The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

The title says it all. This movie goes nowhere. Unfortunately it doesn't go nowhere fast. I should've seen the writing on the wall considering the movie starts out LITERALLY watching paint dry.From there it only slows down. And devolves to absolutely incredulous stupidity by the major players.Want to switch the same scene three times? This is your movie.Want to wonder how stupid people could possibly be? Yep, watch this.Want to watch paint dry? A full minute of someone tying their shoes? 45 seconds cleaning the garbage out of their car? Film just being run to run film? GET.THIS.MOVIE.Sound intolerable? Save yourself the 2 hours. Trust me. Or don't, but you were warned.

These days, American films which attract 'serious' critical attention tend to appear in a blaze of publicity, and are usually forgotten by the time the next self-declared 'masterpiece' is ready for consumption. Monte Hellman's ROAD TO NOWHERE took a different approach, quietly opening in a handful of US cinemas before being released on DVD. Yet in years to come, this will surely be regarded as the defining film of its era. Indeed, it may well be the LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD of our generation: an endlessly fascinating puzzle which resists easy comprehension, and whose solution, like Gatsby's green light, constantly "recedes before us," leaving us with the hope that "tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And then one fine morning—." For this is a cinematic masterpiece in a peculiarly American tradition: one that refuses to sit down and behave, but instead wanders restlessly in several directions, accruing, like Melville's White Whale, a range of possible meanings without ever definitively committing itself to any of them. This is not a film to be watched once and dismissed, but rather a work of art to live with, one that - like VERTIGO and CITIZEN KANE - should be returned to periodically in the hope not of finding the key to the Borgesian labyrinth, but rather of better comprehending the labyrinth's nature.

Road to Nowhere is auteur director Monte Hellman's first film in 21 years and is a breathtaking return to cinema. The film premiered in competition at the 67th Venice Int' Film Festival and won the Jury Award Special Lion for Career Achievement. This recognition is a testament to the quality of the film as well as the genius of the filmmaker behind it. The film also features a terrific cameo from legendary film actor Fabio Testi. I look forward to many more films from Hellman in the future. His latest project is 'Love or Die', which is scheduled to commence shooting in Lisbon in March 2014. He is truly one of the greatest film directors in the history of American film.William Anderson

Ever see a movie that is full of art, depth and meaning, but you just don't like it?David Lynch movies strike me the same way. "Road to Nowhere" seems like a very Lynchian film. It carries a dark, brooding sense of imminent tragedy, characters are mysterious (some may say deliberately 2-dimensional), and the story disorients the viewer by leaping through different planes of existence. It's the kind of movie you're probably expected to view several times before you truly get it.The story takes us to a small town where we piece together a crime based on small fragments. The whole time, a movie is being filmed about the crime, and that's the real plot. It's actually pretty clever of the director to hit us with 2 simultaneous stories unfolding in cryptic bits, and if I had more patience, I could have absorbed it all. But for the first hour I was just struggling to figure out what's going on, and the long, slow pacing seemed to mock my struggle. Do not watch this movie unless you're prepared to sit for nearly 2 hours like a deer in the headlights.When the big picture finally materializes, it's almost too late. The abrupt ending may leave you feeling unsatisfied as it did me. But I guess that's where you're supposed to watch it again. There was one part I'm very glad I saw: a scene where one character recites the poem "Sonnet XXV" by George Santayana. I'd never heard that poem before and immediately paused the movie to look it up.Another scene, a short one of a plane crashing into a lake, struck me as beautiful. Make no mistake, even though I'm not a big fan of this movie, I enjoyed parts of it and would recommend it to fans of David Lynch ("Mulholland Drive"), Peter Greenaway ("Zed and two Naughts") or maybe--this is a stretch--Wim Wenders ("Paris, Texas"). It's also vaguely reminiscent of Jim Jarmusch ("Limits of Control") but it doesn't have Jarmusch's humorous moments, or any humor really. This is a very serious movie, made by serious people, intended for serious cinephiles. Do not watch this if you're in the mood for "Peewee's Big Adventure" or you'll be likely to crash your own airplane into a lake.