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

| Jul 31, 2018

It's not a wreck of a movie; it's not a sleek race car either. But there's heat to be felt here.

| Original Score: B | Mar 22, 2013

Walter Salles's warm but strangely staid adaptation of a piece of literature that was never meant to be tamed as cinema.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 22, 2013

"On the Road" is something of a sprawling mess, but then so is the novel.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 21, 2013

Against all odds, a surprisingly effective movie.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 21, 2013

In Salles, screenwriter Jose Rivera and company's effort to get the details right, they only get so far. And it's not quite far enough.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 21, 2013

Clutching Jack Kerouac's peripatetic roman à clef like a besotted sophomore, Walter Salles trails Kerouac and Neal Cassady's novelistic doppelgängers like an eager puppy.

| Original Score: D+ | Mar 21, 2013

Director Walter Salles' film is fairly faithful to the source material. It's not going to start a movement, though.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 21, 2013

Notwithstanding the characters' spiritual camaraderie, Salles' emphasizes the hard physical labor and loneliness in Sal's story, including the jittery rigors of the writing process.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 21, 2013

Although Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" has been praised as a milestone in American literature, this film version brings into question how much of a story it really offers.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 21, 2013

While Kerouac's odyssey lacks conventional narrative or novelistic beats (though it comes with plenty of the other kind), the restlessness of the prose has its own cinematic allure.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 21, 2013

Sorry, On the Road just doesn't travel well.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 18, 2013

The film is a handsomely photographed and competently cast work that does justice to Kerouac's concept of "the purity of the road." Yet there's still something maddeningly lacking about it.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 17, 2013

A pleasant but undistinguished adaptation of Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel about himself and his Beat friends in the late forties.

Full Review | Jan 14, 2013

If there were an On the Road museum, this could be the elaborate diorama at its center.

| Dec 24, 2012

Salles tries to capture the immediacy and spontaneous nature of the book, using long takes and even allowing the camera to drift out of focus when a character moves about.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.3/4 | Dec 23, 2012

It's all rather exhausting, as opposed to exhilarating.

| Original Score: C | Dec 21, 2012

Kerouac's On the Road influenced generations of writers and artists. Don't expect this film to do the same.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Dec 21, 2012

What's best about the film are its quick jumps from one depravity to the next as jazz rambles on the soundtrack: Youth is a candle to be burned at both ends, with (as it was once said about Bob Dylan) a blowtorch in the middle.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 21, 2012

Salles has made an admirable effort, which - while no roman candle - can be appreciated for its honest ambitions.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 20, 2012