One of the high points of the 1970s “New Hollywood,” Deliverance was a hugely influential critical and commercial success. Boorman's classic film lays bare two key Seventies preoccupations—anxiety about the environment and uncertainty about the meaning and worth of masculinity—into a brilliantly brooding existential horror story about a group of four middle aged Atlanta men whose weekend canoe trip in the woods turns into a fight for their lives. While a faithful adaptation the riveting novel by poet James Dickey, who also wrote the screenplay, Deliverance is also an important extension of the critique of violence central to key Boorman films such as Point Break and Hell in the Pacific.