... A solid, atmospheric and evocative take on what is a seminal slice of 20th Century literature.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 5, 2023

Brazilian director Walter Salles (born 1956) has attempted to make a movie that retains the feel of the Kerouac literary classic.

| Feb 28, 2021

Walter Salles' adaptation of ON THE ROAD is an intoxicating but frustrating film. You will be drawn in by the visual and aural hedonism and you'll ignore the self-indulgence and lack of control - but only up to a point.

| Feb 13, 2020

On The Road takes you on a visual and emotionally visceral experience of freedom and freedom of expression.

| Nov 27, 2019

Salles has been on this road before with much more success, and this trip just feels gratuitous, lost in its own haze of beatnik navel gazing.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Aug 6, 2019

In its base remit of offering a visual realisation of the story and honouring the key themes of the novel and Beat culture, Salles deserves at least a modicum of credit.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 27, 2019

Salles' "On the Road" brings this major work back to its original scale: small, intimate and still wild at heart.

| Dec 17, 2018

[Director Walter] Salles gets the frenetic pace of Beat Generation antics right, but he only hints at Sal's ambivalence about this way of living.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Dec 12, 2018

The performances are a key element to enjoying this picture, but it remains slow and sometimes uneventful.

| Oct 22, 2018

The film feels tame, in part because the subject matter is no longer as shocking as it was in the 50s.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 23, 2018

Kristin Stewart reminded me of why I liked her in the first place, in movies like "Into the Wild." Quiet and natural is more her thing, and she was seductive and believable and also oft-nude here.

| Aug 22, 2018

With On The Road, Salles creates a vivid portrait of youth and spirited abandon that probably won't resonate with everyone. But then again, the best movies seldom do.

| Aug 21, 2018

More an extended Urban Outfitters advertisement than an essay on, or into, the exciting experiments of Beat Cinema.

| Jul 31, 2018

While the film revolves around painfully handsome Dean's chaotic existentialism, the women of On the Road, while often discarded by their men, provide essential narrative stability and insight.

| Mar 8, 2017

Although the film is sensationally photographed and artfully directed and scored, it's ultimately strictly dullsville, man.

| Jun 27, 2014

Despite the obvious enthusiasm of the screenwriter, the director, and the actors for Kerouac's novel, they get it wrong. Probably nobody can get it right, since the power is in the words, not the story.

| Nov 1, 2013

It's hard to imagine how such an exciting book became such a boring movie.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jun 26, 2013

A booze-soaked, drug-riddled, sex-filled escapade with no real point about young people casting off whatever yokes chain them and seeing what's out there. It captures the pure exhilaration of freedom for its own sake.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 2, 2013

If our On the Road is a barely coherent tightrope act - a fizzy word drunk stand-up speed-rapped by an aspiring poet posing as a dumb saint prole - then it's tough to take this pretty version, populated by Gap models in retro Americana fashions.

| Original Score: 81/100 | Apr 26, 2013

The movie version of "On the Road" won't have the impact on a person that the book ever did. But it does go some way to explaining why the book did.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 22, 2013