18 Best Road Trip Movies That Will Make You Want to Drive
Best Road Trip Movies
Road trip movies do something no other genre can pull off: they trap characters together in a moving vehicle and let the miles do the storytelling. Whether it’s two friends crossing Mexico or a family crammed into a VW bus, the road has a way of stripping away pretense. This list covers 18 films where the journey isn’t just backdrop. It’s the whole point.
18 Best Road Trip Movies That Will Make You Want to Drive
18 Best Road Trip Movies That Will Make You Want to Drive is a curated selection of 18 Movies spanning 1969 to 2013 across Road Trip · Adventure and Crime. Each title was handpicked by Movievia and ranked below from the strongest pick downward, so you can start at the top and discover your next watch — no endless scrolling, no algorithmic guesswork.
Thelma & Louise (1991)
What starts as a casual weekend escape between two friends spirals into something neither Thelma nor Louise could have planned. One bad...
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
When seven-year-old Olive qualifies for a prestigious beauty pageant in California, her fractured family sees a chance at redemption. What begins as...
National Lampoon's Vacation (1983)
Clark Griswold's cross-country road trip to a California theme park spirals into a series of increasingly absurd disasters, each one more catastrophic...
On the Road (2012)
When Dean Moriarty bursts into Sal Paradise's static life with charisma and recklessness, the young writer discovers a partner in restlessness. Together...
Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)
Neal Page just wants to get home to Chicago in time for Thanksgiving dinner. Del Griffith, a loud, relentlessly cheerful shower curtain...
Dumb and Dumber (1994)
Lloyd and Harry are, to put it charitably, not operating at full capacity. When a woman named Mary accidentally leaves behind a...
Y Tu Mamá También (2001)
Alfonso Cuarón's sun-scorched Mexican road movie follows two restless teenage boys, Tenoch and Julio, who invite a beautiful, marriage-weary Spanish woman named...
Rain Man (1988)
Charlie Babbitt's inheritance comes with an unexpected condition: his father's three million dollars flows to a mental institution instead of to him....
Due Date (2010)
A man racing against the clock to reach his wife's delivery has his plans derailed when airport security confiscates his documents and...
Midnight Run (1988)
Jack Walsh is a burned-out skip tracer hired to drag Jonathan Mardukas, a mild-mannered mob bookkeeper, from New York back to Los...
Nebraska (2013)
Woody Grant is convinced he has won a million dollars. His son David is convinced the letter is junk mail. What follows...
Easy Rider (1969)
Two counterculture drifters pocket a cocaine windfall and point their Harleys east, chasing something America keeps promising but never quite delivers. Wyatt...
Paper Moon (1973)
Set against the dust-blown flatlands of Depression-era Kansas, Peter Bogdanovich's film follows Moze, a small-time Bible salesman with a gift for separating...
Smokey and the Bandit (1977)
Bo 'Bandit' Darville takes on a bet that sounds simple enough: haul 400 cases of Coors beer from Texarkana to Atlanta in...
The Straight Story (1999)
Alvin Straight is 73, stubborn, and estranged from his brother Lyle for years. When news arrives that Lyle has had a stroke,...
Crossroads (2002)
A road trip reunites three women who drifted apart in their twenties. Crammed into a convertible with little more than gasoline money...
The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)
Before revolutionary politics, before ideology crystallized into doctrine, there was a young medical student named Ernesto who set out across South America...
Transamerica (2005)
When Bree, a pre-operative transgender woman on the cusp of surgery, discovers she fathered a son seventeen years ago, her carefully constructed...
18 Best Road Trip Movies That Will Make You Want to Drive
These 18 road trip movies turn the open road into a co-star. From buddy comedies to soul-searching solo journeys, every film on this list earns its miles.
Best Road Trip Movies
A complete reference of every movie on this list, ranked in the editorial order above. Use this table as a quick scan: tap any title for the full movie page including trailer, synopsis, and streaming availability.
- 1 Thelma & Louise (1991)
- 2 Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
- 3 National Lampoon's Vacation (1983)
- 4 On the Road (2012)
- 5 Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)
- 6 Dumb and Dumber (1994)
- 7 Y Tu Mamá También (2001)
- 8 Rain Man (1988)
- 9 Due Date (2010)
- 10 Midnight Run (1988)
- 11 Nebraska (2013)
- 12 Easy Rider (1969)
- 13 Paper Moon (1973)
- 14 Smokey and the Bandit (1977)
- 15 The Straight Story (1999)
- 16 Crossroads (2002)
- 17 The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)
- 18 Transamerica (2005)
Frequently asked
Which movie on the 18 Best Road Trip Movies That Will Make You Want to Drive is the highest rated?
Paper Moon (1973) is the highest-rated film on the 18 Best Road Trip Movies That Will Make You Want to Drive, with a viewer rating of 7.9/10. You can find it featured at the top of the ranked list above, along with the full lineup ordered from best to last so you always know which title to start with.
How many movies are on the 18 Best Road Trip Movies That Will Make You Want to Drive?
The 18 Best Road Trip Movies That Will Make You Want to Drive contains 18 movies, spanning 1969 to 2013, primarily within the Road Trip · Adventure and Crime genre. The selection is updated regularly as Movievia's editors discover new titles worth adding or refining the lineup based on viewer feedback and rating shifts.
Is the 18 Best Road Trip Movies That Will Make You Want to Drive worth watching?
Yes — the 18 Best Road Trip Movies That Will Make You Want to Drive carries an average viewer score of 7.1/10 across all 18 movies, well above the typical film average. Each entry was handpicked rather than algorithm-selected, so the list reads more like a recommendation from a friend with great taste than a generic top-100 dump. Start with the #1 pick at the top of the page.
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