On the Road Reviews
Top CriticIt's not a wreck of a movie; it's not a sleek race car either. But there's heat to be felt here.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Walter Salles's warm but strangely staid adaptation of a piece of literature that was never meant to be tamed as cinema.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
"On the Road" is something of a sprawling mess, but then so is the novel.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It took more than half a century, but Jack Kerouac's autobiographical cult novel of bohemian youth in postwar America has reached the screen in wonderful form.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Director Walter Salles' film is fairly faithful to the source material. It's not going to start a movement, though.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
A pleasant but undistinguished adaptation of Jack Kerouac's 1957 novel about himself and his Beat friends in the late forties.
Well-intentioned and well-made but self-indulgent exercise tries really hard but falls short.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
If there were an On the Road museum, this could be the elaborate diorama at its center.
It's neither the first nor the best road trip that Mr. Salles has brought to the screen.
It's all rather exhausting, as opposed to exhilarating.
Full Review
| Original Score: C
There's no madness here, no burning, no desperate search for transcendence, no sense of characters on a heroic, continent-crossing quest. Just another sticky, stinky story of boys, being boys. And refusing to become men.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Salles has made an admirable effort, which - while no roman candle - can be appreciated for its honest ambitions.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Audiences may find reliving their own travel experiences during On the Road, enjoying the pretty scenery between the occasional nap and restroom break.
It all seems - dare I say it? - of little consequence.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Salles has lovingly crafted a poetic, sensitive, achingly romantic version of the Kerouac book that captures the evanescence of its characters' existence and the purity of their rebellious hunger for the essence of life.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
This, and a certain lack of what one could call narrative thrust, makes 'On the Road' a strange, diffuse experience, offering occasional glimpses of genuine beauty ...
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Mostly feels like a group of Kerouac devotees performing a lifeless reenactment of prose that was better left on the page.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
Another "primitive" postwar antique repurposed for boutique sale.
A dash of Tarantino might have juiced up Walter Salles' wrongheadedly well-mannered take on Jack Kerouac's 1957 Beat Generation landmark. On the Road feels tight and constricted.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
What's ultimately wrong with On The Road is that the film envisions everyone Sal meets as nothing but fodder.
Salles brings evocative images, fresh faces, and some fine emotional shadings to the famous tale of friendship, love, sex, drugs, jazz, literature, and the American landscape.
Despite the high level of craft here, it's an inadequate substitute for the thrilling, sustaining intelligence of Kerouac's voice.
Salles, an intelligent director whose films include "The Motorcycle Diaries," doesn't invest "On the Road" with the wildness it needs for its visual style, narrative approach and leads.
What he doesn't give us - and what makes the book work - is Kerouac's bedazzled bohemian swoon. Without it, On the Road is a curiously remote experience, all reason and no rhyme.
The rebel yell of 'On the Road' now sounds muted and even a little embarrassing.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
While the film's dramatic impact is variable, visually and aurally it is a constant pleasure.
