The Best American Road Movies

No one needs reminding that the world has been gripped by the coronavirus pandemic for the last 18 months. So, as the latest UK lockdown edges towards an end, Cinema Paradiso celebrates the wide open spaces that everyone has been missing so much with a whistlestop tour of the road movie.

As if to reinforce the notion that the road movie is rooted in one of the oldest forms of storytelling, Joel and Ethan Coen drew on Homer's The Odyssey for their Depression-era comedy, O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). They also paid homage to Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels (1942), in which director Joel McCrea abandons cheap comedies to go in search of a worthwhile topic to reflect the state of the nation.

The quest is one of the two staples of the road movie (as Cinema Paradiso pointed out in one of its popular Brief History articles), with the other being the flight, which sees the principals trying to avoid capture by those in hot pursuit. Yet film-makers are forever finding variations on these themes, as they traverse the genres in order to inflect the action with moments of comedy, romance, suspense and terror that can spice up the journey. Of course, many of these gambits had their origins in the Western. On this occasion, we shall be sticking with the motorised form of horse power. But you can read up on cattle drives, wagon train treks and stagecoach dashes in Cinema Paradiso's 21 Reasons to Love Modern Westerns.

Road Signs

No matter where the landscape or whether the vehicle is a car, truck, bus or motorcycle, the road movie is essentially a character study that juxtaposes Nature and technology. In the quest format, there's more chance to enjoy the scenery, as the action tends to meander as the protagonists follow the bends in the road in pursuit of their goal. By contrast, in the chase picture, the unrelenting pace means that landmarks whizz past the windscreen as the fugitives seek to stay one step ahead of the cops or desperadoes on their tail. Despite the differences, however, there are unifying signifiers and factors.

Regardless of the speed of the conveyance and the vastness of the expanse through which it's heading, the interior scenes in a road movie are largely static and almost intrusively intimate, as the driver and their passenger (s) are necessarily seated with the camera in close proximity. Tight close-ups also serve to detach the figures in the front seats (whether the soft top is up or down), while long takes in long shot highlight the isolation and vulnerability of a vehicle, even when it's a swanky model with a burnished glamour.

In recent times, directors have sought to heighten the sense of space by shooting through side windows or capturing the reflections on the windscreen. Having photographed motorist Homayoun Ershadi from the passenger seat in Taste of Cherry (1997), Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami made innovative use of a dashcam to eavesdrop on Mania Akbari and her companions in Ten (2002). Compatriot Jafar Panahi followed suit in Taxi Tehran (2015) and this shot has now become as much a staple as the rear mirror view that Steven Spielberg utilised so cannily in his debut feature, Duel (1971).

Exteriors are usually achieved by mounting a car on a process trailer or by fitting a flexible crane rig to its roof. Although helicopters are still used, the advent of the drone has made it easier to provide God's eye views of speeding vehicles and their surrounding terrain. But the tarmac snaking through the wilderness isn't the genre's only recurring motif. There are also gas stations, diners and motels, as well as the road signs identifying evocative place names and such famous highways as Route 66, which isn't to be confused with the curse thoroughfare taken Lou Diamond Phillips and Lori Petty in William Wesley's Route 666 (2001).

Editing can be bring kinetic energy to driving scenes, with the rhythm of the sequence often being dictated by the propulsive nature of the score or the rock or rap songs on the soundtrack. This has been the case since Dennis Hopper used Steppenwolf's 'Born to Be Wild' over the shots of Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Hopper) riding their motorcycles in the definitive counterculture road movie, Easy Rider (1969).

Epitomising the road genre's subversive nature, this snapshot of Sixties self-discovery combined the modernist and the pastoral in not only providing a critique of socio-cultural convention, but also in exposing the flaws and fragility of American masculinity in a time of epochal change. This existential crisis became a common theme of countless buddy pictures, as well as those in which the travelling companions were of the opposite sex.

Over the years, the focus has fallen on knockabout treasure seekers (Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, 1963), rebellious bikers (Roger Corman's The Wild Angels, 1966), lone wolves (Richard C. Sarafian's Vanishing Point, 1971), parents and children (Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon, 1973), race competitors (Paul Bartel's Death Race 2000, 1975), risk-taking truckers (William Friedkin's Sorcerer, 1977), holidaying families (Harold Ramis's National Lampoon's Vacation, 1983), psychopaths and casualties (Robert Harmon's The Hitcher, 1986), vampires and victims (Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark, 1987), odd couples (John Hughes's Planes, Trains and Automobiles, 1987), prisoners and escorts (Martin Brest's Midnight Run, 1988), female friends (Ridley Scott's Thelma & Louise, 1991), same sex couples (Gregg Araki's The Living End, 1992), touring rock bands (Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous, 2000), peckish stoners (Danny Leiner's Harold and Kumar Get the Munchies, 2004), and racial opposites (Peter Farrelly's Green Book, 2018).

Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen stop for food in Green Book

As road movies adopt a freewheeling attitude to storytelling, they rarely employ the standard three-act structure. They also tend to steer clear of conventional dramatic strategies in showing how journeys bring about the resolution of conflicts and the emotional growth of the characters. Moreover, they know no generic boundaries or national frontiers. Indeed, road movies have been made around the world since the first flickers offered 19th-century audiences the chance to experience the view from the passenger seat of a speeding motor car. How much has changed since audiences thrilled to point-of-view tram rides like the ones contained in the BFI's Electric Edwardians: The Films of Mitchell and Kenyon (2005) or since Boon Hoggenbeck (Steve McQueen) borrowed his employer's 1905 Winton Flyer to see his best girl in Memphis in Mark Rydell's engaging adaptation of William Faulkner's The Reivers (1969).

Get Your Kicks

Throughout the 1890s, the development of the motor car was always slightly ahead of that of the moving image. In the United States, the market was dominated by the Model T, which was mass-produced by Henry Ford and became so ubiquitous that even the permanently penurious Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy could afford to smash up as many as they liked in their slapstick shorts. Ford ceased production of the most influential car of the 20th century in 1927, the year in which silent movies gave way to the talkies that seized upon the sound made by screeching tyres to make chase sequences in action and crime pictures all the more thrilling.

Just as the rolling plains had symbolised freedom in the pioneer era, the open road served the same function for city dwellers striving to escape from the confines of the grid-pattern roads that confined them during the working week. When work became scarce during the Great Depression, jobseekers took to the roads in search of hope and Hollywood caught on to the national mood in features as different as Frank Capra's It Happened One Night (1934), in which heiress Claudette Colbert takes a bus ride in the hope of establishing her independence, and Fritz Lang's You Only Live Once (1937), which joins ex-jailbird Henry Fonda and wife Sylvia Sidney on a dead-end trip that showed how hard it was to get a second chance in unforgiving times.

Fonda was on his uppers again in John Ford's Oscar-garlanded adaptation of John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath (1940), as the Joad family abandons the Oklahoma Dust Bowl and follow Highway 66 in the hope of finding gainful employment in the promised land of California. The disenfranchised, the despised, the discarded and the disillusioned would become the road movie's stock characters and it's sobering to see in Chloé Zhao's Oscar winner, Nomadland (2020), that little has changed for those on America's social and economic margins.

Not all of the journeying in this period were prompted by despair, however. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby would get to become experienced travellers, without or without Dorothy Lamour, in the popular 'Road' comedies whose influence can still be seen in the eight pastiche odysseys that Brian and Stewie Griffin have undertaken in Family Guy between 2000-18. Having blazed the trail in Victor Schertzinger's Road to Singapore (1940) and Road to Zanzibar (1941), Hope and Crosby hooked up again in David Butler's Road to Morocco (1942), Hal Walker's Road to Utopia (1946) and Road to Bali (1952), Norman Z. McLeod's Road to Rio (1947) and Norman Panama's The Road to Hong Kong (1962). Whether they know it or not, film-makers who seek to show the funny side of life on the road are following in Bing and Bob's footsteps.

A sense of detachment drove many returning GIs on to the tarmac in the postwar era, as they discovered that the United States was anything but a home fit for heroes. Influenced by Italian neo-realism and film noir, road movies like Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945) introduced a new sourness to the genre, as the highway to hope became a road to nowhere for hitching musician Al Roberts (Tom Neal), who recklessly assumes the identity of the murdered motorist who had been giving him a lift after he had quit New York for a fresh start in Tinseltown.

As one of the few women directing in Hollywood in this period, Ida Lupino made the stranger thumbing the ride the bogeyman in The Hitch-Hiker (1953), as buddies Roy (Edmond O'Brien) and Gilbert (Frank Lovejoy) come to regret slowing down for the eerily watchful Emmett Myers (William Talman). By contrast, Keechie (Cathy O'Donnell) has no regrets about meeting Bowie (Farley Granger), even though he's being pursued by both the cops and his criminous associates in Nicholas Ray's debut feature, They Live By Night (1948), which introduced a hint of Poetic Realism to a picture that shouldn't be confused with Raoul Walsh's They Drive By Night (1940), which co-stars Humphrey Bogart and George Raft as brothers discovering the dangers of the haulage business.

While Bowie and Keechie - who returned in the form of Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall in Robert Altman's 1974 version of the same Edward Anderson novel, Thieves Like Us - simply wish to be left alone, Bart Tare (John Dall) and Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) go looking for trouble in Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy (1949), a B classic whose long shadow can be detected in everything from Jean-Luc Godard's A bout de souffle (1960) and Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) to Terrence Malick's Badlands (1973) and Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994), which was co-scripted by Quentin Tarantino.

Many early road movies were two-handers, but Kentucky bootlegger Lucas Doolan (Robert Mitchum) reckons that he that travels alone travels fastest, as he negotiates some treacherous mountain routes in Arthur Ripley's Thunder Road (1958). Travel also played a significant part in films as different as Laszlo Benedek's The Wild One (1954) and Joshua Logan's Bus Stop (1956), while the changing scenery proved crucial to both Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones (1958) and Alfred Hitchcock's North By Northwest (1959), which were released in the wake of two novels that were to have a seismic impact upon the American road movie, Jack Kerouac's On the Road and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, which were both published in 1957. Stanley Kubrick adapted the latter in 1962 and Adrian Lyne had directed a 1997 remake by the time that Brazilian Walter Salles became the first to tackle Kerouac's Beat Generation classic in his 2012 take on the picaresque (mis) adventures of aspiring New York writer Sal Paradise (Sam Riley) and dangerous drifter, Dean Moriarty (Garrett Hedlund).

Get Your Motor Running

It's ironic that the routes that became synonymous with the youth-quakes of the 1950s and 60s came into being thanks to President Dwight D. Eisenhower's inter-state highway initiative. As Disney was hooking a new generation on the pleasures of motorised hi-jinx with Robert Stevenson's The Love Bug (1968), the arrival of New American Cinema drove a hole through the Production Code, which was replaced in 1968 with a certification system that gave film-makers more licence to tackle adult issues in a grown-up manner. Bookended by bus journeys, John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969) became the first Best Picture winner with an X certificate. It also boasted an outstanding soundtrack, although music was largely incidental in Monte Hellman's Two Lane Blacktop (1971), even though its starred musicians James Taylor and Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, as a pair of itinerant drag racers cruising Route 66 in search of challengers.

Tempting though it is to include train-hopping treks like Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (1973) and quirky quests like Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), we had better stick to the straight and narrow and simply note to road movie elements of Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces (1970), Martin Scorsese's Boxcar Bertha (1972) and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), George Lucas's American Graffiti, Jerry Schatzberg's Scarecrow, both 1973), Michael Cimino's Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974) and Jack Starrett's Race With the Devil (1975), which set the trend for such later highway horrors as Ruben Fleischer's Zombieland (2009).

Speaking of the Movie Brats, we should also join Lou Jean (Goldie Hawn) and her escaped prisoner husband Clovis Michael (William Atherton) as they abduct Texas patrolman Maxwell Slide (Michael Sacks) in a mercy dash to prevent their son from being placed in foster care in Steven Spielberg's true-life reconstruction, Sugarland Express (1974). This is available to rent from Cinema Paradiso in high-quality DVD and Blu-ray and would make a fine double bill with another high-speed three-in-a-motor picture from the same year, as Mary Coombs (Susan George) hitches a ride with wannabe NASCAR racers Larry Rayder (Peter Fonda) and Deke Sommers (Adam Roarke) in John Hough's Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry.

Then again, you could twin this with Paul Bartel's Cannonball (1976), which sees Cade Redman (Bill McKinney) do his darndest to prevent Coy Buckman (David Carradine) from winning the Tranx-America Grand Prix in a knockabout manner that will remind some of Dick Dastardley's antics in the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, Wacky Races (1968-69), which re-emerged in a new CGI format in 2017. Bartel's romp would inspire Hal Needham's The Cannonball Run (1981) and The Cannonball Run II (1984), which reunited the stuntman-turned-director with Burt Reynolds after their beer smuggling exploits in Smokey and the Bandit (1977), which proved such a hit (only a little flick called Star Wars bested it at the box office) that Reynolds's Bo Darville was reunited with Carrie (Sally Field) and Sheriff Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason ( for Smokey and the Bandit II (1980). And speaking of CB radio handles, who can forget Martin 'Rubber Duck' Penwald (Kris Kristofferson) locking horns with Natosha County sheriff Lyle 'Cottonmouth' Wallace (Ernest Borgnine) in Sam Peckinpah's Convoy (1978).

Head Out on the Highway

Although the road movie took a musical detour with James Frawley's The Muppet Movie (1979), John Landis's The Blues Brothers (1980) and Walter Hill's Crossroads (1986), the middle of the road was occupied by sentimental odysseys like Peter Masterson's The Trip to Bountiful (1985), which earned Geraldine Page the Oscar for Best Actress, and coming-of-age expeditions like Rob Reiner's Stand By Me (1986), which was adapted from a story by Stephen King, whose career has been assessed in one of Cinema Paradiso's Top 10 selections.

There were also curios like Sylvester Stallone's arm-wrestling saga, Over the Top (1987) and such white-knuckle rides as Jan De Bont's Speed (1994), which sees passenger Sandra Bullock take the wheel of a bus that can't dip below 50 mph or the bomb planted by Dennis Hopper will explode. Now what would happen if you applied the same plot to a milkfloat. See the 'Speed 3' episode of Father Ted (1995-98) for details.

Back on the big screen, knowing comedies used the highway to explore the parochial nature of American society, as yuppies David and Linda Howard (Albert Brooks and Julie Hagerty) go looking for Easy Rider cool and can't find it anywhere in Brooks's Lost in America (1985), former classmates Walter Gibson (John Cusack) and Alison Bradbury (Daphne Zuniga) endure hitching hell in Rob Reiner's The Sure Thing (1985), and party animal Thomas R. Callahan III (Chris Farley) has to save his late father's auto company on a sales trip with sycophant Richard Hayden (David Spade) in Peter Segal's Tommy Boy (1995).

The Sure Thing popularised the campus break scenario that received fresh impetus after the likes of Todd Phillips's Road Trip (2000), Roger Kumble's College Road Trip and Sean Anders's Sex Drive (both 2008) sought to cash in on the success of the success of Paul Weitz's American Pie (1999). Jonathan Demme had been among the first to give joyriding an edge when he sent the psychotic Ray (Ray Liotta) after Lulu (Melanie Griffiths) and Charlie (Jeff Daniels) in Something Wild (1986), but it took David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997) to push things over the neo-noir edge, as saxophonist Bill Pullman and mechanic Balthazar Getty are freaked by respective incidents involving their wife and a gangster's moll, who are both played by Patricia Arquette.

Meanwhile, a liberal dash of sentiment allowed Barry Levinson's Rain Man (1988) to become the third road movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture after It Happened One Night and Midnight Cowboy. Some would argue that it was actually the fourth, as they would count Michael Anderson's all-star adaptation of Jules Verne's globetrotting gem, Around the World in 80 Days (1956), which was remade by Frank Coraci in 2004, with Steve Coogan and Jackie Chan replacing David Niven and Cantinflas in the roles of Phileas Fogg and Passepartout.

Wim Wenders (who is the King of the Road, as we shall see when Cinema Paradiso turns its attention to the global road movie) won the Palme d'or at Cannes with one of the pivotal entries in the entire genre, Paris, Texas (1984). Although devised by screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson, the journey undertaken by Travis Henderson (Harry Dean Stanton) to find his estranged wife, Jane (Nastassja Kinski), offers an outsider perspective on Reaganite America, as it emerges from the fug that had descended after Vietnam and Watergate.

Ironically, the decade's other most influential road movie was also directed by a non-American. Even though George Miller's Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981), was set in the Australian Outback, it souped up the conventions established Stateside and brought a new combustibility to the full-throttle action. Another influential import from Down Under was Stephan Elliott's The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), which followed the sequined antics of drag queens Bernadette Bassenger (Terence Stamp), Mitzi Del Bra (Hugo Weaving) and Felicia Jollygoodfellow (Guy Pearce).

Mad Max: The Road Warrior, an icon of the post-apocalyptic road movie

Yet, while they found kindred spirits in Noxeema Jackson (Wesley Snipes), Vida Boheme (Patrick Swayze) and Chi-Chi Rodriguez (John Leguizamo) in Beeban Kidron's To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar (1995), this was very much part of the New Queer wave that swept along the likes of Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991) and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993), Gregg Araki's aforementioned The Living End and Herbert Ross's Boys on the Side (1995), which also confronted the issue of AIDS. A decade later, the topic of gender identification came under consideration in Duncan Tucker's Transamerica (2005), which centres on the bonding trip made by the troubled Toby (Kevin Zegers) and Bree (Felicity Huffman), the pre-operative transsexual who has just discovered she's a parent.

Looking For Adventure

Such titles reflected the indie shift of gear that had brought a deadpan minimalism to the road movie. Leading the way was Jim Jarmusch, who followed the peregrinations of Brooklynite Willie (John Lurie), his Hungarian cousin Eva (Eszter Balint) and his shifty friend, Eddie (Richard Edson), in Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Staying in monochrome, Jarmusch latched on to a trio of prisoners escaping across the Louisiana Bayou in Down By Law (1986), which cast Lurie as a small-time pimp named Jack alongside Tom Waits and Roberto Benigni, as struggling DJ Zack and Bob, an eccentric Italian tourist who has been charged with accidental manslaughter.

Nicolas Cage provides the connection between Joel and Ethan Coen's baby blues romp, Raising Arizona (1987), and David Lynch's Wild At Heart, which joined Jarmusch's Mystery Train (both 1989) in paying tribute to Elvis Presley. Lynch also managed to wangle in references to Victor Fleming's Yellow Brick Road movie, The Wizard of Oz (1939), and he almost slowed the action down to walking pace again in The Straight Story (1999), which sets Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) on a six-week expedition across country aboard a John Deere lawnmower in order to see the estranged brother who has just suffered a stroke.

Lovers on the lam made a breakneck return in the 1990s, with newlyweds Drew Barrymore and James Le Gros fleeing town in Tamra Davis's Gun crazy (1992); Brad Pitt and Juliette Lewis taking advantage of the four-wheeled hospitality offered by David Duchovny and Michelle Forbes in Dominic Sena's Kalifornia (1993); Christian Slater and Patricia Arquette coming to regret stealing a suitcase in Tony Scott's True Romance (1993), which was scripted by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary; escaped con Charlie Sheen offering a ride to billionaire's daughter Kristy Swanson in Adam Rifkin's The Chase; and Gil Bellows and Renée Zellwegger going on a pistol-packing honeymoon in C.M. Talkington''s Love and a. 45 (both 1994).

It wasn't all revving engines and getaway dust clouds, however. Lloyd Christmas (Jim Carrey) and Harry Dunne (Jeff Daniels) unwittingly put a spoke in the wheel when they schlep from Providence, Rhode Island to Aspen, Colorado to return a briefcase containing ransom money in Peter Farrelly's Dumb and Dumber (1994). Bright ideas are also in short supply as MTV's favourite cartoon couch potatoes head into the wilds in search of their fathers in Mike Judge's Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (1996). What a shame it's not currently possible to double this up with Chris Eyre's father issues saga, Smoke Signals (1998), which is the first notable Native American road movie.

The desert and illegal substances also play a crucial part in Terry Gillim's freewheeling take on Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), as journalist Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) and sidekick Dr Gonzo (Benecio Del Toro) put the trip in travel. The chaos is more civilised, but just as discombobulating in David O. Russell's Flirting With Disaster (1996), as adoption agency employee Téa Leoni decides to accompany new parents Ben Stiller and Patricia Arquette on a drive from New York to San Diego to meet Stiller's biological mother. And the focus also falls on motherhood as 12 year-old Kimberly J. Brown hopes that flighty Janet McTeer (who would be Oscar nominated for her performance) will finally settle down in Starlight Beach, California in Gavin O'Connor's Tumbleweeds (1999).

And Whatever Comes Our Way

For those not fleeing cops or robbers, American road movies have usually involved a search for a mythical past or a dream of a better future. Part of the appeal of the genre has lain in its unpredictability, as the characters go where the road takes them. But, as director Harmony Korine has pointed out, 'You can't make a road movie anymore because everyone has GPS.' What's more, modern forms of communication and surveillance make it more difficult to drop out and freedom seek.

Moreover, attitudes to the colonialist ideologies that underpinned the pioneering principal of the Manifest Destiny have rightly been challenged. Even the great American love affair with the automobile has cooled, as people become more aware of the ecological damage done by gas-guzzling status symbols. Consequently, while individual journeys like the one in Sean Penn's Into the Wild (2007) can still have an emotional impact, the genre has rather settled into a groove, in spite of the injection of novelty provided by the experimental landscape studies of James Benning. As in past times, the outsider eye has also prompted American directors to look again, with the two most influential postmodern post-millennial pictures being Alfonso Cuarón's Mexican sex romp, Y tu mamá también (2001), and Frenchman Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms (2003), which accompanies photographer David Wissak and girlfriend Yekaterina Golubeva on a magazine shoot in the Californian desert.

Among the pictures to roll along pleasantly are Bruce Paltrow's Duets (2000), Tamra Davis's Crossroads (2002), Nigel Cole's Five Dollars a Day, Neil Burger's The Lucky Ones (both 2008), Richard Loncraine's My One and Only (2009), Todd Phillips's Due Date (2010), James Ponsoldt's The End of the Tour, Jake Schreier's Paper Towns and Matt Ross's Captain Fantastic (all 2015). Also keeping to their lane are such family rites of passage as Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris's Little Miss Sunshine (2006) and Paul Weitz's Grandma (2015), as well as such final fling sagas as Bob Gale's Interstate 60 (2002), Walt Becker's Wild Hogs and Rob Reiner's The Bucket List (both 2007).

Three directors have gone their own sweet way, however, with Jim Jarmusch retaining his penchant for the offbeat in Broken Flowers (2005), which follows Don Johnston (Bill Murray) on a quest to discover which of his ex-lovers sent him a letter about a 19 year-son he has yet to meet. Jarmusch has also continued to make inner-city road movies, with the taxis of Night on Earth (1991) being replaced in Paterson (2016) by the New Jersey bus driven by aspiring poet, devoted husband and dutiful dogwalker, Adam Driver. Adding a cat to the mix, Joel and Ethan Coen went much the same route in Inside Llewyn Davis (2013).

Alexander Payne has also mastered the form since he put Jack Nicholson behind the wheel of a Winnebago Adventurer in About Schmidt (2002), as the recently retired and widowed Warren Schmidt decides there's only one way to go when his life comes to a crossroads. Two's company in the Oscar-winning adaptation of Rex Pickett's novel, Sideways (2004), as depressed teacher Miles Raymond (Paul Giamatti) and washed-up actor Jack Cole (Thomas Haden Church) exchange home truths during a tour of California's wine country.

Harsh words are also exchanged between the elderly Woody Grant (Bruce Dern) and his son David (Will Forte), as they head out from Montana to collect a sweepstake prize in Nebraska (2013). Dern won the Best Actor prize at Cannes for his splendidly tetchy performance and joined Nicholson and Haden Church in drawing Oscar nominations.

Director Kelly Reichardt's own pet won the prestigious Palm Dog at Cannes for her adorable display opposite Michelle Williams in Wendy and Lucy (2008), in which a trip to Alaska in a rickety vehicle has a heartbreaking denouement when penniless jobseeker Wendy Carroll is separated from her faithful companion after being arrested for shoplifting. This was Reichardt's second road movie after she had accompanied old friends Kurt (Will Oldham) and Mark (Daniel London) on an overdue reunion trek to the Bagby Hot Springs in Old Joy (2006). Four years later, Reichardt and Williams would also return to the genre's roots in Meek's Cutoff (2010), which recreates the events of an infamous wagon train expedition along the Oregon Trail in the 1840s.

Despite being booed at Cannes because of a notorious scene involving Chloë Sevigny, Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny (2003) has been steadily building a cult following for its depiction of the scenic jaunt between New Hampshire and California undertaken by motorcycle racer Bud Clay (Gallo), who is in the midst of an existential crisis. The past keeps cropping up during the two-day drive from Williamsburg to Atlanta in Jay and Mark Duplass's The Puffy Chair (2005), as Josh (Mark Duplass) comes to wish he hadn't invited brother Rhett (Rhett Wilkins) to join him and girlfriend Emily (Katie Aselton) in collecting a piece of furniture he had won on eBay.

Perhaps the most outrageous road movie of recent times (discounting its Oscar-nominated 2020 sequel) has to be Larry Charles's mockumentary Borat: Cultural Learnings of America For Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006), which chronicles the impressions of the US and A gained by Kazak reporter Borat Sagdiyev (Sacha Baron Cohen), as he goes in search of Baywatch (1989-2001) star, Pamela Andersoon.

Having penned a few road movies, Quentin Tarantino finally directed one of his own with Death Proof (2007), which burns rubber for a solid 18 minutes during the white-knuckle 'Ship's Mast' sequence involving stunt artists Zoë Bell and Tracie Thomas. There's nothing quite so hair-raising in Ramin Bahrani's Goodbye Solo (2008), but the story compels from the moment that taxi driver Solo (Souléymane Sy Savané) drives William (Red West) from Winston-Salem in North California to the dramatic structure of Blowing Rock. There's also something touchiing about the relationship struck up on the road between Dodge (Steve Carell) and Penny (Keira Knightly), as an asteroid hurtles towards Earth in Lorene Scafaria's Seeking a Friend For the End of the World (2012).

Detours to Jacksonville and Savannah are marked on the map when Michael Lane (Channing Tatum) rejoins the Kings of Tampa to participate in the annual Myrtle Beach stripping convention in Gregory Jacobs's Magic Mike XXL (2015). Quitting her abusive home in Muskogee, Oklahoma, teenager Star (Sasha Lane) swaps a dead end for the open road when she joins the magazine subscription crew led by Jake (Shia LeBeouf) and Krystal (Riley Keough) in Andrea Arnold's American Honey (2016). And the comic-book blockbuster finally got its spandex in gear, as Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) takes to the road to keep Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and the mysterious Laura (Dafne Keen) out of the clutches of Donald Pierce (Boyd Holbrook) and his Reavers in James Mangold's Logan (2017).

Hugh Jackman as Logan, a recent top tier American Road Movie

One of the criticisms long levelled at the road movie has been its lack of diversity. There have been rare examples of journeys involving African Americans, including Oz Scott's Richard Pryor vehicle, Bustin' Loose (1981), and Spike Lee's Get on the Bus (1996), which boards a coach destined for the Million Man March in October 1995. It's rather damning that neither of these films is available on disc in this country, but Cinema Paradiso can offer one of the few Chinese American road movies to have reached the big screen, as Wayne Wang's Chan Is Missing (1982) joins San Francisco cabbies Jo (Wood Moy) and Steve (Marc Hayashi) in their search for a man who has disappeared with a £4000 loan.

Migrants from Latin America and beyond have also been given short shrift over the last decade. Perhaps Nomadland's Oscar success will afford politically aware film-makers an opportunity to take the road movie in these vital new directions in the years ahead.