road movie
Thomas Rees
Blues is an old man’s game. To do it properly you really have to have lived, and to have the scars and the criminal record to show for it. How do I know? Because Mac “Dr John” Rebennack is living proof. As he shuffled on at Ronnie Scott’s last night to join his NiteTripper four-piece, with a walking stick in each hand and his dreadlocked pony tail hanging over one shoulder, he had the look of a man who’s done himself serious damage over the years. But his music was all the better for it.For starters, life has given him the voice that every bluesman wants, a throaty growl that Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Melissa McCarthy has been one of the decade's most notable comic finds. Although she's been plugging away for years on TV, as a stand-up, in sketch troupe the Groundlings and in various supporting roles, it was Bridesmaids and The Heat which brought her much deserved attention - including an Oscar nomination for her part in the former. More than just comic fodder, these characters were tough (but sensitive), smart and sisterly women railing against preconceptions and prejudice. In the altogether less fabulous Tammy she once again teams up with her husband Ben Falcone - best known as her air Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
You can almost feel the dust on your skin in Spanish director Diego Quemada-Diez’s debut feature The Golden Dream. It’s the dust of the precarious journey from Central America towards the US, undertaken by four teenage Guatemalan kids intent on finding a better life north of the final border. And of the gritty immigrant experience of jumping train after train, and struggles with the authorities, where each new stage presents new challenges, and more acts of betrayal than of kindness are to be found along the way.We are introduced to the protagonists only gradually. Juan (Brandon Lopez) looks Read more ...
Katherine McLaughlin
Alexander Payne is at home with the road movie. From mid-life crisis in Californian wine country in Sideways to dealing with life after the death of a loved one in About Schmidt, he has a knack of tapping into the human spirit and an affinity with the American landscape. Taking great lengths to elicit the whirs and hums of vehicles and the many bumps along the open road, his exploration of the USA is always an eye-opening experience. Nebraska is no different and is the setting for a Midwestern adventure which captures the essence of an agricultural town, the antics of an elderly community and Read more ...
emma.simmonds
We're the Millers is a road movie which sees a group of outsiders learn how to fill traditional roles and find happiness. It's a film that flirts with rebellion but ultimately reveals itself to be boringly conformist. Director Rawson Marshall Thurber had a memorable hit with his debut Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story but, in the manner of one of that film's KOs, he falls flat on his back here.Jason Sudeikis plays David Clark, a small-time weed dealer who's never really grown up. When he's robbed of his drug stash and money after playing the good Samaritan he finds himself in debt to mwa-ha-ha Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Latin Americans are the current masters of minimalist cinema, films in which nothing much seems to be happening on the surface, but a world of emotion and meaning bubbles beneath. Such films require a little patience and investment, for sure, but offer considerable returns. And like last year’s award-winning Las acacias from Argentina, the Chilean Thursday Till Sunday signals the debut of a filmmaker with the skill to match her cinematic convictions.Both films are road movies, not in the "wham bam", eventful sense of a Hollywood road movie, but modest, small-scale, quiet journeys, involving Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
For anyone who missed Sightseers in the cinema, purchasing it on DVD is a must. Its blend of the shocking and what initially seems a quirky, Mike Leigh-style British road movie is audacious. Mischievously subverting the familiar, it’s funny, pathos-filled and openly questions the nature of morality. It’s hugely entertaining too.By now, the adventures of Steve Oram’s ginger-faced Chris and Alice Lowe’s angry-woman Tina have been recounted endlessly. Both their performances are sure to fuel cult fandom, with Sightseers assured an afterlife akin to that of Withnail and I. Director Ben Wheatley Read more ...
Veronica Lee
Of all the pairings you might have thought would star in a cross-generational road movie, I suspect Seth Rogen and Barbra Streisand would be the last names you would have put together, despite their undoubted comedic talents.Rogen is Andy Brewster, an immature single guy who has invented a green cleaning product that he's schlepping around various uninterested companies, Streisand his long-widowed smothering mother Joyce, constantly calling him with inane questions that he impatiently replies to if he can bothered. They live at opposite ends of the country and don't see each other much beyond Read more ...
emma.simmonds
Those familiar with Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s elegant political feature Il Divo (2008), or perhaps the beautiful, cynical The Consequences of Love (2004) may find themselves struck (pleasantly) dumb by the direction of his latest. Inspired by Lynch’s The Straight Story, This Must Be the Place takes its name from the Talking Heads track (with David Byrne providing original songs and popping up for a cameo). This curio sees Sean Penn’s mischievous goth rocker turn Nazi hunter, taking up his dead father’s mantle of revenge.Penn plays retired rock star Cheyenne, the sartorial twin of Read more ...
Emma Dibdin
“There’s something wrong here. I don’t know exactly what it is, but something.” It’s no coincidence that this line bookends Paolo Sorrentino’s much-anticipated English language debut – it's a beguilingly strange, distancing, even discombobulating venture, at times gently lyrical, at others nightmarish. While there is indeed something about it that feels wrong, a more accurate turn of phrase might be that there’s something missing here. In brief, this is a film about a son avenging his father in which no father-son relationship exists.This is far from unintentional, and Sorrentino has Read more ...
emma.simmonds
As gentle and emotionally affecting as they come, Argentinian director Pablo Giorgelli’s feature debut is the tenderly told story of the burgeoning bond between a migrant mother and a slightly grizzled, taciturn trucker, which gingerly moots the possibility of romance. It’s a wise and disarming tale of hope and unspoken sadness which, though you’ll barely notice it doing so, will work its way right under your skin.In Las Acacias Germán de Silva (main image and below right with Hebe Duarte) plays Rubén, a gruff and withdrawn long-distance lorry driver. As a favour to his employer he has agreed Read more ...
matilda.battersby
Brothers Caleb, Nathan and Jared Followill and their cousin Matthew Followill, better known as Kings of Leon, have come a long, long way from their humble Tennessee roots in the last 12 years. In London last night playing to a 65,000-strong crowd in the same week that a documentary charting their rise hits cinemas, the contrast between the life they were born into and the one they have carved out couldn’t be more marked.Opening with the Aha Shake Heartbreak hit "Four Kicks", people screamed and danced about to the roaring of electric guitars and the growling twang of Caleb’s voice. But Read more ...