The Man With The Answers (2021)

This unhurried, tender and utterly charming comedy has former diving champion Victor, a Greek, driving an old Audi from Greece to Germany, and on the ferry to Italy, he meets Mathias, a German whose Rupert Everett drollness so disarms Victor he eventually, after initial resistance, lets his guard down, braves the dangers of being chopped up into pieces on Italy's provincial backroads and welcomes Mathias as a companion on his journey to reinvigorate himself, a trip full of highs and lows, ups and downs, and beautiful scenery.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Breakdown (1997)

About a man whose car breaks down in the New Mexico desert and whose wife disappears after she hitches a ride to get help, Breakdown for a moment looks like being one of those nobody-believes-him mystery dramas but quickly develops into something much more akin to a road thriller - it's more Duel and The Vanishing than The Lady Vanishes - and even though the movie cheats and fudges some details and has the look of the low-budget nineties, it really is rivetting heart-in-your-mouth stuff, terrifying - horrifying, even - because Kurt Russell's everyman remains for a long time completely bewildered by his nightmare situation and yet it requires him to claw desperately, moment-to-moment for survival.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Tammy (2014)

The makers of this road movie (husband-and-wife team Ben Falcone and Melissa McCarthy, who needed outside voices to check their married groupthink) probably intended a typical Melissa McCarthy gross-out comedy crossed with the sort of quirky familial drama of Little Miss Sunshine, Captain Fantastic or even something bruised and tender like Young Adult, but the result isn't funny nor touching, just loud, shrill, and dull, with the would-be family drama that develops as dropkick Tammy (McCarthy) and her alcoholic grandmother (Susan Sarandon) hit the road landing as lifeless as the jokes.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS