In Fellini's La Strada, we enter another plane by grace of Gelsomina. Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) is the Spirit, the Soul. She will play the trumpet.
In its own time, this hard-to-pigeonhole ambling road picture had as much trouble finding its place in the world as Max and Lion. But the past decade has seen Scarecrow garner a cult following, with Pacino and Hackman both publicly praising it, and director Jerry Schatzberg even rhapsodizing about a sequel.
Bookended by the post-industrial Midwestern hellscapes of Stranger Than Paradise and the twilight tourist Americana of Mystery Train, Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law takes us to the bayous of New Orleans, where a pimp, a radio DJ, and an Italian traveler all wind up in jail.
Whereas Hirokazu Kore-eda's Shoplifters is a fairly stationary film, charting one family’s experiences in and around their cramped Tokyo home, Broker is a story of people on the move.
Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild is a lot of things—Renoirian screwball, Gen-X The Odd Couple, defense for the reggae mixtape—but it’s a road movie first and foremost.
For all its discussions of morals and metaphysics, Stalker is ultimately a film about criticism—not in the sense of simply pronouncing something wasteful or worthwhile, but in the explicative sense, wherein interpreting an object or experience imparts a particular way of seeing.
