Top 10 Cycling Films

With the 111th Tour de France starting at the end of June and Matthew Modine in cinemas leading a 700-mile bike ride in Hard Miles, Cinema Paradiso takes a look back at the best films about bicycles and cycling.

Inspired by social worker Greg Townsend, R.J. Daniel Hanna's Hard Miles (2023) follows four youths from a Colorado correctional facility on the adventure of a lifetime, as they attempt to cycle the 700 miles from Denver to the Grand Canyon. Following a tried-and-trusted formula, the action combines the great outdoors with sporting endurance and character conflict to satisfying effect.

There are numerous wild cycling treks in the niche market of adventure films. But bicycles and cyclists are rarely the subject of entire movies. Cinema Paradiso has unearthed a few, however, as well several documentaries about elite road racing. We've even come up with a batch of bicycling moments from across cinema history. But we'll start with a collection of golden oldies and oddities from the BFI.

On Yer Bike

You have to go to R.W. Paul: The Collected Films 1895-1908 (2006) to find what is perhaps the earliest British cycling film, Hyde Park Bicycling Scene (1896). But the history of screen cycling captured in the 29 shorts in the BFI's two-disc On Yer Bike collection is full of two-wheeled curios.

James Williamson's Lady Cyclists (1899) is among the oldest British records of cycling, as there are those who believe the footage actually dates from 1898. Moving into the Edwardian era, Sagar Mitchell and James Kenyon were on hand to record both Race For the Muratti Cup At Manchester Wheelers' Annual Meet and Manchester and Salford Harriers (both 1901).

A nasty spill is used to promote a market-leading brand in Rudge Whitworth - Britain's Best Bicycl (1902), which is one of the oldest surviving filmed commercials. A few more are grouped later on the disc in Cinema Adverts Humber, Raleigh, Rudge (1938). But the emphasis is firmly on danger in James Williamson's Flying the Foam and Some Fancy Diving (1906), a selection of daredevil cycling stunts that features 'Professor' Reddish sprinting off Brighton Pier. Equally amusing is Fat Man on a Bicycle (aka W.H.O.R.K. a la Pimple, 1914), in which a vegetable seller and a woman with a pram are inconvenienced when Fred 'Pimple' Evans tries to teach a portly pal how to ride a bike.

The Topical Budget newsreel showcases the inaugural National Bicycle Week in May 1923 and it's still going strong. The same outlet also issued Cycling the Channel, which shows a woman pedalling a hydrocycle from Dover, and Woman Wheelers (both 1929), which records Gracie Fields handing out prize at the Herne Hill velodrome. This venue had been the scene of Olympic Trials (1928), which checked out contenders for the British team at the Amsterdam Games. Leaping forward a decade, Montgomery Tully's From Acorn to Oak (1938) celebrates the 50th anniversary of the pneumatic Dunlop tyre, which put paid to the boneshaker bicycles of old.

Made for matinee audiences, Darrell Catling's Tom's Ride (1944) chronicles a crisis of conscience for a member of the National Cinema Club for Boys and Girls (Colin Simpson), as he wants to keep the cash he's found to buy a new bike, while his sister (Angela Glynne) thinks he should return the wallet to its rightful owner. As J. Arthur Rank was a devout Methodist, there's a religious moral to this tale and not everyone will warm to the front-room finale. Norman Lee takes us on a tour of the Raleigh factory in Nottingham in How a Bicycle Is Made (1945), which traces the process from the design stage and the sourcing of raw materials to the fitting of the parts and the rigorous testing regimen.

Alan C. Simpson won £100 at the Amateur Cine World Awards for Stringing Along (1947), which warns about the importance of cycle maintenance in showing what happens to a lad late for football practice. Speaking of road safety, Stanley Holloway tells the story of a man charged with murdering his bike in the unsigned comedy, The Ballad of the Battered Bicycle (1947), which was released in the same year as the peerless Richard Massingham's public informtional, Pedal Cyclists, which is filled with cycling 'don'ts'. Echoing the theme, Good Cycles Deserve Good Riders (1950) takes us to a Kodachrome capital to remind viewers what not to do when on two wheels.

Rounding off Disc One in style is Don Chaffey's Skid Kids (1953), a Children's Film Foundation romp that joins Swanky Clarke (Barry MacGregor) and his teammates from the Burton Bullets Cycle Speedway Club, as they take on a gang of bike thieves operating in Bermondsey. Although not part of this set (it's actually available from Cinema Paradiso on The Race Is On ), Charles Frend's The Sky Bike (1967) is another CFF gem, which sees Tom Smith (Spencer Shire) join forces at an abandoned airfield with Mr Lovejoy (Liam Redmond), the inventor of a flying bicycle.

Disc Two gets off to a brisk start with a linked couple of shorts from the British Transport Film Unit. No director is given for Cyclists Special (1955), which explains how trains can take bikeriders to such historical places as Kenilworth Castle, Stanford on Avon, and the site of the Battle of Naseby. Tony Thompson went along for the ride when members of the same Cyclists' Touring Club set off for Austria in Cyclists Abroad (1957), in which they pedalled around the land of Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert and sampled some local delicacies.

A pair of pesky lion cubs discover the benefits of having a superior cycle in Hercules: Lion Cubs (1956), while simple line drawings get the message across in Cycling Proficiency Scheme Father and Son (1959), which was directed by Alan Smith for Halas & Batchelor, whose careers we explored in Pig Power: Animal Farm At 70. The sales pitch in Riding on Air (1959) was made on behalf of the Foreign and Colonial Office in a bid to promote British bicycle makes abroad at a time when a fifth of the domestic population cycled.

Showing British life through the eyes of a female Caribbean artist, The Racing Cyclist (1966) starred amateur racer Barrie Witcomb, whose family owned a renowned bike business in Deptford. Another success story was recalled in The Moulton Bicycle (1972), which was made for schools broadcasting. The Department of Transport sponsored Alan Ross's Free Wheeling (1979), which called for the introduction of cycle lanes. Safety is also to the fore in Cyclist Turning Right (1983), which shockingly shows what happens to two boys on their BMXs when they fail to heed the code of the road.

The disc ends on an upbeat note, however, with another 1983 release, Frank Prendergast's It's a Bike! (1983), which was made for the Royal Society For the Prevention of Accidents. With its cod-rapping narration, the Suffolk-set story follows a Victorian avenger who helps a schoolboy fend off a couple of thieves. Decidedly tongue in cheek, this recalls the classic 'Bicycle Repair Man' sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus (1969-74). The final series of this landmark show also featured an episode entitled 'The Cycling Tour', in which Michael Palin plays the accident-prone Mr Pither, who is on holiday in Cornwall.

While we're focussing on British bicycling shorts (the films, not the garment), mention should be made of Ridley Scott's Boy and Bicycle (1965), which was filmed in monochrome using a 16mm Bolex camera when Scott was studying at the Royal College of Art. Younger brother Tony plays the schoolboy truant cycling around Hartlepool, while Ridley provides the stream of consciousness narration, which took its cues from James Joyce's Ulysses (the 1967 film version of which also has its cycling moments).

While this debut can be found on Cinema 16: British Short Films (2003), Douglas Hickox's Les Bicyclettes de Belsize (1968) can be rented from Cinema Paradiso as part of a double bill with Norman Cohen's The London Nobody Knows. This stars James Mason on a walking tour. But it's Anthony May who takes centre stage in a mini-musical based on Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), as his cycle ride is disrupted by a young girl who crashes into him (Leslie Goddard) and a model on an advertising hoarding (Judy Huxtable). Sadly, we can't bring you Michael B. Clifford's delightful, but elusive documentary, Bicycle (2014), which traces the British love affair with cycling, but it's well worth a watch.

Pelotons and Podiums

First held in 1903, the Tour de France is the most famous cycle race in the world. It's not the oldest, as the Paris-Brest-Paris dates back to 1891, while the Paris-Roubaix race hails from 1896 and is known as 'the Queen of the Classics'. But the Tour de France has unrivalled prestige, even over the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a España, with which it forms the Grand Tours.

This year will see history made. Not only is the Grand Départ taking place in Florence for the first time (to mark the centenary of the first win by an Italian rider, Ottavio Bottecchia), but the race won't finish on the Champs-Elysées for the first time in its 121-year history. As the 21 July finale is deemed to be too close to the start of the Paris Olympics, the final stage will cover the 21 miles from Monaco to Nice on the Riviera (which technically means that neither the opening or the closing stages will start on French soil).

Before television coverage started in 1948, French newsreels covered the Tour. But we shall start our survey of documentaries about elite road racing with Louis Malle's Vive le Tour (1962). This 18-minute short provides an astonishing insight into how much the race has changed over the last six decades, as the domestiques no longer go scurrying into cafés and bars to fetch wine and beer for their team's star riders. With vox pops enlivening the discussion of the taxing course, injuries, pile-ups, and doping, this is a beautifully edited gem and it's hugely disappointing that it can't be teamed with Claude Lelouch's Pour un Maillot Jaune (aka For a Yellow Jersey, 1965), a little-seen gem that recalls Felice Gimondi's surprise win over favourite Raymond Poulidor.

Although he can be seen solving problems in Lars von Trier's The Five Obstructions (2003), Dane Jørgen Leth is a big miss when it comes to cycling docs on disc, as both The Stars and the Water Carriers (1974) and A Sunday in Hell (1977) respectively offer superb coverage of the Giro and the Paris-Roubaix, while also revealing that even superstars like Belgian Eddy Merckx (who is also profiled in Joël Santoni's La Course en tête, 1974) had to dig deep in order to top the podium.

It turned out that Erik Zabel and Rolf Aldag weren't competing cleanly when they rode in the Centenary Tour for Team Telekon. But Pepe Danquart's Hell on Wheels (2004) still provides an intimate view of life on the road when the pressure's on. As does Tómas Gislason in Overcoming (2005), a profile of former winner, Bjarne Riis, as he strives to impose his unorthodox methods as manager of Team CSC, which contains such front-rank riders as Ivan Basso and Carlos Sastre.

When it comes to unorthodoxy, however, no one comes close to Graeme Obree, the record-breaking subject of Douglas Mackinnon's biopic, The Flying Scotsman (2006). Having survived a teenage suicide attempt, Obree (Jonny Lee Miller) discovered a talent for speed cycling and he twice broke the World Hour record. But it was his creation of a bike named 'Old Faithful' from scrap metal and washing-machine parts that made him a target for a cycling hierarchy that took a dim view of individuality. What a shame, though, that we can't bring you the man himself, as Obree heads to Nevada to attempt the Human Powered Land Speed record aboard 'The Beastie' (which he built from cooking pots and rollerblades) in Dave Street's Battle Mountain (2015).

One has to remember that cycling is considered a niche pursuit compared to the major team sports. Consequently, fascinating pictures like William Savage's Klunkerz (2006) can slip through the net, even though they reveal how mountain biking emerged from Marin County, California in the late 1960s, as San Francisco was revelling in flower power and the rise of the counter-culture. The same goes for Stephen Auerbach's Bicycle Dreams (2009), a classic of its kind that follows the riders seeking to complete 3000 miles in 10 days and take the coveted Race Across America title.

The Isle of Man's Mark Cavendish is very much to the fore in Jason Berry's Chasing Legends (2010), a remarkable self-financed account of how the travails of Team HTC-Colombia were eclipsed by the comeback of one Lance Armstrong. More of him anon, but he shouldn't be allowed to overshadow the courage of the riders coached by ex-rider Jacques Boyer, who moved to Rwanda in 2006 with the express purpose of using cycling to help some of the thousands of children orphaned in the 1990s genocide. The debut display of a Rwandan team at the Tour de France is recorded in T.C. Johnstone's Rising From Ashes (2012) and it makes for air-punchingly inspirational viewing.

Equally poignant is Oren Jacoby's My Italian Secret: The Forgotten Heroes (2014), which reveals how two-time Tour winner, Gino Bartali, risked his life during the Second World War by using his training rides to pass messages to the leaders of the anti-Fascist resistance. He also helped save the lives of over 800 Jews by smuggling forged documents. But he sought no recognition in his lifetime other than for his triumphs on the Champs-Elysées in 1938 and 1948.

Contrast this with the sobering story related in James Erskine's Pantani: The Accidental Death of a Cyclist (2013). At the age of 28, Marco Pantani pulled off the staggering double of the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France within the space of a couple of months. Only six men have emulated the feat. But the triumphs of 1998 faded into the background in 2004, when Pantani died of cocaine poisoning in a seedy hotel room in Rimini. Paolo Santolini also assesses the career of his compatriot in The Natural: Marco Pantani (2021), which returns to his hometown of Cesenatico to meet family members and the coaches who had steered him towards glory that came at the highest possible price.

Pantani's tragedy made fewer headlines than the scandals involving the seven-time Tour winner who was stripped of his victories after an investigation into doping. The downfall of a sporting icon is laid bare in Alex Gibney's The Armstrong Lie (2013) and Alex Holmes's Stop At Nothing: The Lance Armstrong Story (2014), while Ben Foster plays the cyclist being pursued by Sunday Times journalist David Walsh (Chris O'Dowd) in Stephen Frears's The Program (2015), which is based on the Irishman's memoir, Seven Deadly Sins. Armstrong also features in onetime rider Bryan Fogel's Icarus (2017), an Oscar-winning investigation into doping that is blown wide open by the testimony of the former head of the World Anti-Doping Agency, Dr Grigory Rodchenkov.

In cleaner times, the rivalry between Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault was among the fiercest in the history of the sport, as John Dower explains in Slaying the Badger (2014). But LeMond would have to endure a living nightmare in order to take the yellow jersey (and become the first American to do so) in the epic 1989 race against Laurent Fignon and Pedro Delgado that is revisited by Alex Holmes in The Last Rider (2022).

The reasons why women's professional cycling gets short shrift are explored in Kathryn Bertine's Half the Road: The Passions, Pitfalls and Power of Women's Professional Cycling (2014), while Rebecca Rusch and riding partner Nguyen Thi Thanh Huyen show their mettle in Nicholas Schrunk's Blood Road (2017) by riding the 1200-mile Ho Chi Minh Trail in a bid to find the grave of the American mountain biker's father, who was killed during the Vietnam War.

Phil Keoghan's Le Ride (2016) harks back to 1928 to commemorate the Australian quartet that made history by competing as the first team from Down Under, while Finlay Pretsell's Time Trial (2017) compellingly follows Scot David Millar during the final season of a career that had seen him win stages at each Grand Tour race and claim the British road and time trial titles. But we end where we began with the Tour de France and its diehard fans. Belgian documentarists Méryl Fortunat-Rossi and Valéry Rosier got to meet some of the camp followers while making La Grand-Messe (aka Holy Tour, 2018), which wittily reveals that watching cycling's greatest race is all about being in the right place at the right time.

Watching the Wheels

Cinema as we know it was born in the Salon Indien of the Grand Café in Paris on 28 December 1895, when Auguste and Louis Lumière projected a series of short films to a paying audience. On the programme was La Sortie de l'usine Lumière à Ly, which showed staff leaving through the gates of a photographic factory. Three versions of this scene are known to exist - one of which can be rented from Cinema Paradiso on the BFI's Early Cinema: Primitives and Pioneers (2005) - and men wheeling or riding bicycles feature prominently in them all. Rivals followed suit when the Lumières showed off some trick cycling in Bicyliste (1897) and, with chases and crashes proving popular with novelty-seeking audiences, the link between cinema and cycles was firmly established. Even Georges Méliès had to doff his cap to Ferdinand Zecca, however, as his futuristic item, À la conquête de l'air (1900), concocts the Fend l'air dirigible that is seen flying over Belleville by pedal power.

Among the earliest surviving films with a cycling theme is Harold M. Shaw's The Wheels of Chance (1922), an adaptation of an H.G. Wells novel that was filmed in Hampshire and Sussex and follows the efforts of a draper's assistant named Hoopdriver (George K. Arthur) to save socialite Jessie Milton (Olwen Roose) from the fortune-hunting Bechamel (Gordon Parker), while on a cycling holiday. Another hapless clerk finds himself seeking two-wheeled redemption in Lloyd Bacon's comedy, 6 Day Bike Rider (1934), as Joe E. Brown strives to impress Maxine Doyle by winning an indoor cycling marathon.

While these features have largely been forgotten, Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948) is among the most influential pictures in screen history. Perhaps the foremost example of the neo-realist style that transformed postwar film-making worldwide, this harrowing tale of a father and son, Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani) and Bruno (Enzo Staiola), tramping the streets of Rome in search of the stolen bike the former needs to land a new job as a bill sticker counted a pair of silent comedies, the Polidor slapstick, Tontolini Steals a Bicycle (1916), and Charlie Chaplin's The Kid (1921), among its inspirations. Winning BAFTA and Golden Globe awards, this starkly photographed, location-set melodrama topped the first Sight and Sound Poll in 1952 and fostered numerous features including East German Evelyn Schmidt's The Bicycle (1982), which follows a female job-seeker and is one of many films produced by the DEFA studio that deserve to be better known.

As Cinema Paradiso users will discover by renting The Short Films By Jacques Tati (2014), the music-hall performer-turned-auteur had recorded his famous Tour de France routine in Soigne ton gauche (1936) before creating the character of the cycling postman in L'École des facteurs (1946). François returned in Jour de fête (1949), in which Tati displays his genius as a clown as the rural postie hurtles along country lanes with a satchel slung across his shoulders. A particularly brilliant scene shows him multi-tasking, as he uses the tailgate of a lorry as a desk so he can stamp letters while riding along. But he's just as hilarious while cycling drunk or finding himself accidentally competing in a race.

Photographed in the Thomsoncolor process, but released in black and white because of technical problems, this cycling classic came out in the same year as Jean Stelli's Five Red Tulips (1949), in which a serial killer leaves a calling card beside the corpses of five former Tour de France winners. Sadly, it's unlikely to ever be issued on disc, unlike Harold French's Isn't Life Wonderful! (1953), which is currently unavailable from Cinema Paradiso. But a few user inquiries might sway the issue, as there's much to enjoy in this adaptation of Brock Williams's novel, Uncle Willie's Bike Shop, including an impish display by a young Peter Asher (brother of Jane) as the nephew of bibulous Edwardian idler Donald Wolfit, whose life turns around when he goes into the bicycle business.

Another title that would enhance our 100,000-list is Juan Antonio Bardem's Death of a Cyclist (1955), a savage satire on Francoist Spanish society that sees college professor Alberto Closas and mistress Lucia Bosé blackmailed when they attempt to cover up a traffic accident. Bourvil strives to stay one step ahead of a debt collector in Alex Joffé's The Hot Shots (1968), a knockabout Belle Époque comedy that sees an impecunious inventor enter the Paris-San Remo race on a newfangled cycle. France also provides the setting for Robert Fuest's And Soon the Darkness (1970), as Nottingham nurses Pamela Franklin and Michelle Dotrice fall out while on a cycling holiday. When Dotrice vanishes, however, Franklin goes in search of the Lambretta rider who had been buzzing them on the road. Marcos Efron's 2010 remake, And Soon the Darkness, sent mountain bikers Amber Heard and Odette Annable to Argentina, where they stray off the beaten track.

Cycling as a leisure pursuit had become popular during the 1920s. Humphrey Jennings had shown some Sheffield steel workers heading into the country for a bike ride and a pub lunch in Spare Time (1939), which can be found on The Complete Humphrey Jennings, Volume One: The First Days (2011). Alan Bennett took a leaf out of this book in his first television play, A Day Out (1972), which accompanies the members of a Halifax cycling club on a 1911 spin to Fountains Abbey. Available from Cinema Paradiso on Alan Bennett At the BBC (2009), this is a deceptively acute dissection of British society on the eve of the Great War.

Coming forward several decades, we reach one of the most iconic of all cycling films, Peter Yates's Breaking Away (1979). Winner of the Golden Globe for Best Comedy or Musical and the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, Steve Tesich's story follows high school graduate Dave Stohler (Dennis Christopher) and his best pals, Mike (Dennis Quaid), Cyril (Daniel Stern), and Moocher (Jackie Earl Haley), as they bid to make their mark on the annual Little 500 road race in Bloomington, Indiana. Known as 'cutters' because they come from the quarry side of town, the quartet get into all manner of scrapes in their bid to prove the doubters wrong. The same goal drives Australian kids P.J. (Angelo D'Angelo), Goose (James Lugton), and Judy (Nicole Kidman), when they pick up chatter on some walkie-talkies stolen from the gang of pig-masked bank robbers led by The Boss (Bryon Marshall) in Brian Trenchard-Smith's cult favourite, BMX Bandits (1983).

While this adventure worked wonders for Nicole Kidman's career, Kevin Costner's got a welcome boost from John Badham's American Flyers, which was also scripted by Steve Tesich. Upset by a rift caused by their father's death, sports physician Marcus Sommers (Costner) responds to a grim medical diagnosis by persuading younger brother David (David Marshall Grant) to help him train for the three-day race across the Rocky Mountains, known as 'The Hell of the West'. By contrast with this macho crowdpleaser, the debuting Tim Burton's Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (both 1985) takes impish cues from Bicycle Thieves to follow Pee-Wee Herman (Paul Reubens) as he strives to recover his beloved cherry red Schwinn bicycle, which has been stolen by dastardly man-child, Francis Buxton (Mark Holton). Trust us, you won't see a weirder film all year.

Another cult hit, Hal Needham's Rad, joins high schooler Cru Jones (Bill Allen) in his attempt to overcome the odds and triumph in the famous Helltrack BMX race. Frustratingly, this is currently as unavailable as Thomas Michael Donnelly's Quicksilver (both 1986), which stars Kevin Bacon as stockbroker-turned-cycle messenger Jack Casey, who gets himself on the wrong side of a gang of San Franciscan villains. Each picture is famed for the way in which speeding bikes are filmed, but not every worthwhile film gets a UK release. Another case in point is Mohsen Makhmalbaf's The Cyclist (1987), a masterpiece of Iranian cinema in which an Afghan refugee needing money for his wife's medical treatment makes a bet with his village neighbours that he and his son can pedal a bicycle non-stop for a week. Thankfully, Cinema Paradiso can bring you a film by the director's wife, Marzieh Makhmalbaf's The Day I Became a Woman (2000), a triptych that includes a story about a woman's determination to enter a bike race in defiance of her conservative husband.

Two more titles momentarily out of reach are Fernando E. Solanas's El Viaje (aka The Journey, 1992), in which a 15 year-old Argentinian boy cycles across South America in search of his missing father, and Tran Anh Hung's Cyclo (1995), which centres on the Vietnamese cycle taxi boy who falls in with a gang after being mugged in Ho Chi Minh City. But we do have a Bollywood treat in store in Mansoor Khan's Jo Jeeta Wohi Sikandar (1992), which turns on the rivalry between Model School and Rajput Collge in the hill-station of Dehradun. When underdog Mamik Singh gets injured before a big race against Deepak Tijori, wastrel brother Aamir Khan has to take his place.

While this has more than its share of subplots, the situation is more straightforward in Bernard Salzmann's The Unknown Cyclist (1998), as a dying man asks identical twin brother Vincento Spano, ex-wife Lea Thompson, and gay lover Stephen Spinella to enter the 450-mile West Coast Cycle to raise money for charity. The LGBTQIA+ theme continues in Manon Briand's 2 Seconds (1998), as bisexual champion mountain biker Charlotte Laurier pals up with former rider-turned-mechanic Dino Tavarone when she becomes a cycle messenger in Montreal. However, they soon realise they are both keen on the same woman, Suzanne Clément.

From the provincial Argentinian town where two friends set out to get into the Guinness Book of World Records by completing the longest ever bike ride in Juan Bautista Stagnaro's El Amateur (1999), we land in the Chinese capital for Xiaoshuai Wang's Beijing Bicycle (2001), another De Sica homage that won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. At the heart of the story is Guei (Lin Cui), a cycle messenger whose bike is pinched and sold to the unsuspecting Jian (Bin Li), who just needs some wheels so he can impress the love of his life.

Chances are slim we'll ever get discs for Simo Halinen's Cyclomania (2001), in which a Finnish couple fall in love while competing in a race, or Philippe Harel's Le Vélo de Ghislain Lambert (2001), in which Benoît Poelvoorde is typically engaging as an amateur cylist who runs a farm with his brother. But we recommend that everyone puts in an order for Sylvain Chomet's Belleville Rendezvous (2003), a magical Oscar- and BAFTA-nominated animation that follows Madame Souza (Monica Viegas) after her grandson, Champion (Michel Robin), is kidnapped by the French mafia while riding in the Tour de France. Along for the ride are a pet dog named Bruno and the elderly singing siblings known as The Triplets of Belleville. Unmissable stuff, as is Chomet's The Illusionist (2010), which was inspired by a script by Jacques Tati, whose Jour de fête is showing on TV in the triplets' boudoir.

In an ideal world, an enterprising UK label would have snapped up our next three titles, as each is eminently watchable. Vicente Amorim's The Middle of the World (2003) tells the deeply poignant story of a family of seven cycling 2000 miles across Brazil to find work in Rio de Janeiro, while hearing impaired college student Tung Ming-hsiang embarks upon a week-long tour of Taiwan's islands in Chen Hwai-en's Island Etude (2006). The quirkiest of the three, however, is Kôji Wakamatsu's Cycling Chronicles; LandScape The Boy Saw (2004), which was made by one of Japan's most acclaimed 'pink film' directors and speculates on the fate of teenager Tasuku Emoto after he cycles around the countryside after murdering his mother. Instead, we have to make do with Robert Krause's Blood Trails (2006), in which bike messenger Rebecca Palmer comes to regret a one-night stand with cycle cop Ben Price, as he stalks her when she goes to the mountains for a biking break with boyfriend, Tom Frederic.

A happier ending awaits the lonely boy in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's The Kid With a Bike (2011), another variation on Bicycle Thieves that shows how Liège hairdresser Samantha (Cécile de France) offers sanctuary to tweenager Cyril (Thomas Doret), who has been abandoned by Guy (Jérémie Renier), the father who sold his treasured bicycle. The winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes (along with Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Once Upon a Time in Anatolia) and a Golden Globe nominee, this is one of the many neo-neo-realist dramas that the Belgian brothers have set in the working-class district of Seraing. Find the others via the Cinema Paradiso Searchline. Each one is guaranteed to make a lasting emotional impact.

As will Haifaa al-Mansour's Wadjda (2012), which was not only the first feature to be directed by a woman in Saudi Arabia, but also the first to be made entirely in the kingdom. Waad Mohammed excels as the lively Riyadh 10 year-old who can't understand why her mother (Reem Abdullah) won't buy her the green bicycle she has seen in a shop window so she can have a race with her friend, Abdullah (Abdullrahman Al Juhani). Taking five years to make and imbued with De Sica's neo-realist spirit, this BAFTA-nominated delight would make a splendid double-bill partner with Jeremy Leven's Girl on a Bicycle (2013), But the story of Italian tour bus driver Vincenzo Amato becoming bewitched by Parisian cyclist Louise Monot while caring for her after accidentally knocking her off her bike is currently out of reach.

Very much up for grabs, though, is David Koepp's Premium Rush (2012), which sees New York bicycle messenger Wilee (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) weave his fixed-gear, no-brakes bike through motorists who are oblivious to his existence. However, bent cop Bobby Monday (Michael Shannon) has taken exception to Wilee and is determined to stop him completing a 90-minute drop across town. Baz Vartis (Kevin Bishop) is a model cycle cop at the start of Stuart Urban's May I Kill U? (2012). But a nasty head injury turns him into a hi vis psycho in this riotous London romp that makes innovative use of helmet-cam footage.

The Île de Ré provides the backdrop for Philippe Le Guay's Bicycling With Molière (2013), which charts the pedalling efforts of Lambert Wilson to persuade old friend Fabrice Luchini to end his three-year exile and return to acting. Oh that this was available, so Cinema Paradiso users could pair it with Laurent Tuel's La Grande boucle (aka Tour de Force, 2013), which takes its title from the French nickname for the Tour and follows underdog Clovis Cornillac who becomes an accidental national hero after he is abandoned by his wife and friends and decides to cycle the course one day ahead of the official field.

A regular highlight on the Tour gives its name to Nicole van Kilsdonk's Ventoux (2015), which joins a group of Dutch friends on a cycle up the mountain they had climbed three decades earlier. An unspoken secret links the riders, while street tough Will Martinez hides from community service mentor Joel Moody that he is smuggling drugs on their BMX dirt jumping jaunts in Eric Bugbee's Heroes of Dirt (2015). And completing this unattainable triptych is Meg Ryan's Ithaca (2015), which saw her reunite with Tom Hanks in a Second World War story that centres on a 14 year-old Californian kid with ambitions to become a telegraph messenger who has been left to look after his widowed mother by his soldier sibling.

Another widow, Máiréad McSweeney (Hilary Rose), makes a living as a fishmonger in Cork, while raising impressionable teenage son Conor (Alex Murphy). However, he is always being led astray by bike-thieving best mate Jock O'Keeffe (Chris Walley), whose latest scheme involves a cross-country cycle to the coast in order to snag one of the bags of cocaine that was washed ashore during a customs operation. Peter Foott's The Young Offenders (2016) inspired a TV series of the same name (2018-24) , which retains the bicycling connections, as Máiréad begins dating Tony Healy (Dominic MacHale), the cycle cop who is forever trying to nab Jock and Conor and their unpredictable mate, Billy Murphy (Shane Casey).

The laughs also come thick and fast in Jake Szymanski's Tour de Pharmacy (2017), a star-studded HBO mockumentary in which Andy Samberg plays an American Tour de France rider with doping issues. After a quick detour to namecheck Belgian Kenneth Mercken's docudramatic feature bow, The Racer (2019), we're back on the Tour for Kieron J. Walsh's The Racer (2020), which sees Louis Talpe reinstated to the team that had disowned him after its leading riders are caught up in a doping scandal that reveals his own drug disgrace to have been a mistake.

Cycling becomes an act of defiance in Kim Yoo-sung's Race to Freedom: Um Bok-dong, as a Korean under Japanese colonial rule seeks to beat the odds and win a prestigious championship. But friendship is the issue in Michael Angelo Covino's The Climb (both 2019), a dramedy in seven chapters that reveals how cycling buddies Kyle (Kyle Marvin) and Mike (Michael Angelo Covino) overcome the fact that the latter steals the former's high school sweetheart, Marissa (Gayle Rankin). But we're more disappointed than usual that we can't bring you Laurent Tirard's Juste ciel! (aka Oh, My Goodness, 2022), as who would want to miss a comedy in which five nuns who has never pushed a pedal in their lives set out to raise funds to restore a crumbling hospice by winning a bike race offering a bumper cash prize?

Classic Cycle Scenes 1895-1995

We'd be here until the 117th Tour de France if we tried to cover every film that has featured a bicycle since Pathé issued their first trick and crash flickers in the early 1900s. But we can present our pick of the classic cycling scenes, as well as some of the odd contraptions that have been ridden across the screen. Take the penny-farthing that Charlie Chaplin was filmed riding while making 'Sunnyside' (1919), which can be rented from Cinema Paradiso on Charlie Chaplin: The Mutual Films - Volume 1 (2003). Several other pictures have included high-wheelers, including John Cromwell's Little Lord Fauntleroy (1936), the Jules Verne duo of Michael Anderson's Around the World in 80 Days (1956) and Don Sharp's Rocket to the Moon (1967), Freddie Francis's Tales That Witness Madness (1973), Garry Marshall's The Princess Diaries 2 (2004), Bruno Dumont's Slack Bay (2016), and Wash Westmoreland's Colette (2018). There was an iconic canopied penny-farthing in The Prisoner (1967-68), while Johnny Knoxville and Ryan Dunn clambered up to the saddle for the 'Bicentennial bmxing' stunt in Jeff Tremaine's Jackass Number Two (2006).

Buster Keaton also bestrode the big wheel in The General (1926), which he co-directed with Clyde Bruckman. He also rode through the countryside on a bone-shaker in Our Hospitality (1923), which he made with John G. Blystone. Keystone stooge Al St John was a trick cyclist on the stage before Mack Sennett signed him up. None of his two-wheel antics have been released on disc, but selections of the studio's best two-reelers can be found on Keystone Komedies Volume 1 (2006) and The Keystone Comedies (2007).

Baby-faced Harry Langdon tries to impress bad rich girl Alma Bennett with his trick cycling when her car breaks down in Frank Capra's Long Pants (1927), while the same year saw Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy beat a hasty retreat on a stolen bicycle in Fred Guoil's Duck Soup, which is available to rent on Laurel & Hardy and the Law (2004). But we bid farewell to the Roaring Twenties in surreal style, as Pierre Batcheff rides a bicycle in a nun's habit before ants come pouring out of his hand in Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un chien andalou (1929), which has lost little of its power to amuse and startle.

Beginning in 1929, the Great Depression continued to bite into the next decade and Slatan Dudow's Kuhle Wampe (1932), which was scripted by Bertolt Brecht, opens with a scene of men on bikes in Berlin waiting to see what vacancies are listed in the morning paper. The realities of life in rural Kansas were photographed in sepia in Victor Fleming's The Wizard of Oz (1939) and no one embodied the harshness more than Miss Almira Gulch (Margaret Hamilton), who tries to steal Toto the dog in the basket of her step-through roadster, which gets swept away in the twister and turns into the flying broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West.

A more innocent cycling scene occurs in Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring (1949), a shomin-geki drama in which Setsuko Hara (in the first of her six films for the director) plays Noriko, a dutiful daughter who enjoys a bicycle trip to the beach and a picnic with Hattori (Jun Usami), who is the assistant to her controlling father, Professor Shukichi Somiya (Chishu Ryu). Another love triangle develops in François Truffaut's adaptation of Pierre Roche's Jules et Jim (1962), which sees Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) cycling in the countryside with Frenchman Jim (Henri Serre) and Austrian Jules (Oskar Werner), in a scene that Philip Kaufman referenced in another ménage saga, Henry and June (1990).

Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney) cycles home across the Nottingham cobbles after his shift at the factory in Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), one of the social realist dramas that raised the profile of regional England and enabled the likes of The Beatles to break down the class barriers in leading a cultural revolution. On the first day of the Bahamas shoot for Richard Lester's Help! (1965), John, George, Paul, and Ringo circle around on cycles while deciding whether to smash Leo McKern and his crazed cult acolytes. A deleted scene involved John Lennon riding a bike in a hotel swimming pool.

Despite the success of the Fab-film-related album, the biggest selling soundtrack of 1965 came from Robert Wise's The Sound of Music, with Maria (Julie Andrews) and the Von Trapp children singing 'Do-Re-Mi' while cycling beside a glorious Austrian lake. The scene is deftly choreographed, but the timing is even more impeccable as PC Jimmy Edwards continually tries and fails to mount his bike while following the antics of Tommy Cooper and Eric Sykes (who also wrote and directed) in the slapstick featurette, The Plank (1967).

Paul Newman did his own cycling stunts, as he tries to amuse Katharine Ross aboard 'the future mode of transportation for this weary Western world' in the famous 'Raindrops Are Falling on My Head' sequence in George Roy Hill's Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid (1969). Following a crash-landing in a bull's field, the pair flee with Ross riding on the handlebars and there was more multi-party riding in The Goodies (1970-82), as Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie, and Tim Brooke-Taylor cycled around London on their three-seat tandem. While we're on the subject of small-screen cycles, we should mention Granville's rickety delivery bike in Open All Hours (1976-85) and the various bicycles ridden to medical emergencies in The District Nurse (1984-87) and Call the Midwife (2012-17).

A cycling couple on a mountain road come to a sticky end after being targeted by a self-driving Lincoln Continental in Elliot Silverstein's The Car (1977), but Lise Danvers is no more safe when she cycles along country lanes to the beach with lecherous cousin Fabrice Luchini in Walerian Borowczyk's Immoral Tales (1973). Also directed by a Pole in exile, Jerzy Skolimowski's The Shout (1978) has Alan Bates's mysterious drifter wheedle his way into Devon composer John Hurt's confidence by letting the air of his bicycle tyre. Staying in the English countryside, the scene shifts to Worcestershire in Alan Clarke's Penda's Fen (1974), a David Rudkin-scripted Play For Today that sees Spencer Banks fall off his bike after having a vision of the demon that had been haunting his dreams. The same Malvern Hills can be seen in Ken Russell's Elgar (1962), which is also available from Cinema Paradiso as part of the BFI's Ken Russell: The Great Composers collection. He would revisit the theme in Elgar: Fantasy on a Composer on a Bicycle (2002).

Thugs Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere steal bicycles as part of their lawless rampage in Bertrand Blier's enduringly controversial study of toxic masculinity, Les Valseuses (aka Going Places, 1974). Los Angeles Rams quarterback Joe Pendleton is robbed of life in Warren Beatty's Heaven Can Wait (1978), as an overzealous angel on his first day on the job whisks him upwards after he's knocked off his bike in a tunnel.

Hoping to bond with his son during a stressful divorce case, Dustin Hoffman teaches Justin Henry to ride a bike in Central Park in Robert Benton's multi-Oscar-winning drama, Kramer vs Kramer (1979). Young Danny Torrance (Danny Lloyd) is in no need of instruction, as he hurtles along the corridors of the Overlook Hotel on his blue plastic tricycle in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's The Shining (1980). Mind the twins!

If this iconic sequence took some filming, imagine how complicated it must have been to have Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy bowl along on bicycles in Battersea Park in Jim Henson's The Great Muppet Caper (1981). Steven Spielberg managed to top the effect, however, not once, but twice in E.T. the Extraterrestrial (1982). Having had a bicycling Elliott (Henry Thomas) and a basket-riding E.T. soar over the treetops and glide past the moon, Spielberg ended the slickly edited chase sequence by lifting five bikes into the air to slip past a setting sun before landing safely. Four decades on, the magic remains undiminished.

Lampooning the children's books of Enid Blyton, Bob Spiers's Five Go Mad in Dorset (1982) sends Julian (Peter Richardson), Anne (Jennifer Saunders), Dick (Adrian Edmondson), and George (Dawn French) on a two-wheeled adventure with their dog, Timmy, in the first film in the groundbreaking series, The Comic Strip Presents... (1982-2000 & 2005-16). The quintet would reassemble with mixed results in Five Go Mad on Mescalin (1983) and Five Go to Rehab (2012).

Whether she's riding a bicycle, dancing, or plotting pitiless revenge, Isabelle Adjani fixes the attention in Jean Becker's One Deadly Summer (1983), which was released in the same year as Jackie Chan's Project A, in which the martial arts maestro evades capture with balletic bicycling brilliance in a warren of narrow alleyways. Ralph Macchio isn't so lucky, when he's sent sprawling by the Cobra Kai motorcyclists in John G. Avildsen's The Karate Kid (1984). He angrily hurls his bike into a dumpster, but the story has a happy ending, thanks to Mr Miyagi.

Cyndi Lauper's 'Good Enough' provides the accompaniment, as Mikey Walsh (Sean Astin), Data Wang (Ke Huy Quan), Mouth Devereaux (Corey Feldman), and Chunk Cohen (Jeff Cohen) saddle up to go in search of One-Eyed Willy's treasure in Richard Donner's The Goonies. If you think they've got pluck, however, remember paperboy Johnny Gasparini (Demian Slade), who is prepared to cycle downhill after Lane Meyer (John Cusack) in a skiing race in order to claim the money he's owed in Savage Steve Holland's Better Off Dead (both 1985).

Having feigned injury, altar boy Salvatore (Salvatore Cascio) gets to ride back from the cemetery on the handlebars of the bike belonging to Alfredo the projectionist (Philippe Noiret) in Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso (1988). The same director also slips a cycle into Malena (2000), as the eponymous newcomer (Monica Bellucci) arrives in a sleepy village on the same day that Italy enters the Second World War and young Renato Amoroso (Giuseppe Sulfaro) gets his first bike.

We've not had many female cyclists in this section so far, but Lesli Linka Glatter puts things right in the nostalgic treat, Now and Then, as Roberta (Christina Ricci), Teeny (Thora Birch), Samantha (Gaby Hoffmann), and Chrissy (Ashleigh Aston Moore) ride abreast singing along to Badfinger's 'No Matter What' and 'Knock Three Times' by Tony Orlando and Dawn. Also released in 1995, Joe Johnston's Jumanji will bring back memories for Cinema Paradiso users of a certain vintage, as among the bikes chasing young Alan Parrish (Adam Hann-Byrd) are a clutch of Raleigh Choppers. Those were the days!

Classic Cycle Scenes 1996-2024

Dick Steele (Leslie Nielsen) and Veronique Ukrinsky (Nicollette Sheridan) relive Butch and Etta's cycling antics in Rick Friedberg's spoof, Spy Hard (1996), but the romantic ride takes a wrong turn when the pair encounter a huge flight of steps. Pausing just to mention the scariest bike kids ever in Harmony Korine's unavailable curio, Gummo (1997), we head to a small Po Valley town in the 1950s, as Anna Ammirati cocks a snook at prim baker fiancé, Max Parodi, by cycling round in an ultra-short skirt in Tinto Brass's softcore saga, Frivolous Lola (1998).

A more charming Italian scene is painted in the early scenes of Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful (1997), as Guido Orefice (Benigni) steals a bike to make an escape in 1930s Arrezzo and crashes into teacher Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), who instantly becomes the love of his life. Fifteen year-old Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman) is lost without his bike in Wes Anderson's Rushmore. So, when industrialist Herman Blume (Bill Murray) runs his car over the front wheel to teach him a lesson, Max borrows his mother's bike to exact his revenge.

Having promised to help young Yusuke Sekiguchi find his long-lost mother, the unreliable title character in Takeshi Kitano's Kikujiro (1999) fritters all his money betting on track cycling and the pair have to hitch to continue their journey. A cycle ride down a mountainside after a glorious sunrise to the strains of Echo & the Bunnymen's 'The Killing Moon' provides the opening scene in Richard Kelly's Donnie Darko (2001). But Jake Gyllenhaal has actually sleepwalked into a 2 October 1988 nightmare. complete with a giant rabbit.

Allusions to an imaginary character also abound in Chih-yen Yee's Blue Gate Crossing (2002), as cycle rides around Taipei help high schooler Guey Lun-mei work out her feelings for best friend Liang Shu-hui after she asks her to act as a go-between with school swimming star, Chen Bo-lin. Taiwanese director Ang Lee uses a cycling scene to bring the action forward 30 years, as Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) cycles into work at the Berkeley Lab in Hulk (2003).

On her last day as a cycle courier, Queen Latifah whizzes through Macy's and over Brooklyn Bridge in a bid to break her personal best speed at the start of Tim Story's Taxi. A grandmother's quad bike accident leads to socially awkward 16 year-old Jon Hader going to stay with an uncle who lives near Mexican transfer student, Efren Ramirez, who shows Hader how to ride his bike over a ramp in Jared Hess's endearingly daft, Napoleon Dynamite (both 2004).

Clearly, this was a good year for bicycling sequences, as James McEvoy has some choice moments grinding on an exercise bike in his room and falling off his racing cycle in full kit because his foot is still clipped to the pedal in Richard Loncraine's Wimbledon. Even Lance Armstrong pops up to give Vince Vaughn a pep talk against quitting in Rawson Marshall Thurber's DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story. But this was when Armstrong was still the superman who had beaten three kinds of cancer to win five successive Tours. Indeed, he was still on his pedestal when Owen Wilson races against him in a living-room simulator in Anthony and Joe Russo's You, Me, and Dupree (2006).

With his helmet strapped firmly on, Steve Carell is the safest cyclist, as he heads into work each morning in Judd Apatow's The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005). However, when Catherine Keener flees his digs after a misunderstanding over his intentions towards her, he takes nocturnal risks that result in him ploughing through a billboard van and out the other side. Robin Williams also takes cycling seriously in Barry Sonnenfeld's R.V. (aka Runaway Vacation, 2006), as he wades into a lake to retrieve his sunken cycle and barrels down a hillside and along a highway in order to catch up with his family.

Stuntman John Davies actually did the dangerous stuff, although Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr, Winona Ryder, and Woody Harrelson opted to be rotoscoped for their argument about a bike in Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly. It's also safe to assume that Matthew McConaughey wasn't really chomped by the chipmunk he stops to feed during a mountain biking trek with buddies Justin Bartha and Bradley Cooper in Tom Dey's Failure to Launch (both 2006).

It's evident that someone involved in Steve Bendelack's Mr Bean's Holiday (2007) is a Jacques Tati fan, as the scene in which Rowan Atkinson passes the riders in a road race on a sit-up-and-beg machine is straight out of Jour de fête (as is hitching a ride from a motor vehicle). It's all good fun, though, and there's also plenty of wistful humour in César Charlone and Enrique Fernández's The Pope's Toilet (2008), as a bicycling drug smuggler from a Uruguayan town on the Brazilian border hatches a get-rich-quick idea when Pope John Paul II visits the area in 1988.

Shady dealings are par for the course for Frank Martin (Jason Statham), so he's not overly fazed when his car is stolen in Olivier Megaton's Transporter 3 (2008), as he just commandeers a BMX and goes steaming after it with The Stooges belting out 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' on the soundtrack. The stunts were performed by ex-World Champion trials riders, Vincent Hermance and Thomas Caillard. Maybe Aron Ralston (James Franco) could have picked up some tips from them, as he flies over the handlebars while zipping through the brush while filming with a camera on his handlebars in Danny Boyle's 127 Hours (2010).

His pride survives the fall, but those familiar with the film will know that much worse is about to follow. Those who aren't need to get clicking. They could also do worse than ordering Phil Lord's 21 Jump Street, if only for the scene in which rookie cops Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill wind up on cycle duty in the park and have a tough time taking down a group of wasted stoners. Just think how much trouble they'd have with Steve Oram and Alice Lowe, the camper van psychopaths who have a brush with cyclist Martin Glover and his mini-caravan in Ben Wheatley's Sightseers (both 2012).

Middle-aged Paul Rudd takes out his frustrations with angry cycle rides in Judd Apatow's This Is 40 (2012). But, having weaved his reckless way through speeding traffic, his sprint away from a family birthday party results in a crunching confrontation with an opening car door. Fully focussed on the road ahead, racing cyclist Michelle Monaghan has little time for milquetoast pharmacist husband Sam Rockwell in Geoff Moore's Better Living Through Chemistry (2014). But he strays from the straight and narrow when he meets neglected trophy wife, Olivia Wilde.

Following a calamity known as 'the Ruin', society has to reorganise and bicycles not only become the primary means of transport, but also a symbol of independence in Philip Noyce's adaptation of Lois Lowry's prize-winning Young Adult Novel, The Giver (2014). By contrast, New York cycle messenger Taylor Lautner comes to believe that parkour is the future after his bike is wrecked by a debt collecting Tong gang from Chinatown in Daniel Benmayor's Tracers (2015).

A thrilling bike chase through the woods is a highlight of Boaz Yakin's Max, which centres on the relationship between a war-traumatised Belgian Malinois and the brother of the Marine handler who had perished in Afghanistan. Suffice to say, the situation isn't quite so intense when SpongeBob SquarePants leaves Bikini Bottom and has to team up with his pals to ride a bicycle while on the trail of the pirate, Burger Beard (Antonio Banderas), in Paul Tibbitt and Mike Mitchell's The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water (2015).

Forced to make a living as a bike courier, Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) agrees to be the fox in a hunt through Central London with some other riders, only to wind up crashing into a police car in the opening sequence of Roar Uthaug's Tomb Raider. Police officer Marvin (William Ash) takes a shine to Joy (Toni Collette) after a cycling injury leaves her with the spare time to realise that her marriage to Alan (Steven Mackintosh) is no longer working. But, while he gets closer to work colleague Claire (Zawe Ashton) in Luke Snellin's Wanderlust (2018), the couple's three children embark upon ill-advised flings of their own.

There are boys on bikes in Keith Behman's Giant Little Ones (2018), Anthony and Joe Russo's Avengers: Endgame (2019), and David Poag's Spooky Night: The Spirit of Halloween (2022). And humble student Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) offers the use of his bike when the well-heeled Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) gets a flat tyre in Emerald Fennell's Saltburn (2023). But cycles are ten a penny in Oxbridge movies. So, we'll end on what Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon) thinks she sees while riding through woods towards a logging town in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Colin Trevorrow's Jurassic World Dominion (2022).