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The 10 Greatest Car Movies Ever Made

Car movies remind us of all the things that can happen when we turn the key.

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Top 10 Greatest Car Movies of All Time
Photo: Dimension Films

Cars, it’s often been observed, offer a sort of contradiction of motion: They allow us to move around while sitting still. It only makes sense, then, that the movies have for so long been attracted to the allure of the automobile, for surely the appeal of the cinema lies in its capacity to take us from the comfort of the theater or living room to adventures around the world. The greatest car movies—movies about cars, largely set in cars, or otherwise significantly concerned with them—understand that our affection for our vehicles has as much to do with the possible freedoms they promise as the routines they let us uphold. Cars drive us to and from work every day, keeping our lives precisely ordered. But they also suggest escape: We’re always aware, faintly, that we could drive away from it all at any moment, out and off toward some new life’s horizon. Car movies remind us of the power in that possibility—of all the things that can happen when we turn the key.

Editor’s Note: This articale was originally published on June 30, 2014.

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10. Death Proof (2007)

Death Proof ranks among the best of Quentin Tarantino’s work because it engages with the world not simply through the cinema, but as cinema—his one area of expertise. Without politics or history weighing it down, Death Proof feels freed up to have fun with the car movie, to play around with conventions Tarantino has spent a lifetime digesting and knows more intimately than anybody. It’s been dismissed as “merely” a genre exercise, but in retrospect that simplicity, even purity, proves its greatest strength: Part fond tribute, part postmodern riff, the film remains a valuable contribution to the form.


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9. Bullitt (1968)

It’s difficult to overstate the influence and importance of the central car chase in Bullitt, which has persisted for nearly half a century as the preeminent model and the standard against which all other car chases continue to be compared. But what’s even more remarkable about the film’s rubber-burning pursuit through the hills of San Francisco is how vital and exhilarative it still seems to modern eyes: Far from simply a relic of cinematic history, the scene feels fresh and alive, no less potent in its bracing physicality than it must have been in 1968.

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8. Vanishing Point (1971)

The 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T in alpine white. It is, and forever will be, the Vanishing Point car, rechristened and emblazoned across the popular imagination by Richard C. Sarafian’s legendary film. Barry Newman’s fated cross-country road trip boasted all the requisite features of post-Bullitt car-movie lore, from elaborate stunt work to flourishes of high-octane action, but the tenor of Vanishing Point suggests something rather more muted, even despairing, as if Sarafian’s real interests tended away from fist-pumping theatrics expected of hard-boiled men hauling ass across America and toward something more existential.


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7. Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)

It’s the widescreen composition, rather than ’55 Chevy, that proves the defining feature of Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop, a car movie and a road movie equal parts searching and sad. The endless sprawl of Route 66 is flattened by the lens into a purgatory of American ennui, the world around the heroes such a void that even the interior of their car, in Hellman’s view, seems about to swallow them whole. Stripped down, streamlined, and reduced to its essence, Two-Lane Blacktop finds the framework of the road movie furnished with the anxieties of an American struggle to make it out of the ’60s with its identity in tact.

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6. Repo Man (1984)

Leave it to Alex Cox, maverick punk auteur, to contemporize the ’70s car movie for the 1980s by scaling back the angst and cranking up the weird. Hard drugs, Kiss Me Deadly, glowing cars, space aliens, televangelists, Black Flag: Repo Man is a pop-cultural sponge soaking up the detritus of a burnt-out America, not unlike Gremlins (released just three months later), but without any pretense of catering to middle-class family values. The thesis? Emilio Estevez watches his ex-hippie parents melt away into the comfort of televised religion, giving up their life savings for the promise of quick-fix salvation. That’s 20 years of American culture in a nutshell.


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5. Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988)

Francis Ford Coppola’s wildly underrated Tucker: The Man and His Dream is not, perhaps, a car movie in the traditional sense, in that its hero, Preston Tucker, doesn’t race or drive automobiles so much as invent them. And yet what is the essence of Tucker’s story—a visionary man set apart from the world and found struggling to overcome their oppressions—if not the same one told by films whose heroes take to the roads to break away from a suffocating America? Tucker proves that cars themselves can, like the people who drive them, be intensely personal machines, and they are uniquely equipped, for Tucker and those who followed him, to help us follow our dreams.

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4. Duel (1971)

Steven Spielberg’s Duel, among its other virtues, is perhaps the only film of its kind to recognize the significance of the car as a symbol of masculine hubris in America—a critical edge all the more remarkable considering the film’s roots as a genre exercise made for late-night TV. The setup, of course, is a classically Freudian dilemma of threatened manhood: An ineffectual middle-class milquetoast finds himself besieged on the open road by a 10-ton phallus on wheels, and it’s all our hero can do to hope his rear end survives all this vigorous ramming. Subtle? Not exactly. But few films are as bluntly terrifying.


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3. Gone in 60 Second (1974)

Before Dominic Sena and Nicholas Cage endeavored to pervert his masterpiece’s legacy, there was simply H.B. Toby Halicki, who wrote, directed, produced, and starred in the original, utterly singular Gone in 60 Seconds, one of the most significant passion projects of cinema history. Built from the ground up, painstakingly and at great expense, as if it were a muscle car labored over in a garage, the film feels handcrafted in the best possible way. Every close call, crash, and burn out was put together by its mad-genius of an engineer, who poured his life savings (and, more valuably still, his extensive car collection) into a movie made all the more exhilarating for its hard-won authenticity.

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2. The Driver (1978)

Though it has been regrettably misinterpreted by hacks like Nicolas Winding Refn for years, the steely reticence that defines Walter Hill’s The Driver isn’t intended to be the picture of samurai-like cool, but rather of a coldness that makes the film’s nameless hero a tragic figure rather than a bad-ass action star. The Driver is a film about two men—one a criminal, the other a cop—whose proficiency and professionalism have all but consumed them, and the drama comes not so much from whether one will ultimately best the other but whether either’s victory will really mean anything. That it doesn’t should hardly be surprising.


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1. Weekend (1967)

Car movies, it should be noted, are designed in part to make us forget that cars themselves are fundamentally a commodity, and the connection between our vehicles and the capitalist system that produces them is one dimension of the genre that’s rarely explored—for understandable reasons. Consider this a much-needed corrective. Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend is littered with automobiles, variously jammed up, overturned, piled together, set spectacularly alight, and the quest that sets the action in motion—a married couple who despise one another head across the French countryside to receive an inheritance—isn’t so far removed from the cross-country journeys that animate the genre. The difference is that for Godard, the car isn’t an object to be romanticized. Better, as a symbol of capital and wealth and greed, for it to be gloriously destroyed.

Calum Marsh

Calum Marsh is a critic, reporter, and essayist who specializes in art and culture. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Playboy, The New Republic, Pitchfork, and other publications.

2 Comments

  1. Calling a NW Refn a hack is a bit lazy and unsubstantiated. Both Drive and the Driver can be great films in their own right (which they are). Everything does not need to be evaluated with reference to something else.

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