01 Two mismatched strangers endure a nightmare cross-country trip home for Thanksgiving.
25 Best Road Trip Movies of All Time
By Vlad Zakh · July 17, 2026
A road trip movie is really just an excuse to trap characters together long enough to finally talk, and this list runs from broad slapstick comedy to some of the most quietly devastating dramas ever built around a car.
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02 A bounty hunter's cross-country transport of a fugitive accountant keeps getting derailed.
03 A Black pianist and his working-class white driver tour the segregated Deep South together.
04 A runaway heiress and a fast-talking reporter share a bus ride that turns into a real romance.
05 A man who vanished for four years reunites with his young son and searches for the wife he left behind.
06 Two bikers' cross-country trip to sell drugs becomes a snapshot of a fractured late-60s America.
07 Two friends' weekend getaway spirals into a fugitive run from the law across the American Southwest.
08 Two drag queens and a trans woman perform their way across the Australian outback.
09 A young Che Guevara's road trip across South America radicalizes him mile by mile.
10 A college graduate gives away his savings and walks into the Alaskan wilderness alone.
11 A grieving woman hikes eleven hundred miles alone to rebuild herself from nothing.
12 An elderly man drives a lawnmower hundreds of miles to reconcile with his estranged brother.
13 Two friends' wine-country trip before one's wedding turns into a real reckoning with failure.
14 A road-trip comedy that turns unexpectedly melancholy about class and mortality.
15 A dysfunctional family road-trips a young girl to a beauty pageant she barely wants to attend.
16 A self-absorbed hustler discovers his estranged brother is an autistic savant with a photographic memory.
17 A teenage journalist's mother tries to keep him grounded while he tours with a rock band.
18 Chris Farley and David Spade at their most reliably silly.
19 A stranded expectant father is forced to drive cross-country with the man who got him stranded in the first place.
20 A germaphobic survivor's rules for staying alive in a zombie-overrun America.
21 A father's dream family road trip to a theme park goes wrong at every possible stop.
22 A grown-up Rusty Griswold drags his own reluctant family on the same disastrous cross-country trip.
23 A stressed dad's fake business trip becomes a real family RV vacation he can't escape.
24 Four college friends drive cross-country to intercept an incriminating tape before it reaches a girlfriend.
25 Peak Jim Carrey physical comedy, dumb by design and better for it.
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