicken fighting trainer that has taken a vow of silence until he can successfully raise a champion. His pursuit of that goal will prove both the breadth of his skill and the depths of his empty life after living on obsession. An existentialist riff on The Odyssey with an extra coat of ‘70s grit, Cockfighter bravely explores the suffering of an empty victory, a view from the top with no bottom in sight. 1974, U.S., DCP, 83 minutes. Rated R.