Road To Nowhere (2011)

79% of critics liked it
(24 reviews)
40% of users liked it
(776 ratings)

There's a murky, tenuous balance between reality and fiction...particularly when it involves a beautiful young woman, murder, a powerful politico, a missing fortune, and suicide. A passionate filmmaker creating a film based upon a true crime casts an unknown mysterious young woman bearing a… More There's a murky, tenuous balance between reality and fiction...particularly when it involves a beautiful young woman, murder, a powerful politico, a missing fortune, and suicide. A passionate filmmaker creating a film based upon a true crime casts an unknown mysterious young woman bearing a disturbing resemblance to the femme fatale in the story. Unsuspectingly, he finds himself drawn into a complex web of haunting intrigue: he becomes obsessed with the woman, the crime, her possibly notorious past, and the disturbing complexity between art and truth. From the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina to Verona, Rome, and London, new truths are revealed and clues to other crimes and passions, darker and even more complex, are uncovered. -- (C) Monterey Media

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Rating, Runtime: R, 2 hr. 1 min.
Directed By: Monte Hellman
Written By: Steven Gaydos
Genres: Drama, Romance, Mystery & Suspense

In Theaters: Jun 10, 2011 Limited
On DVD: Aug 22, 2011
Studio: Monterey Media

Critic Reviews

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
"The Road to Nowhere" plays like an exercise in frustrating audiences.
David Lewis, San Francisco Chronicle
Ultimately, the film gets too clever and confusing for its own good, while the slow pacing zaps momentum from the story (and the story within the story).
Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune
A rabbit hole of enigmatic characters and swampy motives...Shot by shot, the film has a burnished, beautiful sheen.
Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic
"Road to Nowhere" is a beautifully made, glorious mess.
Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times
A stylish, shimmering neo-noir with a multi-layered narrative for which the director's longtime collaborator Steven Gaydos has written an exceedingly elliptical and challenging script.
Elizabeth Weitzman, New York Daily News
There are rewards to be teased out of Monte Hellman's enigmatic new picture, but you'll have to accept the title as a promise, rather than a threat.
Dennis Schwartz, Ozus' World Movie Reviews
Becomes less clever the more clever it gets.
Margot Harrison, Seven Days
The film is a series of carefully composed, painterly tableaux that may stay in your mind long after its "story" has been forgotten.
Simon Abrams, Slant Magazine
Road to Nowhere is a tribute to the artifice and the rawness of cinema and a fitting testament to director Monte Hellman's powers of cinematic sleight of hand.
Jeff Shannon, Seattle Times
The final scene offers clarity, at least, if not a satisfying payoff.
Jeffrey M. Anderson, Combustible Celluloid
A return to form. But it still has the power to leave audiences disoriented, just as Hellman's best films Ride in the Whirlwind, The Shooting, Two-Lane Blacktop, and Cockfighter once did.
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Ebert Presents At The Movies
A pretty great movie.
Chris Hewitt (St. Paul), St. Paul Pioneer Press
The sort of movie that goes down so many wormholes that, at the end, there's room for debate about what was real and what wasn't.
Chris Barsanti, Film Journal International
The first feature film from Monte Hellman in 21 years is a quirky and self-reflexive film-within-a-film mystery that whiplashes viewers with audacious inventiveness; it's both more and less than it seems.
Ron Wilkinson, Monsters and Critics
Cult icon Hellman has no pity on the faint of heart in this complex time-warped epic of a film noir.

Read all 15 critic reviews

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Featured Audience Ratings

Eric B

Hard to believe "Road to Nowhere" is what lured director Monte Hellman back to feature films after a 22-year break. This film-within-a-film aims to be a David Lynch-like puzzle in which alter-ego director Mitchell Haven (Tygh Runyan) casts troubled novice Laurel Graham… More
Hard to believe "Road to Nowhere" is what lured director Monte Hellman back to feature films after a 22-year break. This film-within-a-film aims to be a David Lynch-like puzzle in which alter-ego director Mitchell Haven (Tygh Runyan) casts troubled novice Laurel Graham (Shannyn Sossamon) in his erratic dramatization of a true story about a doomed, con-artist couple. Scenes occur both inside and outside the fictional film without adequate warning, and this arty ambiguity is as about as far as the movie's pleasures go. Well, unless you count Sossamon's stunningly photogenic face. As shooting continues, Mitchell and Laurel becomes lovers and this compromises the project -- smitten Mitchell begins skewing scenes toward his lady, much to the dismay of the screenwriter and other cast members (Cliff De Young plays her older co-star). Meanwhile, a story consultant and insurance investigator (Waylon Payne) is equally fixated on Laurel, and believes she is secretly portraying herself after switching identities to avoid capture. It's all quite confusing, and not interesting enough to worry about. "Road to Nowhere" could be enjoyable if -- like Lynch -- Hellman was a more stylized filmmaker, but this conspicuously flat work not only lacks striking camera movement but doesn't even have a musical score. Overlong at 121 minutes (at the very least, those indulgent excerpts from "The Lady Eve," "The Seventh Seal" and "Spirit of the Beehive" could be cut), this film will thoroughly exhaust most viewers' patience.
Alec B

Most of the supporting performances are pretty weak but I respect what Monte Hellman is trying to do here. The seamless weaving in and out of the present, the past, and the film the characters are making suggests a world where there are no physical boundaries to separate our reality… More
Most of the supporting performances are pretty weak but I respect what Monte Hellman is trying to do here. The seamless weaving in and out of the present, the past, and the film the characters are making suggests a world where there are no physical boundaries to separate our reality and ones that we create. Its the kind of story David Lynch would tell, but Hellman uses realism instead of the surreal, so its easy to get lost. By the end even the characters seem unsure of where they are.
Sarah P

Horrific. I couldn't all the way through this one. The acting was awful and the story (from what I saw) was going nowhere, so the title was very apt.