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Road, The
EMAILPRINTThe Weinstein Company
Generally favorable reviews
Based on 30 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 3 votes
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Adventure | Drama | Sci-fi | Suspense/Thriller
Written by:
Joe Penhall
Nick Wechsler
Directed by: John Hillcoat
Release Date:
Theatrical: November 25, 2009
Running Time: 119 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for some violence, disturbing images and language
Starring Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Robert Duvall, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Guy Pearce
Based on Cormac McCarthy's beloved, best-selling and Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Academy Award nominee Viggo Mortensen leads an all-star cast in the big screen adaptation of The Road, the epic post-apocalyptic tale of a journey taken by a father and his young son across a barren landscape that was blasted by an unnamed cataclysm that destroyed civilization and most life on earth. (The Weinstein Company)
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
USA Today Claudia Puig
While the film is not as resonant as the novel, it is an honorable adaptation, capturing the essence of the bond between father and son.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
The Road evokes the images and the characters of Cormac McCarthy's novel. It is powerful, but for me lacks the same core of emotional feeling.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
In this haunting portrait of America as no country for old men or young, Hillcoat -- through the artistry of Mortensen and Smit-McPhee -- carries the fire of our shared humanity and lets it burn bright and true.
Read Full Review >Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
The Road walks a tremendously daring and delicate line between inspiration and horror, and it does so not only in the events it depicts but in its very air and atmosphere. It was unforgettable on the page, and it impresses equally, or at least it does so remarkably often, on screen.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Elias Savada
It is compellingly enervating and a marvel in the filmmaking process.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Between the two performances there's not a false note. Between the father and son there's an unbreakable bond. Though civilization has ended, love and parental duty shape the course of this fable, which is otherwise as heartwarming as a Beckett play shorn of humor.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Joe Neumaier
Intense and, yes, depressing - and earns every minute that it rattles inside your head.
Read Full Review >Time Out New York Joshua Rothkopf
And then, Robert Duvall appears—or, should I say, insinuates himself out of the muck. Cagily, his character wends his way into the story, played by the one American actor who might best understand the limits of bluster. “It’s foolish to ask for luxuries in times like these,” he mutters in the Duvall twang, the weather and indignity beaten into him, and The Road suddenly feels major.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
The Road isn't a masterpiece...But I cannot think of another film this year that has stayed with me, its images of dread and fear - and yes, perhaps hope - kicking around like such a terrible dream.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Amy Biancolli
The latest in a year filled with Armageddon movies such as "Terminator Salvation" and "2012," and it won't be the last, but it's the most chilling so far.
Read Full Review >Premiere Mark Salisbury
This might just be a tad too grueling and bleak for everyone’s liking, but it’s a Road that’s definitely well worth traveling.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
The movie The Road is nowhere close to its literary sire, but it's probably the best one could hope for from a movie version.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
The filmmakers capture enough of the book's essence -- and the power of its knockout, transcendent ending -- to more than justify the movie's existence.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Deborah Young
Director John Hillcoat has performed an admirable job of bringing Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen as an intact and haunting tale, even at the cost of sacrificing color, big scenes and standard Hollywood imagery of post-apocalyptic America.
Read Full Review >The New York Times A.O. Scott
Engrossing and at times impressive, a pretty good movie that is disappointing to the extent that it could have been great. Is this the way the world ends? With polite applause?
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader J.R. Jones
Portrayed ad infinitum in sci-fi and fantasy, the postapocalypse may now seem about as scary as Post Raisin Bran, but Hillcoat gives it an unnerving solidity by focusing on the drab details of survival and linking them to the more hellish aspects of modern American life.
Read Full Review >Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov
The Road deviates from McCarthy's original text via a series of flashbacks to the man's pre-apocalyptic life with the woman (Theron) who both leaves her family behind and is in turn left behind by them.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
There's enough foreboding in America right now to make sitting through a movie such as The Road seem like one more heavy burden that, frankly, no one needs.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias
Aas grim as The Road gets, Hillcoat goes a little soft at the wrong time. Someone like Michael Haneke would have no trouble embracing this material’s uncompromising dreariness.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
Everything about the film is a welcome rebuke to the happy-face apocalypse of “2012,’’ a movie that turns mass extinction into the Greatest Show on Earth. In The Road, what has been lost is recognized as infinitely precious; what’s left is bitter and our due.
Read Full Review >St. Louis Post-Dispatch Joe Williams
The Road has the signposts of an important film, but it lacks the diversions of an inviting trip.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Michael Phillips
The best thing about the film is Viggo Mortensen’s performance. A stealth talent of many shadings, Mortensen has a way of fitting easily into nearly any period, any milieu.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Ann Hornaday
The Road possesses undeniable sweep and a grim kind of grandeur, but it ultimately plays like a zombie movie with literary pretensions.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
The Road is a road you'll wish hadn't been taken. Not because anything's been badly done, but because there's a serious imbalance in the complicated equation between what the film forces us to endure and what we end up receiving in return.
Read Full Review >New York Magazine David Edelstein
Evocative as it is, The Road comes up short, not because it’s bleak but because it’s monotonous.
Read Full Review >New York Post Kyle Smith
Doesn't offer plot or an inquiry into the evil in men's hearts. It simply wallows in the filth and inhumanity that surround a father and his pre-adolescent son as they march across the shattered remains of this country.
Read Full Review >Slate Dana Stevens
For everything the movie gets right--most notably the impressively pared-down script by Joe Penhall and the two truthful and fearless performances from Mortensen and McPhee--there's a corresponding painful blunder, like the overwrought score from Nick Cave.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor Peter Rainer
The novelist Cormac McCarthy was served well by the Coen Brothers' adaptation of his novel "No Country for Old Men" but comes a cropper in The Road, a lugubrious trek through postapocalyptic debris.
Read Full Review >Variety Todd McCarthy
Except for the physical aspects of this bleak odyssey by a father and son through a post-apocalyptic landscape, this long-delayed production falls dispiritingly short on every front.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
Pale by comparison to an action thriller like "Children of Men" or gross out eco-catastrophe like "Land of the Dead," squandering its ready-made zombie scenario.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 9.6 (out of 10) based on 3 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Barry C gave it a10:
The lukewarm reviews of these critics are an outrage. This is a great film of a great book. It seems these critics don't approve of bleak or, nostalgic for their own nuanced response to the book, they dismiss the nuance of this film. Having recently endured the destructiive and bland Hollywoodification of another fine book, "Blind Side" , the critics should rejoice in a film that so valiantly attempts and succeeds at bringing the experience of a great book to the screen.
Claudia P gave it a9:
While the film is not as resonant as the novel, it is its an honorable adaptation, capturing the essence of the bond between father and son.
David S gave it a10:
Extremely faithful adaptation of the book. This movie was breathtaking and powerful. Absolutely captivating, this is a surefire Oscar contender.