9 BuzzVerdicts, ranked by rating across Movies (6), TV Shows (2), Books (1)
1987 · John Hughes · 93 min · Comedy, Drama
John Hughes proved he could break your heart as effectively with two middle-aged men sharing a rental car as he ever did with teenagers in detention, and Steve Martin and John Candy delivered career-defining performances in the process.
2017 · 2 Seasons · Channel 4 · Dark Comedy Drama
The End of the F***ing World is a tight, darkly hilarious road trip through teenage alienation that manages to be both deeply cynical and surprisingly tender. Alex Lawther and Jessica Barden are extraordinary together, bringing life to two damaged teenagers whose journey from mutual exploitation to genuine connection is one of the most honest portrayals of adolescent loneliness on screen. The first season is near-perfect. The second season is good but unnecessary. Together, they make a compelling case for the short-form drama as a viable format.
2014 · Jon Favreau · 114 min · Comedy / Drama
Chef is Jon Favreau's palate cleanser between blockbusters, a small, warm film about a celebrity chef who torches his career in a viral meltdown and rebuilds his life, his craft, and his relationship with his son from the window of a Cuban sandwich truck. The food photography set a standard the genre still chases, the father-son road trip supplies real feeling, and the film's love of process, knife work, mojo marinade, a perfectly pressed cubano, is infectious enough to send audiences straight to the kitchen. The conflict dissolves early and the wish-fulfillment runs unopposed. As comfort cinema with garlic, it remains the genre's gold standard.
1983 · Harold Ramis · 98 min · Comedy
The American family road trip movie to end all American family road trip movies, with Chevy Chase at the peak of his powers and a John Hughes script that finds the absurdity hiding inside every family vacation.
2008 · Byron Howard, Chris Williams · 96 min · Animation / Adventure
Bolt is the film where modern Disney Animation quietly turned the corner, a road movie about a TV-star dog who believes his superpowers are real, discovering the country, the truth, and what actually makes him a good dog. The premise is a gentle Hollywood satire, the heart is a pet-and-owner love story played completely straight, and Rhino the hamster remains one of the studio's great scene thieves. It's smaller and safer than the classics that followed it, with a story arc visible from the first act. What it started, warmth, craft, and a studio remembering itself, turned out to matter more than its modest scale.
2005 · 15 Seasons · The WB / The CW · Fantasy, Horror, Drama
Supernatural ran for an astonishing fifteen seasons on the strength of Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki's chemistry as the Winchester brothers, producing a wildly inconsistent but often thrilling mix of monster-of-the-week horror, mythology, and found-family emotion.
2020 · Dan Scanlon · 102 min · Animation, Adventure, Fantasy
A deeply personal story about brotherly love and father loss wrapped in a clever urban fantasy setting, Onward delivers a gut-punch ending even if the journey there is Pixar on autopilot.
2018 · Peter Farrelly · 130 min · Comedy / Drama
Green Book is a well-acted, crowd-pleasing road movie that tells a story about racism in the Jim Crow South through the least challenging lens possible. Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali deliver performances that make their odd-couple dynamic genuinely entertaining, and the film's warmth is real enough to carry audiences through two hours without friction. The problem is that frictionlessness is exactly the wrong quality for a film about the Black experience in 1960s America. It tells a story about racial injustice primarily through the education of a white character, smooths the sharp edges into comfortable life lessons, and arrives at a resolution that feels better than it should given the reality it claims to depict.
2024 · Miranda July · 336 pages · Literary Fiction
A daring, polarizing novel about a woman in midlife who abandons a cross-country drive to hole up in a motel room, redesigning it and herself in the process. Brilliant and frustrating in almost equal measure.