holiday trip movie

Holiday Road: release date, trailer, cast, plot and everything we know about the Hallmark Channel movie

An airport delay turns into a memorable holiday road trip.

Airport delays can be one of the more frustrating things about the holiday season. When a group of strangers find their holiday plans grounded, they decide to go on an adventure in Holiday Road . Holiday Road is one of the latest Hallmark Christmas movies in the 2023 Countdown to Christmas. 

Holiday Road joins Letters to Santa , Christmas in Notting Hill , Haul Out the Holly: Lit Up , Our Christmas Mural and A Biltmore Christmas , which all debut on Thanksgiving weekend.

Here's everything we know about Holiday Road .

Holiday Road release date

Holiday Road premieres Friday, November 24, at 8 pm ET/PT on Hallmark Channel. 

We don't have a premiere date for UK viewers, but as soon as one is available, we'll have it for you here. 

Holiday Road plot

Here's the synopsis of Holiday Road from Hallmark Channel: "Nine strangers, stranded at an airport during the holidays, unite for a Christmas road trip to Denver. Misadventures lead to unexpected bonds and heartfelt conversations."

Holiday Road cast

Sarah Canning plays Dana in Holiday Road . She's probably best known for her role as Jenna Sommers on The Vampire Diaries . She's also had appearances in Smallville , Kyle XY and 9-1-1 . She's held leading roles in Paparazzi Princess: The Paris Hilton Story and Slap Shot 3 . Canning is a familiar face around the Hallmark Channel, having starred in Christmas at the Golden Dragon and Come Dance at My Wedding . 

Warren Christie plays Clay in Holiday Road . Christie is a Hallmark Channel frequent flyer, appearing in popular movies like Crashing Through the Snow , The Most Wonderful Time of the Year and The More Love Grows . He's also played a lead role in October Road , and he had a recurring role in Happy Town as well as a guest role in Flashpoint . 

Holiday Road trailer

Take a look at the preview for Holiday Road below: 

How to watch Holiday Road

Holiday Road is a Hallmark Channel original movie. If you miss the premiere, you can catch it on demand the following day if you have cable. 

Hallmark Channel is included in many cable TV packages, but if you've cut the cord there are a few other options to help you watch. Hallmark Channel now has a partnership with Peacock , so you can watch new movies on the streaming platform with a subscription.

You can also access Hallmark Channel via Philo , Sling TV , Frndly TV, Hulu with Live TV , YouTube TV and Fubo . While Hallmark Movies Now is the network's streaming arm, you cannot access new movies right away, so if you're looking to watch Countdown to Christmas 2023 movies, you'll need access to the channel.

Viewers in the UK can access Hallmark Channel as an add-on subscription channel on Prime Video .

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Sarabeth joined the What to Watch team in May 2022. An avid TV and movie fan, her perennial favorites are The Walking Dead, American Horror Story , true crime documentaries on Netflix and anything from Passionflix. You’ve Got Mail , Ocean's Eleven and Signs are movies that she can watch all day long. She's also a huge baseball fan, and hockey is a new favorite.  

When she's not working, Sarabeth hosts the My Nights Are Booked Podcast and a blog dedicated to books and interviews with authors and actors. She also published her first novel, Once Upon an Interview , in 2022. 

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Holiday Road Trip

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Rent Holiday Road Trip on Fandango at Home, or buy it on Fandango at Home.

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Fred Olen Ray

Ashley Scott

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20 of the best travel films

From Rome to the Amazon, in these 20 films stunning locations play a starring role – and they’re all on now at a laptop or TV near you

REAL-LIFE ADVENTURES

Wild (2014).

Cheryl Strayed decided to walk the Pacific Crest Trail to face her demons, and her memoirs were turned into this uplifting film starring Reese Witherspoon as the inexperienced hiker who turns her life around. Director Jean-Marc Vallée was adamant that the movie be shot entirely on location: the journey starts in the Mojave Desert, heads up to Mount Hood – the highest point in Oregon – and the magnificent Crater Lake, before culminating in the iconic Bridge of the Gods in Cascade Locks on the Oregon/Washington border. Netflix , Google Play , Sky Store . Read the Guardian review

Tracks (2013)

Another memoir adaptation, Tracks stars a young Mia Wasikowska as Robyn Davidson, who spent nine months trekking across the Australian desert on camels. Her journey begins in Alice Springs and takes her across scorching outback to the Indian Ocean, via sights such as Uluru and Coffin Bay. It’s an inspiration for would-be solo travellers, given that Robyn was only accompanied by her dog and, at some points, a photographer (Adam Driver). Amazon , Google Play , Sky Store Guardian review

Into The Wild (2007)

Graduate Christopher McCandless gave away all his possessions and money to charity and hitchhiked across Northern America to Alaska, where he attempted to live in the wild. This poignant account of his journey is directed by Sean Penn and stars Emile Hirsch in many of the real locations visited by Christopher, aka “Alexander Supertramp”. Feast your eyes on peaceful Lake Tahoe, camping at Beard’s Hollow, kayaking down the Colorado River and run with wild horses … There’s plenty to envy until things take a darker turn. Sky Cinema , NOW TV , Amazon Guardian review

Lion (2016)

If you fancy a good cry as well as a virtual trip to India, then Lion is for you. Based on a true story, it tells of a young Indian boy, Saroo (Sunny Pawar) who accidentally boards a train to Kolkata and becomes homeless. After being adopted by an Australian couple, the older Saroo (Dev Patel) searches his memory – and the evolving internet – in an attempt to locate his childhood home and find his family. This is a film with plenty of compassion as well as armchair travel, with locations including Tasmania as well as India. Netflix , YouTube , Google Play Guardian review

Under the Tuscan Sun (2003)

A cheerful comedy-drama about a divorcee rediscovering herself, this memoir adaptation features scenery as charming as the central performance from Diane Lane. Frances Mayes’ pals send her on a tour of Tuscany, where she ends up falling in love with a ramshackle house and buys it on a whim. She meets a plethora of interesting people, including Polish builders and an eccentric old British actor, and becomes a major fixer-upper. The film was shot in and around the town of Cortona, near Arezzo: think gorgeous little houses cut into the hillside overlooking glistening waters. Amazon , YouTube , Google Play , Sky Store Frances Mayes on writing Under the Tuscan Sun

HIKING TALES

Hunt for the wilderpeople (2016).

Go tramping in the New Zealand bush with this adorable comedy-drama directed by Oscar-winner Taika Waititi. A winning family adventure, it sees grumpy foster uncle Hec (Sam Neill) following his cheeky young charge Ricky (Julian Dennison) into the wilderness for a trek that turns into a gripping adventure – and an opportunity for the pair to try out their survival skills. Most of it was filmed around the Auckland area, and includes jaw-dropping scenery that Hec describes as “majestical”. BFI Player , Amazon , Google Play , Sky Store The landscapes behind Hunt for the Wilderpeople

The Way (2010)

Follow in the pilgrims’ footsteps with this touching, meditative drama starring Martin Sheen as a grieving father who decides to walk the ancient spiritual trail after the death of his son (played by Sheen’s son, Emilio Estevez, who also directs). The route to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia takes in sensational landscapes as well as a variety of entertaining characters, including James Nesbitt as an Irish travel writer. Amazon Prime Video , YouTube / Google Play , Sky Store Guardian review

On the Road (2012)

Based on Jack Kerouac’s novel set in the late 1940s/early 50s, literature’s most famous road trip did not make it onto the big screen until 55 years after the book was published. Sam Riley is the writer who heads to Denver, North Carolina, San Francisco and Mexico by car and occasionally bus. Head here to vicariously experience a hedonistic road trip with sexually fluid bohemians played by an array of Hollywood’s hottest, including Garrett Hedlund, Kristen Stewart, Amy Adams, Tom Sturridge and Kirsten Dunst. Amazon Prime Video , Sky Store Guardian review

Captain Fantastic (2016)

This film immediately plunges the viewer into the forests of the Pacific Northwest: you’re greeted by lush green trees, the sound of birdsong and the sight of a deer munching its way through the bush. Said deer is short-lived, however, as a pack of children led by Bodevan (George MacKay) slaughter it and take it home for tea with their father (Viggo Mortensen – who’s also in On the Road). It’s a chance to live out your off-grid fantasies, before the family are plunged back into society on a road trip with entertaining consequences. Netflix / Amazon , Sky Store Guardian review

TRAIN TRIPS

The darjeeling limited (2007).

Three brothers have madcap adventures on a train in this quirky, colourful film that could only have been made by Wes Anderson. Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman are the warring trio who bicker and bond their way through a scenic rail journey in India. Though the film was shot mainly in Rajasthan, the fictional route also convincingly takes in the Himalayas – and reminds you of the wonders of train travel abroad. Amazon , YouTube / Google Play , Sky Store Guardian review

Before Sunrise (1995)

A train to Vienna is the romantic setting for this cult drama starring Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke. After meeting on the journey, they spend the night walking around the city together. Their frank, naturalistic exchanges are involving and funny, and it’s easy to fall in love with the Austrian capital as the pair jump on trams and ferris wheels along the banks of the Danube. Director Richard Linklater followed this with Before Sunset and Before Midnight, but this remains by far the most romantic in the series. Amazon , YouTube , Google Play , Sky Store Guardian review

LIFE-CHANGING ADVENTURES

The secret life of walter mitty (2013).

A daydreamer finally lives out his travel fantasies in this whimsical adventure based on James Thurber’s short story. Walter (Ben Stiller) works a dull desk job at Life magazine, and goes on a globe-trotting treasure hunt in search of a missing negative by legendary photojournalist Sean O’Connell (Sean Penn). Walter’s travels take him to Greenland, Iceland and the Himalayas, and although some of the locations are stand-ins, the film captures the wonder of globe-trotting in a cosy, feelgood format. Amazon , YouTube , Google Play , Sky Store Guardian review

Patagonia (2010)

The psychological benefits of travel are at the heart of this tender drama that explores the links between Wales and Argentina. A Cardiff couple travel to Patagonia where they are guided by a Welsh-Argentine guide (Matthew Rhys). Meanwhile, an older woman journeys from Argentina to Wales to discover her roots. It’s a moving watch with a fun backstory: Rhys found out about the production when travelling through Patagonia on horseback , where he bumped into the director, Marc Evans, who was scouting for locations. Amazon , iTunes , Google Play Guardian review

Black Mountain Poets (2015)

Rural south Wales provides a handsome setting for this con artist comedy from writer-director Jamie Adams. Alice Lowe and Dolly Wells star as sisters on the run who resort to posing as a pair of famous beat poets at a retreat in the Black Mountains – what could possibly go wrong? As they camp out in nature, the remote location forms a backdrop for their potential redemption, as well as plenty of improvised humour. YouTube , Google Play , BFI Player Guardian review

HISTORICAL TRAVELS

Meek’s cutoff (2010).

You wouldn’t want to re-live the journey these characters make, but the landscape looks remarkable from the safety of your sofa. Loosely inspired by an infamous incident in 1845, it sees a small group of settlers travelling across the Oregon High Desert and becoming increasingly less confident in their guide, Stephen Meek (Bruce Greenwood). Kelly Reichardt’s western shows the gender dynamic slowly shifting as the stakes get higher, and she’s assembled an excellent cast lead by Michelle Williams, Shirley Henderson and Zoe Kazan. Amazon Prime Guardian review

The Lost City of Z (2017)

Explorer Percy Fawcett had a compulsion to travel, undertaking hugely risky journeys in the Amazon in to prove his theories about a disappeared civilisation – theories that were ridiculed by his contemporaries in the early 20th century. James Gray’s film stars Charlie Hunnam as Fawcett, Sienna Miller as his wife, and Robert Pattinson as his right hand man, who helps him navigate the rainforest, which looks tantalisingly beautiful despite the dangers that unfold. Amazon , YouTube , Google Play , Sky Store . Also showing on BBC2 Friday 27 March at 11.05pm Guardian review

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

An ambitious adventurer makes an eventful jungle voyage in Werner Herzog’s German-language classic inspired by the life of Peruvian rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrald. Notoriously volatile actor Klaus Kinski’s wild eyes glint with lunatic abandon as he dreams of building an opera house in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, and navigating the Pachitea river in a huge steamboat. The shoot (famously as troubled as the events it depicts) took place in the wilds of Brazil and Peru, where Herzog and cinematographer Thomas Mauch vividly captured the cast’s period costumes against the sights and sounds of the jungle. BFI Player , iTunes Guardian review

CITY BREAKS

2 days in paris (2007).

Julie Delpy writes, directs and stars in this whipsmart dramedy that puts a humorous spin on the notion of a romantic city break. She plays Marion, a photographer who lives in New York and decides to spend two days in the French capital with her neurotic boyfriend Jack (Adam Goldberg). It takes in plenty of famous spots, including the Père Lachaise cemetery, the Pasteur metro station and – should you be missing the Eurostar – the Gare du Nord. Amazon Prime Guardian review

In Bruges (2008)

Who knew a film about a couple of hitmen could showcase a city’s charms so beautifully? The Irish contract killers hiding out in Belgium have very different goals: while Ray (Colin Farrell) just wants to get drunk, Ken (Brendan Gleeson) would prefer to see the cultural sights. And so Martin McDonagh’s bitterly funny black comedy takes in architectural delights such as the Belfry of Bruges as well as canal trips through the medieval city. Amazon , YouTube , Google Play Sky Store Guardian review

Roman Holiday (1953)

Take a trip back in time to Rome, circa 1953, where a princess (Audrey Hepburn) is trying to stay incognito. After she’s befriended by an American reporter (Gregory Peck), he realises her identity, but keeps his a secret in an attempt to get a scoop. Romance follows, along with iconic black and white shots of the Eternal City. Look out for a meeting on the Spanish Steps, a tour of Colosseum and Vespa ride through the city traffic. Sky Cinema , YouTube , Google Play Guardian review

Rental prices generally between £1.99 and £3.49 depending on household subscription status. Netflix and BFI Player films are included in a monthly subscription and are subject to change. Most films also available on DVD/Blu-Ray

Anna Smith is a film critic and host of the podcast, Girls On Film

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Holiday Road Trip (2013 TV Movie)

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Holiday Road Trip

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Holiday Road Trip is a direct-to-video Christmas movie, produced by Hybrid for Daro Film Distribution. It premiered on Ion Television on December 1, 2013.

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Synopsis [ ]

Co-workers at a high-profile pet supply store in Washington, D.C., Pat (Patrick Muldoon) and Maya (Ashley Scott) couldn't be more opposite. Maya works in accounting, she’s a driven, ambitious businesswoman looking to turn her job into a great career.  He’s in the design department and basically plays for a living, which is a perfect job for the little kid who never really grew up. She wears Manolos, and he wears Velcro.

When Maya's obscenely successful boyfriend Davis (Kip Pardue) leaves her right before Christmas , she begrudgingly decides to volunteer an RV tour along with Pat and the star of the company, Scoots (Uggie the dog, "The Artist"). At first, the road trip is a match made in hec. However, the whole idea is the brain child of the company founder Max (George Hamilton), who is Pat's father.

Once on the road, opposites are put to the test. Pat eats nothing but junk food, but she wants to be healthy. He listens to hard rock, while she prefers jazz. He drives 95 while she coasts at a leisurely 55. She thinks he is an uneducated man-child while he thinks she’s a self-absorbed snob. However, fate has a funny way of intervening. All the while, Davis, who feels he made a terrible mistake breaking up with Maya, is one step behind.

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Holiday Road Trip

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We checked for updates on 246 streaming services on April 25, 2024 at 8:40:41 PM. Something wrong? Let us know!

Holiday Road Trip streaming: where to watch online?

Currently you are able to watch "Holiday Road Trip" streaming on fuboTV, Peacock, UP Faith & Family Apple TV Channel or for free with ads on The Roku Channel, Tubi TV, Pluto TV. It is also possible to rent "Holiday Road Trip" on Google Play Movies, YouTube, Vudu, Microsoft Store, Spectrum On Demand online and to download it on Vudu, Microsoft Store, Google Play Movies, YouTube.

Where does Holiday Road Trip rank today? The JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity within the last 24 hours. This includes clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as 'seen'. This includes data from ~1.3 million movie & TV show fans per day.

Streaming charts last updated: 5:13:30 PM, 04/25/2024

Holiday Road Trip is 17724 on the JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts today. The movie has moved up the charts by 14293 places since yesterday. In the United States, it is currently more popular than Insignificance but less popular than Marc Maron: Thinky Pain.

Ashley Scott plays an executive for a company that produces pet supplies. Just after getting into a fight with her boyfriend about their relationship status, she takes up with the company's mascot and the company president's son on a road trip across America at Christmastime in an effort to get home for the holiday season.

Streaming Charts The JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity within the last 24 hours. This includes clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as 'seen'. This includes data from ~1.3 million movie & TV show fans per day.

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34 Movies That Will Make You Want to Get Off the Couch and See the World

From "The Holiday" to "Romancing the Stone" to "Eat Pray Love," these travel movies will inspire some serious wanderlust.

There's nothing like an epic on-screen adventure to get you acquainted with some place new and dreaming up an enviable vacation itinerary. For me (and basically all my childhood friends), this first happened following a viewing of Disney's "The Lizzie McGuire Movie" back in 2003, when Hilary Duff's character traveled to Rome to live out every teen's parent-free European fantasy. Though I've graduated to more mature travel movies over the last 18 years, one thing hasn't changed: films with gorgeous backdrops give me an unruly case of wanderlust.

From classics like "Around the World in 80 Days" and "Roman Holiday" to modern masterpieces such as "Wild" and "Crazy Rich Asians," travel films tend to ignite a longing for freedom and excitement. Maybe it's the sight of beaches on your screen triggering a phenomenon known as Blue Mind , or maybe watching a couple of pals take to the open road for a life changing road trip just makes you want to feel unconfined. Whatever it is, sometimes a travel film is all you need to provoke that feeling. That's why we've rounded up, in no particular order, 34 of the best travel movies that inspire wanderlust. Maybe they'll be cause for a change of scenery — or maybe they'll incite the adventure of a lifetime.

'Thelma & Louise' (1991)

Widely regarded as one of the best road trip movies of all time, this buddy film follows best friends Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon) as they drive through the American Southwest after Louise kills a man in Arkansas.

'The Holiday' (2006)

A Hollywood movie trailer producer (Cameron Diaz) and a London reporter (Kate Winslet) decide to switch homes for a few weeks after finding out their respective boyfriends have been cheating on them. The results offer enough glamor shots of Los Angeles and cozy footage of England's countryside to make you want to pack up and head to either city immediately.

'Crazy Rich Asians' (2018)

Though this movie revolves around the conflict between New Yorker Rachel Chu (Constance Wu) and her boyfriend's wealthy family, "Crazy Rich Asians" could pass as a tourism film for Singapore . If the Southeast Asian country wasn't on your bucket list before, this film's dazzling shots of Singapore, specifically the acclaimed Marina Bay Sands Hotel , may convince you.

'Wild' (2014)

Based on a true story, "Wild" sees Cheryl Strayed (Reese Witherspoon) hike more than a thousand miles from California to Washington on the Pacific Crest Trail following her divorce and the death of her mother. On her journey, Cheryl treks through the Mojave Desert , the Sierra Nevada, and Mount Hood National Forest while reflecting on her life.

'Eat Pray Love' (2010)

After her divorce, Elizabeth (Julia Roberts) sets off to explore the world with hopes of finding herself in the process. Elizabeth's inspiring and uplifting journey takes her — and viewers — to Italy , India , and Indonesia where she discovers the pleasure of nourishment, prayer, and romance.

'La La Land' (2016)

Admittedly, this musical doesn't feature much traveling (save for a brief road trip to Mia's hometown in Nevada), but the dreamy, oversaturated shots of Los Angeles in nearly every scene are enough to make anyone want to book a flight to the City of Angels.

'Before Sunrise' (1995)

Two strangers meet aboard a train from Budapest. Jesse (Ethan Hawke) is hoping to catch a flight home to the United States while Céline (Julie Delpy) is en route to Paris . Instead of sticking to their plans, the two disembark in Vienna and spend the entire night exploring the city and falling in love. A viewing of this movie will leave you longing for an epic adventure in the picturesque Austrian capital .

'National Lampoon’s Vacation' (1983)

National Lampoon 's classic comedy series is now six films strong, but it was 1983's "Vacation" that started it all. Unlike the franchise's most famous film, "Christmas Vacation," the original movie sees the Griswolds actually hit the road for a trip to Walley World, an amusement park several states away. After you watch Chevy Chase's hilarious hijinks unfold in this film, let sequels "European Vacation" and "Vegas Vacation" inspire further travels.

'The Darjeeling Limited' (2007)

After the death of their father, three estranged brothers (Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Jason Schwartzman) decide to hop aboard a train in India called The Darjeeling Limited to reconnect and experience spiritual self-discovery. Viewers catch glimpses of the Indian countryside, Hindu temples, and eventually the Himalayas — but not without a few jokes along the way.

'Up' (2009)

Arguably the most heart-wrenching animated film of all time, "Up" earns a spot on our list thanks to adorably grumpy widower Carl Fredricksen's determination to fulfill his own wanderlust. With the help of thousands of balloons and a young sidekick named Russell, Carl and his house soar across the world on an incredible journey that culminates at Paradise Falls (based on Angel Falls in Venezuela).

'Raiders of the Lost Ark' (1981)

"Raiders" kicks off the iconic Indiana Jones series with a quest to find the fabled Ark of the Covenant. On his journey, Indy (Harrison Ford) makes stops in Nepal , Egypt , and the Aegean Sea , and, of course, famously runs from a giant rolling boulder in a temple in Peru . Follow up this film with its sequels, "Temple of Doom" (1984), "Last Crusade" (1989), and "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" (2008), to see Indy travel to Jordan , the Amazon jungle, and beyond.

'Mamma Mia!' (2008)

Few movies offer the kind of gorgeously colorful beach imagery "Mamma Mia!" and its 2018 sequel, "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again" provide. If you haven't seen the films, you likely know them as "the movies with all the ABBA songs." But if you have seen them, you know they're actually about three men who travel to the impossibly beautiful, albeit fictional, Greek island of Kalokairi, each believing they're the father of a young bride-to-be.

'Nomadland' (2020)

After losing her job in the town of Empire, Nevada, Fern (Frances McDormand) decides to sell her belongings, buy a van, and drive across the country working odd jobs. Fern travels through deserts, small towns, and nomad communes where she works, makes new friends, and learns about life. If you've ever fantasized about dropping everything and taking to the open road, "Nomadland" will probably either convince or deter you.

'Romancing the Stone' (1984)

When New York City-based romance novelist Joan Wilder's sister is kidnapped in Cartagena , Joan (Kathleen Turner) ends up on a rescue-mission-turned-treasure-hunt with adventure-seeking Jack T. Colton (Michael Douglas). Don't be surprised if a viewing of this movie makes you want to trade in your annual beach vacation for a wild ride through the Colombian jungle .

'Paris, Je T’aime' (2006)

Paris, Je T'aime is different from the other films on this list in that it's not one film — it's 18 short films that all feature Paris as a central theme. Because the project is made up of 18 different stories in 18 different arrondissements around the city, viewers get a true, unfiltered sense of Paris, and may even find themselves inspired to visit lesser-known locales in the City of Light.

'The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert' (1994)

If you've ever longed to take a laughter-fueled road trip with your best friends, this film is worth a watch. In the flick, pals Tick (Hugo Weaving), Adam (Guy Pearce), and Bernadette (Terence Stamp) head out on a cross-country road trip through the Australian outback to perform their successful drag act in a new town. The trio takes up residence in an oversized tour bus called Priscilla, Queen of the Desert in this fun, ahead-of-its-time dramedy.

'RV' (2006)

While plenty of road trip movies have been made over the years, "RV" might be the only one that takes place in, well, an RV . Though the main characters in this movie face more bad luck than fun, family bonding, the film does feature generous desert , mountain , and wilderness scenery, as well as an all-star cast (Robin Williams, Kristin Chenoweth, Cheryl Hines, and Josh Hutcherson are just a few that appear).

'Point Break' (2015)

Yes, we're talking about the "Point Break" remake rather than the original film from 1991, but hear us out: the imagery in this movie inspires some serious wanderlust. The story takes viewers to several of the wildest places on Earth (Mexico's Cave of Swallows, Venezuela's Angel Falls, etc.) and though the plot is slightly different from the original (think eco-terrorism rather than bank robberies), it is quiet possibly the most visually stimulating travel movie ever made.

'Girls Trip' (2017)

When was the last time you took a trip with just your core group of girlfriends? A quick watch of this comedy will have you planning your next gal pal getaway faster than you can say "PTO." In the film, a group of friends (Queen Latifah, Tiffany Haddish, Regina Hall, and Jada Pinkett Smith) head to New Orleans , but you'll be ready to travel anywhere with your best buds after watching "Girls Trip" — even if it's just to the next town over.

'The Way' (2010)

After his son is killed walking the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route to Galicia, Spain, Tom Avery (Martin Sheen) sets out on the trail himself to retrieve his son's body. Along the way, Tom meets several other travelers who are walking the trail in hopes of changing their own lives for one reason or another. This inspiring film may just persuade you to make the famed pilgrimage yourself, or to book a similarly reflective trip.

'The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants' (2005)

If you were a teen or pre-teen in 2005, you have likely seen this movie and its 2008 sequel, and can attest that both inspire major wanderlust. The first film follows best friends Carmen, Lena, Bridget, and Tibby (who share a magical pair of jeans that fits them all perfectly) as they spend a summer in different parts of the world. Lena (Alexis Bledel) travels to Santorini, Greece , which makes for some seriously dreamy backdrops. In the sequel, the whole gang heads to Greece, but not before Bridget (Blake Lively) spends some time in Turkey .

'Up in the Air' (2009)

This George Clooney-led comedy-drama makes business travel and airports look glamorous — hospitable, even. Boasting just as many cityscape shots as it does plane scenes, "Up in the Air" will have you longing to be in the skies, jet setting off to some place new. Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga also star in this critically-acclaimed film about a man who lives out of a suitcase.

'Around the World in 80 Days' (1956)

If this classic adventure film doesn't inspire daydreams of traveling somewhere new, we're not sure what will. In 1872, Englishman Phileas Fogg makes a bet with several members of his gentleman's club that he can travel around the globe in just 80 days. On his journey, he and sidekick Jean Passepartout bring viewers along as they travel by gas balloon to France , Spain , Italy , India, Hong Kong , the United States , and more.

'Home Alone 2: Lost in New York' (1992)

The Home Alone movies usually fall under the comedy or holiday categories, but if you think about it, the second installment in the series is totally a travel movie. The film does a fantastic job of showing off the glamorous side of New York City , the place young Kevin McCallister accidentally ends up while the rest of his family vacations in Florida. From shots of the Rockefeller Christmas tree to the Manhattan skyline , this film is sure to inspire a trip to the Big Apple.

'Under the Tuscan Sun' (2003)

You won't find shots of northern Italy as serene as the ones in this feel-good film about independence, love, and friendship. After losing everything in her divorce, American writer Frances Mayes (Diane Lane) suddenly finds herself beginning a new life in the small Tuscan town of Cortona. And if you're anything like us, Googling "Tuscan villas for sale" will become a regular part of your life after watching this film.

'Angels & Demons' (2009)

Though "Angels & Demons" is classified as a thriller, it'll definitely make you want to head to Rome and dig up some history, both figuratively and literally. Based on the Dan Brown novel of the same name, the story follows Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) as he discovers secrets of the Vatican and faces off against the supposed Illuminati. If you're a fan, check out other Dan Brown adventure travel films, "The Da Vinci Code" (2006) and "Inferno" (2016).

'Easy Rider' (1969)

Our list features travel by plane, train , RV, and even hot air balloon , but "Easy Rider" is the only movie that follows a journey via motorcycle. In the film, drug smugglers Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and Billy (Dennis Hopper) ride from Los Angeles to New Orleans in hopes of reveling at Mardi Gras to celebrate their latest score. On their journey, they stop in several small towns, make a few friends, and unsuccessfully try to evade trouble.

'Out of Africa' (1985)

If Africa doesn't currently have a spot on your bucket list, this film might make you rethink that. Meryl Streep and Robert Redford star in this true story about Karen Blixen, a Danish woman who moves to Nairobi with her new husband, and builds a life there despite their many marital issues. "Out of Africa" features sweeping panoramic shots of Nairobi in nearly every scene, leaving it no wonder the drama won seven Academy Awards, including one for Best Cinematography.

'Johnson Family Vacation' (2004)

This family comedy starring Cedric the Entertainer, Vanessa Williams, and Solange Knowles follows the mildly dysfunctional Johnsons as they road trip to their family reunion in Missouri. On the drive, the family hilariously encounters just about every road trip cliché, from picking up a problematic hitchhiker to running out of gas, before making it to the reunion and performing a musical number to nab the coveted Family of the Year trophy.

'Midnight in Paris' (2011)

Set in present-day Paris , this Oscar-winning film is typically a favorite among art and literature lovers. At midnight each night, screenwriter Gil (Owen Wilson) is transported back in time through different eras of Paris, where he befriends Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Pablo Picasso, and even strikes up a romance with a 1920s woman named Adriana. The film offers plenty of inspiration for a culturally rich trip to France.

'The Parent Trap' (1998)

"The Parent Trap" is another film that may not immediately stand out as a travel flick, but once you take into account the film's many settings ( London , San Francisco, Napa Valley , and the northeastern U.S.), it's easy to see that this family classic has been a travel film all along. Plus, the main characters spend lots of time on planes, boats, and camping trips throughout the movie.

'The Talented Mr. Ripley' (1999)

Carefully spliced between disturbing revelations and suspenseful plot twists are luxurious shots of Italian beaches in this Matt Damon-led film. When Tom Ripley (Damon) is paid to travel to Italy and bring Dickie Greenleaf (Jude Law) back to the States by Dickie's father, Tom ends up befriending — and later becoming obsessed with — Dickie. Despite the plot quickly darkening, viewers are treated to bright, colorful scenes in Rome and glamorous seaside villages .

'Roman Holiday' (1953)

Romance? Check. Stunning visuals of Rome ? Check. Audrey Hepburn? Check. This classic travel comedy lands at the top of many movie buffs' all-time favorite lists, and for good reason. Bored with her mundane life as a European princess while on a trip to Rome, Ann (Hepburn) ditches her duties and hits the town with journalist Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck). The two take viewers on a tour of the Eternal City and fall in love in the process.

'Pee-wee’s Big Adventure' (1985)

Before you roll your eyes, take a moment to acknowledge that this film essentially sends happy-go-lucky Pee-wee Herman (Paul Reubens) on the great American road trip in search of his stolen bicycle. In this comedy for adults and children alike, Pee-wee stops at the Alamo, the Cabazon Dinosaur park in California , and Hollywood . Traveling by car, truck, and train, Pee-wee befriends a biker gang, competes in a rodeo, and of course, famously dances to "Tequila" before his journey is through.

Hillary Maglin is a digital editor who splits most of her time between New York City and Pittsburgh. You can find her on Instagram @hillarymaglin , where her DMs are always open to discuss travel gear, wine bars, and Taylor Swift's latest record.

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25 travel films that will make you feel like you're on holiday

By Antonia Quirke

The best films don’t just inspire us to travel, or even make us feel like we have – they are much more. They are time travel. Taking us directly into other eras. Some recreate a different epoch with set-dressing and costumes. Others are actual documents of worlds now lost, such as Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s unforgettable Gabbeh from 1996, about the rural carpet weavers of Iran, capturing with spectacular colour and romance a landscape and community that no longer exists. With such a film we go where we otherwise literally cannot.

We make friends with characters in films similar to the way we make friends on our travels – intensely, fleetingly. We take trips to revisit those people and places when we rewatch our favourites. We travel in our own heads whenever we think of them. That’s where the movies actually live. In our minds, reorganising images and location. The marvellous, muddled movie brain. It’s deeply poetic. Here are 25 films to transport the viewer.

Into The Wild (2007)

Some of the best travel films are based on a true story and Into the Wild , which follows the Alaskan adventure and ultimate demise of Christopher 'Alexander Supertramp' McCandless. Sean Penn's take follows McCandless, played by Emile Hirsch, kayaking the Colorado River, summiting snowy peaks, and embodying unchecked wanderlust. It's adventure travel at its best and most reckless, which of course makes for a great film.

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MAMMA MIA! (2008): THE GREEK ISLANDS

When it was released in 2008, this sunny tribute to ABBA was the most successful movie musical ever. But the onslaught of Scandi pop from Colin Firth, Pierce Brosnan and Meryl Streep is somehow less central to the film’s success than its location. It’s set on the fictional Greek island of Kalokairi, and the cast and crew set up in the Sporades island of Skopelos. Amanda Seyfried (Sophie) and Dominic Cooper (Sky) romp about in unspoiled Mediterranean coves such as Kastani Beach. In bad news for fans making the pilgrimage to the island, though, the jetty – where we see Sky’s stag-do mates memorably dance in flippers – was temporarily added for the film. Perhaps most striking is Agios Ioannis, where Sophie and Sky are due to be married. This dinky church sits precariously above a 100-metre cliff face in the north of the island, with 202 steps leading to the summit. Sarah James

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Where was Mamma Mia! filmed in Greece?

REBECCA (2020): CORNWALL

The 2020 Netflix adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s Gothic classic Rebecca travelled all across England to recreate Manderley, arguably the most famous fictional house ever dreamt up. The vast Cornish estate belonging to Maxim de Winter (Armie Hammer) is said to be one of the most beautiful properties in the country – but in real life, the crew took elements of several locations to create a composite of this impressive mansion. The exterior was shot at 17th-century Cranborne Manor in Dorset, while most of the interior was filmed at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire (also used in The Favourite and The Crown ). Back in Dorset, Mapperton House’s 15 acres of gardens stand in as Manderley’s grounds. Away from Manderley, we see Lily James (Mrs de Winter) and Armie Hammer strolling the wild Cornish coast, actually filmed in Devon’s Hartland Quay. And further afield, Monaco’s Jardin Exotique and the Belle Epoque Ancien Hôtel Régina in Nice also make star appearances. Sarah James

Where was Rebecca filmed? A locations guide

MAMMA MIA! HERE WE GO AGAIN (2018): CROATIA

While its predecessor made use of a thriving Greek isle for its sunny location shots, the sequel – filmed a whole decade later – moved the production to a sleepy Croatian outlet, Vis. This rugged 35 square-mile island, one and a half hours from mainland Croatia , was home to the cast and crew for six weeks. Lily James, who plays a young Donna (played by Meryl Streep in later life) strolls around Srebrna Bay with her lover Sam (Jeremy Irvine), while Vis harbour also stars. Kalokairi’s famous jetty from the first film appears again in the sequel, this time set up on the western tip of the island, Barjaci. Greek food was even imported to the island, to add to the all-important authenticity. Sarah James

Where 'Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again' was filmed

Carol (2015)

The film follows a young clerk at a department store (Rooney Mara) who falls for the titular Carol (Cate Blanchett), a glamorous older woman who comes into the shop one day and leaves with more than a new scarf. The two embark on a tentative affair which leads them through Fifties New York and on a road trip across America.

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THE DARJEELING LIMITED (2007): RAJASTHAN

Three brothers head across Rajasthan by train, truck and scooter in a film that feels it’s in perpetual motion; a flick-book of vividly coloured paintings of Hindu gods, and people in their multitudinous safas and ghagra cholis . Even the dust of the Rajasthani plains looks infused with pale saffron – in one scene the sand almost seems to be aflame, while the soundtrack plays Debussy’s ‘Clair de lune’: moon and fire combined. Ice and heat. The best scenes, on a cross-country train, take place in an antiquated, super-florid luxury dining car that seems fantastical but might very well be an immaculate reconstruction of the real thing. Anybody who’s been to this part of India knows it’s more than possible. Chandeliers hugger-mugger with those intricate paintings of princes hunting gazelles or Shiva bringing the Ganges down from heaven or Vishnu Vaikuntha defeating the king of Kangra. All the while, carriage windows flash past camels and scared cows, parakeets, doves and crows, old tombs and thorn scrub and the ruins of temples, to the rattle of Raj-era cutlery and the boiling of perpetual chai.

Stream on Amazon Prime

ROMA (2018): MEXCIO CITY

Director Alfonso Cuarón has a thing about beaches – they represent liberty and potency to him. His adored 2001 road movie Y Tu Mamá También , about two randy teenagers heading down Mexico ’s southern coast, shows a beach so analgesically romantic it’s since become a very specific and celebrated destination for fans (Bahías de Huatulco, about 70 miles east of Puerto Escondido, in case you’re interested). In the movie, that cove with sand like cool velvet looks like a defining image of excitement tinged with vital regret. All summers must end. The director’s autobiographical mega-hit Roma is mostly set in Seventies Mexico City , where he was raised, and the scenes when the family at the centre of the story head to the beaches at Tuxpan for a holiday completely knocks our heads off. Huge breakers, salt and wind, children’s voices bouncing hard across the water, enlivening both the family on screen and the audience. Beaches: beautiful and dangerous. In full view of your loved ones you can be eaten by a shark. Or drown. Get swept away. When I interviewed Cuarón a couple of years ago and mentioned the beaches in his films, he hooted and nodded. And said there was nothing in his childhood like that thrilling, nervy sensation of leaving Mexico City and heading towards the sea: ‘I longed for those moments.’

Where was Roma filmed?

LITTLE WOMEN (2019): NEW ENGLAND

On the subject of beaches, if there are better seaside scenes in a recent movie than the ones shot along Crane Beach in Massachusetts for Greta Gerwig’s cherished new adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel, I’d like to see them. The rest of the film centres mostly on the house of the March family: a near-cloying mirage of heritage clapboard, open fires, American quilts, dried-flower swags, lanterns in the snow, Christmas feasts, Marmee hurrying forth with still-warm bread in a wicker basket. But when the girls head to Crane Beach for a picnic one spring day, the camera tracks the grass-fringed dunes and waters of one of north-east America’s most spectacular shores, studded with rare piping plovers – just outside the town of Ipswich and along towards the Essex River Estuary and salt marshes. Suddenly the film gulps in fresh air. Laurie flirts madly with an oblivious Jo all along the water’s edge as the sun throws armfuls of pure light across white sand out from the screen right across us.

Where is the new 'Little Women' filmed?

CNT Editors

CNT Editors , CN Traveller

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD (2019): LOS ANGELES

Tarantino’s lauded love letter to late-Sixties LA, and a semi-fantasy version of the city, now (natch) a popular bus tour all of its own. The seductive and enthralling locations are countless – the 1938 Aquarius Theatre, the Puerco Canyon in Malibu , Casa Vega on Ventura Boulevard... How well Tarantino captures the sense of the sprawling movie lots, the vacant extras, the catering trucks, the everyday strangeness of it all. The tone of the movie is phenomenal, capturing not just a fascinating place in time but a newly famous, and doomed, woman in that specific place in time: Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), filmed bowling down the freeway in her convertible, or watching herself in a movie in amazement, or just dancing and laughing at a party in a modernist bohemian enclave of the Hollywood Hills (away from ‘the tired old men and tired old money,’ as Raymond Chandler once put it to describe other Californian neighbourhoods). A woman at the high point of her happiness. ‘Good air, and a view of the mountains,’ Chandler also declared, was the best LA (ie, life) could offer. What more could any of us want?

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood locations – the LA filming spots

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MUD (2012): MISSISSIPPI

‘This way of life ain’t long for this world…’ A story set today but with a woozy, antique feel – from its opening moments you suspect it’s a remake of a much older movie (it’s not). Or at least inspired by something written by Mark Twain, especially when one of the characters turns out to be called Tom Blankenship, the name of Twain’s childhood friend and the real-life Huckleberry Finn. The characters live along the Mississippi in wooden houseboats that crouch low along the water, hand to mouth, fishing for crawfish and mussels, and occasionally bringing up pearls. Two kind children meet Mud, an unfrightening convict hiding out on an uninhabited island in the river – Matthew McConaughey, the most handsome of Magwitch types, despite being drenched in perpetual sweat and wearing unlovely dentures. It’s filmed in the Arkansas Delta Lowlands and an island outside Eudora, and the Mississippi itself is ever-present, verdant and varied. Mystical, historical, aesthetic. Sometimes big as a sea, other times full of winding creeks and inlets edged in low-slung trees and the soft furze of mossy stones. In one scene in the morning, a dreamlike mist hovers and a snake curls through the water, geese languidly flying in a crescent overhead. You want to enter the frame as the river’s slow green flow crinkles in the occasional breeze.

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CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (2017): ITALY

Teenage Elio falls for handsome doctoral student Oliver, who’s spending the summer with his family. It’s not that the Italian town and its surrounds here – Crema, in Lombardy – is devastatingly gorgeous. Or that the villa where it’s set is headturningly historic. Or any of the too-unctuous things that usually oversell locations in movies: it’s the weirdly accurate sense of time and milieu that it grasps. Of being just ‘somewhere in Italy’, in 1983, seeing out the summer. The cardboardy towels. The wrong-sized bike. Nesquik on the breakfast table. Plates of over-bruised cherries. The endless cigarettes, and clanging of church bells. You’ve been to that town during an unreliably warm July. You’ve sat in a Fiat picking at the door-catch. Endured evenings in the living room while someone has a go on the piano and others watch telly. Gone to bed early, listless. Had a cold swim in a local river. Crushed on the exchange student’s middle brother. And even though it’s a film about love and passionate sex and quashed dreams – and so upliftingly sad – it’s also the safest and familiar-feeling movie of all time. Like Wordsworth’s bright ‘spots of time’, it could be your own memories.

Where was Call Me By Your Name filmed?

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (2011): Paris

‘How is anybody ever going to come up with a book or a painting or a symphony or a sculpture that can compete with a great city?’ Specifically, Paris . So many shots in Woody Allen’s relentlessly charming amusement about an American writer (Owen Wilson) accidentally travelling back in time to Paris in the 1920s and meeting such panjandrums as Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll, incandescent) show the city drenched in rain. Absolutely pelting down. Rain racing in the gutters. Rain hammering on the Seine, turning it white. The shots, though brief, seem to go on for long moments. The narcotic beauty of it! The insatiable longing that descends on us as the movie goes on – to be negotiating some café chair yourself, under an awning off the Pont Neuf, with your coat collar up, ordering coffee swilling with Armagnac while your shopping bags dissolve in the deluge. ‘How drop-dead gorgeous this city is in the rain!’ says Wilson. The same might be said for all cities, really – they magically turn into mirrors in the rain. Street puddles reflect light glimmeringly back upon itself. But Paris, being rain-coloured to begin with (those silver-grey apartment buildings), does rain best.

PHANTOM THREAD (2017): London

A masterpiece, especially for the way it conjures London . Rarely is the city filmed in wide-shot (we never see a whole street), and yet you come away completely immersed in the place and era. It’s set circa 1953, with Daniel Day-Lewis playing a couture designer living and working in a smart London square off the Marylebone Road. His house is a high-stretching, late-Georgian caress of a building: polished parquet, stucco, white shutters, immaculate cupola and a vaulted staircase that winds into infinity past rooms filled with assiduous seamstresses. Here is the air of wealth. European royalty come and go, immaculately lipsticked, being fitted for weddings. And yet at the same time there’s something very close and secretive and quintessentially Fifties to the movie – it has the tone of a Muriel Sharp novel. The city reveals itself in alluring details only. Doors slightly ajar reveal shadows of the square beyond. Through tall sashed windows, as a countess is swathed in tulle and pinned, we see plane trees and sky and elegant brick. Perhaps the red blur of a London bus. You marvel that this is all we need to so successfully locate us in a place. A certain corner. A statue. Beautiful Sanderson wallpaper. Whenever I’m in the area I find myself walking out of my way especially to sit in Fitzroy Square where it was filmed, thinking about Daniel Day-Lewis eating a plate of porridge with cream for breakfast and drinking his lapsang, frowning and sketching while London wakes up beyond his casement.

INTO THE WILD (2007): ALASKA

‘I love not Man the less, but Nature more,’ Byron wrote. This movie is as much as anything about travelling alone. Christopher McCandless was a restless young American seeking personal revitalisation by hitching towards Alaska in the early 1990s, inspired in part by Walt Whitman (‘I take to the open road’). Emile Hirsch’s McCandless grows ever thinner in leaky boots, his rucksack brimming with guides to edible plants, his hair a dustbowl, scrawny arms eternally on the brink of throwing each meagre item in his possession off a bridge just to ensure he won’t lose the focus of his ideals. Living on what he can forage, he strikes up brief friendships – in that intense, addictive way that any backpacker will recognise – with a catalogue of characters en route. The suspiciously buoyant Swedish campers. The caring older couple keen to offer their advice. The watchful girl with a guitar and a sheaf of sad songs. From the wheat fields of South Dakota and the blue water of the Topock Gorge, everything we see looks gorgeous. Especially the very guts of Alaska itself when we get there – huge skies of winter sunshine. It’s a landscape that eventually consumed McCandless, and its vigour and immensity feel overwhelming.

UNCUT GEMS (2019): NEW YORK CITY

The most exciting crime thriller in years, about a New York City jeweller (Adam Sandler) perpetually on the crazed lookout for the next big score. It’s a movie completely charged by a desire to evoke the thrum of the diamond district and all the stories that the directors – the obsessive, hard-working Safdie brothers – heard their father tell about that part of the city. Stories that sounded to them like irresistible mini pulp-genre flicks as teenagers. It’s mostly filmed on 47th Street. An outdated, antiquated world; a cash-based economy of gemstones and bartering. The movie comes at you yelling. There are scenes where you feel like every argument, every deal, every scam is being drilled right into your head, the sound mix is so chaotic and vivid. Layers and layers of conversation and alarms and traffic and mobile phones. The Safdies didn’t close the area off for their exterior shots – they just went right out on the street, real pedestrians mixing unknowingly with extras (in that way of other indelible New York movies including Marathon Man , or Tootsie , when Dustin Hoffman, dressed as Dorothy for the first time, totters with prim perfection past unsuspecting members of the actual public). But more than anything, it’s the way that 47th Street itself is clearly utterly alive for everyone involved, a living thing that they just can't stop thinking about. A knockout.

TRACKS (2013): DESERTS

Of all films shot in the desert , this one feels most saturated in a hypnotic, sunbaked, slow-blooded yellowness. A thirsty, seductive amber. It is perhaps the ultimate cinematic dream of aloneness. Mia Wasikowska stars in the true story of Australian writer Robyn Davidson , who, aged 27, walked 1,700 miles across bone-dry west Australia – for the hell of it, for the thrill, the peace – with just a few doting camels for company. ‘I’d always been drawn to the purity of the desert. The hot wind and the wide open spaces,’ she says. Occasionally she’s followed by a Time magazine photographer (played by a then-unknown and thrillingly idiosyncratic Adam Driver), who gazes at Mia’s upturned freckled frown approaching through heat-shimmers with a kind of existential longing we all share by the end of the movie : Tracks makes you want to be a different sort of person. Happier with solitude. Braver.

THE TALENTED MR RIPLEY (1999): ITALY

The look on Matt Damon’s face says it all. His character, Tom Ripley – low-born American charlatan, villainous but compelling impersonator – has come, in the late 1950s, to ‘Mongibello’, an amalgam of southern Italy’s Positano , Procida and Ischia , to spy on Jude Law’s Dickie Greenleaf, a WASP trust-fund brat. It’s not just Law’s startling eyes (blue as borage) and insolently expensive caramel curls that Ripley desires. Everything Tom sees, he covets. The candy-coloured houses clambering up the sparkling coast. The scooters and tans, the rattan bags and sandals. Espresso taken under citrus trees whilst playing at writing novels in the cobbled Amalfi afternoons; to the sound of Chet Baker and swifts and clapping masts in the bay below. But here’s Rome , too, at Christmas , with fairy lights swagged across chilly fountains. And Venice on a vivid blue day out of season, boats transporting socialites in cashmere. The freedom, the glamour and history of Italy! Away from the ‘subways and taxis and starched collars’ of America . All captured in Damon’s expression.

A BIGGER SPLASH (2015): PANTELLERIA

This movie, about a British rock singer hiding from the world on a Sicilian island, and wrangling her troublesome lovers, is pretty much perfect. Sexy, hilarious and, absurd, it’s shot on a large, elegant old estate dotted with traditional houses (called dammusi; they look like scarab beetles), crimson hibiscus and Maiolica ceramics. A vivid yellow and blue swimming pool sits by a walled Arabian garden with a citrus tree that catches the movement of the light throughout the day like a sundial. In some of the best scenes, Matthias Schoenaerts drives an old Citroën Méhari (they’re everywhere here), sexily negotiating the pitted tracks and potholes of the roads, flooring the clutch in trodden-down deck shoes and blasting Captain Beefheart while Tilda Swinton hangs off his neck. Flowing fields of capers give way to sudden swathes of amber flowers that look like waving hedgerows of Champagne. There’s a lagoon in the opening scene that islanders call the Mirror of Venus – an ancient caldera coloured the outlandish blue of a Himalayan poppy, where Swinton and Schoenaerts spend the morning crusted in skin-softening mud, snogging and sleeping. Where is this? you ask just about every time the scenery changes. The location glowers and shadows, and by the end you’re wind-blasted, ensnared. Interviewing the director, Luca Guadagnino , once, I told him I’d visited Pantelleria in tribute to the movie . ‘When you were there, did you dream?’ he asked. ‘Oh the dreams on Pantelleria! So dramatic. So tempestuous. Oh, the dreams….’

BOY ON A DOLPHIN (1957): HYDRA

Leonard Cohen would have put the Greek island of Hydra on the map when he made it his home in 1960, if this film hadn’t pipped him to the post. Sophia Loren stars as a sponge diver in a patently ridiculous tale of skulduggery and salvaged ancient statues, and many of those still living on the island appeared in the film as children, and talk about it like it all happened yesterday. However foolish the plot, the film is mesmeric, the camera capturing so much of what makes Hydra (then, and still) a kind of paradise. Sere thistles and Judas trees punctuate the shore as we swoop past grand villas and smaller overhanging-flowered cottages, water glistering off rocky shores, sponges in the underwater shots the colour of caramel, coming up from abyssal depths. And up comes Sophia too, time and again, clutching one to her historic décolleté after a dive (‘Her double was even more beautiful!’ the harbour master here once told me.) Watching the movie you see how little the island’s one main town has changed. Shaped like a horseshoe, the port backing into a natural amphitheatre dotted with russet and citrine, 18th-century, Genoese-designed millionaire-mariner’s mansions; coiling around these houses, intensely warm coloured in the sun, are white labyrinths of high steps and streets which take on a honeysuckle glow in the pale evening shadows. They sometimes show the film in the port during the summer , and people shout ‘There’s my house!’ and whoop and applaud.

IN BRUGES (2008): BRUGES

A movie that seems to have been made in part as an advert for its location, In Bruges simultaneously – so cleverly, so irresistibly – offers a challenge to any prospective visitor. Writer-director Martin McDonagh knows that we are all sitting there silently earmarking the city as a MUST VISIT IMMEDIATELY, as he sends his two antiheroes, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson – soft-hearted, doomed Irish hitmen both – to hang out in the medieval capital of the County of Flanders, waiting for instructions from their nutty, Bruges-fanatic boss (an incandescent Ralph Fiennes ). Where Farrell is furiously bored by the town (history is ‘all just a load of stuff that’s already happened’), Gleeson is completely charmed (‘all those canals and bridges and cobbled streets…’) and the camera flits down the waterways and through the squares, picking out glowering swans and moonlight reflected off leaded windows as Farrell rants and Gleeson goes assiduously to museums. Oh, the bloodied wintry sunsets over 13th-century stone belfries. Bruges is famously photogenic – but what the film comprehends is its more menacing thrum and darkness, its greater sense of fate. The film’s a taunt to the traveller, an enticement.

KING KONG (1933): NEW YORK

The only film to have debuted simultaneously at the two largest movie theatres in NYC , the Roxy and Radio City Music Hall – 10 screenings a day, each sold out. And not just because of the magnificent scenes of the giant ape, cinema’s favourite misfit, uprooted from his prehistoric Skull Island lair, where he had lived in roaring disharmony with dinosaurs. But it’s loved more, I think, for the scenes in New York , where his co-star Fay Wray is first discovered, pale under a little cloche hat, stealing an apple from a stall off Broadway. The lights of Times Square – ads for Pepsodent and Chevrolet – glisten in a winter fog. The Manhattan skyline is seen from the New Jersey side of the Hudson, with the sharp jag of the Chrysler Building looking like an arrow to the heavens. It seems to impersonate the slimness and sparkle of Wray herself. And when Kong hangs off the top of the Empire State at the end of the movie, a furious dawn sun breaks through the clouds as in Titian’s painting of Goliath, and we spot Central Park below, a patch of wild space in this most designed and thrusting of cities. With this backdrop, Wray struggles in the monster’s grip in a powerful image of unrequited love.

BRIGHT STAR (2009): HAMPSTEAD HEATH

‘The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild…’ wrote the incomparable Romantic poet John Keats, in a verse composed while sitting under a plum tree in a garden on Hampstead Heath in 1819. Then, Hampstead was his adopted locale, in a house that still stands up by the Spaniards pub, when the village was a day’s march from the city of London. The heath area there today remains 800 acres of ancient parkland, woodland and meadow. This film, about Keats’s time in Hampstead, might send you directly there – and the reality won’t disappoint. ‘I’ve explored all these paths,’ explains Ben Whishaw’s unbearably tender, dying Keats to his beloved neighbour and betrothed Fanny Brawne, ‘which are more in number than your eyelashes…’ Moments in the film are so sad and beautiful that audiences openly wept. Here’s drama and plot and love and tragedy, and yet sometimes the whole thing feels like a super-feminine, drowsy montage of sensations and beauty; a spring bower of magnolia buds and bluebells, butterflies and dew-drenched poppies. High reeds around the swimming ponds, blurred dragonflies, the occasional glimpse of St Paul’s in the grey distance reminding you that a whole city beckons below, with all its hardness and reality. Death is inescapable. If only we could dawdle forever in this high Hampstead dell.

FINAL PORTRAIT (2017): PARIS

To the Montparnasse studio of the great Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, in 1964. This wasn’t even filmed in the city and yet still manages to give that most charismatic, celebrated of terrains – the Left Bank of the Seine – more than its due. Director Stanley Tucci used to joke that this was the easiest job he’d ever had – walking to the Twickenham set to film, from his home by the Thames. On those walks he would think about how to bring Paris to the audience, in this cluttered, grimy art-studio setting that its owner once called ‘the prettiest and humblest of them all’. Magically, Tucci pulls it off. The belted macs on the hurrying extras in the street, the cigarettes and cigarettes, Geoffrey Rush as the artist with his tremendous uprush of grey curls, head held in concentration and then growing impatience over red wine and espressos gulped in neighbouring cafés. The bells of – is it? Yes… – Notre-Dame pealing eerily as the grey winter light ekes its way through the glass while Giacometti works with frozen hands. ‘Everything is about to dissolve, everything is floating,’ noted the writer Jean Genet once, of the studio that Tucci has recreated with such spirit. ‘And yet it all appears to be captured in an absolute reality.’

CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (2000): CHINA

Ang Lee’s swooning Chinese martial-arts fable involving two sets of lovers, a missing sword and the theft of an ivory comb, is set under the Qing dynasty, during the 19th-century – and yet the story feels far, far older. It seems to inhabit some indefinite, painted past, with a teeming hinterland of Mongol invaders and a heart-poundingly romantic closing scene showing steps leading up a forested, moss-bursting mountain towards an ageless temple. The characters literally float when in combat (the actors were hoisted frighteningly high on wires), silk robes streaming, and what we see and hear beneath them makes us twitch to be there: pink-throbbing cherry blossom , the whistling of fighters in vast woodlands, horses tearing across the Gobi Desert. Paper lanterns in the dusk of antique Chinese courtyards, the sort of architecture that seems to unfold in the dim light, like a delicate paper scroll, while Yo-Yo Ma bursts the life out of his cello on the soundtrack.

HOTEL SALVATION (2016): VARANASI

It could be morbid: a film about the hostels in the holy city on the Ganges where elderly Hindus take themselves off to die, having decided enough is enough. They buy their time-slot and simply prepare, seemingly unquestioningly, for the end – families visit, pyres are built along the riverbank, the days tick by. Such hostels exist. And yet… young director Shubhashish Bhutiani, with little to no budget, moves with instinctive swagger and tenderness amongst the crowds with his cinematographer – especially in the scenes along the river, which are pure vérité, catching faces in rhapsodic moments of grief and humour and wonder. There’s a scene during a mass prayer ceremony where many celebrants have been drinking lassi laced with mango and marijuana, singing on the steps of old temples, boats hugger-mugger, flares lit, stars hanging like lamps over green-blossomed champak trees, voices rising in urgent unison. Such wit in every shot, but love, too, and also that sense of a film learning new and quite mystical things about an old, old religion – and an even older country.

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Hallmark’s Holiday Road: Filming Locations and Cast Revealed

Helmed by director Martin Wood, ‘Holiday Road’ is a story inspired by true events, following 9 co-passengers whose flight to Denver is grounded due to bad weather. Dana (Serah Canning), a travel writer, makes an ingenious suggestion of renting a van and traveling by road to Denver together. Her co-passengers, now fellow travelers, agree. They include a diverse set of personalities – a mother and her impatient son, a social media influencer, a tech entrepreneur, a couple, and a grumpy old man.

Not long after the merry band sets off, they encounter unknown territories and have to navigate a series of obstacles, bringing them closer and changing some of their lives. Witnessing their lively journey and the locations they stop at along the way, you may wonder if the filming actually took place on the route from Portland to Denver.

Where Was Holiday Road Filmed?

‘Holiday Road’ was largely filmed in and around Vancouver City in the province of British Columbia on the western coast of the Great White North. Shooting for the Hallmark Movie was carried out in early September of 2023. Let us take a look at the specific locations which set the scenes for the production.

Vancouver, British Columbia

The bustling port city of Vancouver has played the part of Portland, Denver, and everywhere in between for ‘Holiday Road.’ The city is a Hallmark favorite when it comes to filming destinations, as it offers a diverse landscape along with top-of-the-line filming studios. One such studio was used for its sound stage to simulate the road trip taken by our travel party. The city has additionally seen the filming of previous Hallmark movies like, ‘ Christmas in Canaan,’ ‘Royal New Year’s Eve,’ ‘The Christmas Secret,’ ‘Write Before Christmas,’ ‘The Christmas House,’ and ‘Five Star Christmas.’

View this post on Instagram A post shared by PRINCESS DAVIS (@iamprincessdavis)

The Portland airport shown at the beginning of the film was actually Vancouver International Airport, with a few switched-up signs. The airport is located on Sea Island in Richmond, and has also been featured as a backdrop in films such as ‘ Supernatural ,’ ‘ Final Destination ,’ ‘ Good Luck Chuck ,’ ‘ Passengers ,’ and ‘Firewall.’

The actors seemed to have had an especially good time filming ‘Holiday Road,’ with many of them speaking of their positive experiences on social media. Enid-Raye Adams who plays Tricia talks about the actors being given plenty to work with in the storyline, and rolling around laughing even off camera. Sharon Crandall, who plays Lei Ling talked about the extraordinary experience on Instagram, saying, “What a time we had together for three weeks this summer. We cried, we laughed, we (almost) puked and we sweated. Boy, did we sweat. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Holiday Road Cast

The film features an ensemble of talented actors, with Sara Canning and Warren Christie as Dana and Clay being the romantic center and having a number of Hallmark titles under their belts. Sara is known especially for her performance in ‘ The Vampire Diaries ’ as Jenna Sommers, ‘ War for the Planet of the Apes ’ as Lake, ‘Remedy’ as Melissa Conner and ‘ A Series of Unfortunate Events’  as Jacquelyn.

Warren Christie is an Irish actor and producer; you may have seen him in ‘Apollo 18’ as Ben Anderson, ‘This Means War’ as Steve, ‘Alphas’ as Cameron Hicks and ‘The Most Wonderful Time of the Year’ as Morgan Derby. Other cast members include Princess Davis as Maya Way, Kiefer O’Reilly as Ben, Enid-Raye Adams as Tricia, Sharon Crandall as Lei Ling, Trevor Lerner as Dusty Redford, Brittany Willacy as Ember Craig, Laura Mitchell as Beth, Benita Ha as Ming, Kayla Deorksen as Sarah and Simon Chin as Santa.

Read More:  Best Christmas and Holiday Movies on Disney Plus

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Holiday Road Trip (2013) – Ashley Scott & Patrick Muldoon XMAS Holiday Movie Review

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By Geno McGahee

I used to think that you couldn’t go wrong with dogs in movies. For some reason, putting a dog as a focus in films worked, but then they had that SNOW BUDDIES shit come out and my theory was ruined. In the 2013 holiday film “HOLIDAY ROAD TRIP”, we get a dog as a focus, but it’s not the main focus, but the dog works here. Maybe my theory that dogs make good movies isn’t so fucked after all.

Maya (Ashley Scott) works for a pet supply corporation and is unlucky in love. Her boyfriend, Davis (Kip Pardue) is a total douche, but she still wants to marry him. When they go out to dinner, she is hoping that he pops the question, but he doesn’t. He is a dick that has no interest in relationships and gets a glass of wine splashed in his face for his troubles.

Max (George Hamilton) wants his son, Patrick (Patrick Muldoon), to start proving that he is the right guy to run the company when he retires. The best plan that Max can come up with is to have Patrick go cross country with their mascot dog, Scoots, and take pictures of all of his adventures. Somebody from the company needs to go and chronicle the trip and Maya quickly volunteers. Considering that the two disliked each other at work, the trip would prove to be an interesting one.

The trip is a bumpy one at first with Maya disliking Patrick and Patrick continually trying to annoy her. As they drive, Davis finds out that he’s up for a huge promotion at work, but his boss wants him to marry Maya for some reason. That puts Davis on the road trip to get her back and marry her, but damn, I’ve never seen anything like this. What boss would ever tell a guy that you have to marry somebody in order to get a raise? It was just odd.

The ice begins to melt between Maya and Patrick and it becomes obvious where the story is going, but the film has a lot of good moments and a fun atmosphere. At one point, they get stuck in a town and the mechanic will only fix their vehicle if Patrick agrees to play Santa for some old women. He agrees, but this is another weird one. I’ve never had that happen, but the way that the mechanics butt fuck you on prices, I’d gladly put on a Santa costume if that meant a free fix. The old ladies are expecting a Santa stripper and Patrick obliges, dancing and stripping for the golden girls. It was a really funny scene.

The couple begins to fall in love and every attempt Davis makes to find Maya ends with him getting his ass kicked. Pardue was good at the physical comedy and did a good job being a total dickhead, but he sort of looks like one. So, maybe it wasn’t that difficult.

On the way to the final stop, Los Angeles, Maya gets dropped off at her mom’s, Cynthia (Shelley Long), and this is where the film starts to nosedive. Shelley Long is, at best, a stage actress. She cannot act. I know her time on CHEERS was warmly received, but I give any and all credit to the director. Long is one of the shittiest actresses ever to make it to any level of note. I know they cast her because of that name value, but her performance is pure shit. The director should have worked with her more, but he was probably trying to find reasons not to kill himself after working with her.

HOLIDAY ROAD TRIP is a fun movie that leans on the Christmas holiday as a selling point, but it doesn’t really feel like a holiday movie. The cast is good, minus Long, and there is enough humor to keep the interest going. I recommend it.

Rating: 6/10

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