A tender portrait of family with a subtly political message.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 18, 2024

Hit the Road is a chaotic but tender snapshot of a family on a journey, shifting at ease between light-hearted humour and affecting drama.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 18, 2024

The rawness and the expressions captured in Hit the Road make the journey even more special, and when the youngest family member sticks his head through the sunroof and blissfully yells the chorus of the song, everything comes together.

| Sep 4, 2023

In best road movie fashion, Hit the Road also serves as a travelogue as the family passes pistachio-like hills, hot springs, and babbling brooks.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jun 7, 2023

Panahi and his actors shift through emotions so smoothly, you barely notice them until they have immersed you.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 3, 2023

As the answers slowly come into focus — the family is travelling through rural Iran towards the border — Hit the Road transforms from a light-hearted, funny road movie into a heart-breaking multi-tragedy.

| Feb 17, 2023

Hit the Road works in enough familiar ways that critics can safely place it within a certain tradition. But it’s also hopefully the start of something new.

| Feb 16, 2023

Pahar Pahani’s irreverent road movie is sharp and heartbreaking

| Jan 25, 2023

As heartbreakingly raw in its depiction of a family confronting an uncertain future apart as it is effusively alive with love's joy, [it] takes us through remote desert villages en route to the Iranian-Turkish border in search of a promise of freedom.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jan 6, 2023

It’s Little Miss Sunshine with a brooding sociopolitical terror lurking after every single Batman quip and bathroom joke.

| Dec 6, 2022

Hit The Road took me to a country I have never visited, introduced me to people I have never met and made me fall in love. It is a wonderful, pretty much perfect wee gem. Do go and see it.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 24, 2022

A gorgeously shot, superbly acted, astutely written and deeply felt feature all in its own right.

| Sep 3, 2022

Few movie premises are more familiar than a family road trip -- and though it may not be immediately clear where the nameless characters in Panah Panahi’s Hit the Road are headed, while we’re riding along with them, it’s easy to feel at home.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 1, 2022

There is warmth, however bittersweet, and great tenderness in this portrait of a family knowingly charting a course for an unwanted and risky separation -- this depth of feeling all too easily traced back to Panahi's own experience of a family imperilled.

| Aug 31, 2022

A sweetly funny and engaging film that carries a sting in its tail like an Aesop fable.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 30, 2022

It's the kind of road movie that makes you wish for the sudden appearance of a large sinkhole.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Aug 25, 2022

Love and loss are the bedrock of an heroic cross-country ride from Iranian film-maker Panah Panahi.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 25, 2022

It has cinematic brio, and its best characters are distinctive, rounded versions of their archetypes...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 24, 2022

The director’s style carries his father’s comical take on realism forward with such confidence; I was never expecting special effects, images that play like waking dreams, or musical numbers sung to the audience.

| Original Score: B+ | Aug 20, 2022

A far-reaching fable of connection and separation, handled with disarming wit and tenderness.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 4, 2022