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A road film is a film genre in which the film's plot takes places during a journey.

The genre has its roots in spoken and written tales of epic journeys, such as the Odyssey and the Aeneid. The road film is a standard plot employed by screenwriters. It is a kind of bildungsroman, a kind of story in which the hero changes, grows or improves over the course of the story. The modern "road picture" is to filmmakers what the heroic quest was to Medieval writers.

The on-the-road plot was used at the birth of American Cinema but blossomed in the years after WWII, reflecting the boom of America's postwar automobility and youth culture. Even so, awareness of the "road picture" as a genre came only in the 1960s with Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde.

Like their antecedents, the road movie tends towards an episodic structure. In each episode, there is a challenge to be met, although not all of them will be met successfully. In most episodes, a piece of the plot is revealed - knowledge or allies are gained, and so on. Sometimes, as Heart of Darkness, this progress is inverted, and each episode represents a loss rather than a gain.

Road movies traditionally end in one of four ways:

• having met with triumph at their ultimate destination, the protagonist(s) return home, wiser for their experiences.
• at the end of the journey, the protagonist(s) find a new home at their destination.
• the journey continues endlessly. In such cases, the last shot of the film is almost always the driver's point of view of a lonely highway at night.
• having realised that, as a result of their journey, they can never go home, the protagonists either choose death or are killed.

Notable examples include Duel; Easy Rider; Vanishing Point; The Long Long Trailer; Planes, Trains and Automobiles; Just Like the Son; Natural Born Killers; Rain Man; Thelma and Louise; Elizabethtown; Wild at Heart; Little Miss Sunshine; Sideways; Dutch; Y tu mamá también; Rat Race; Larger Than Life; The Hitcher; The Cannonball Run; The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle; Transamerica; Children of Men; National Lampoon's Vacation; Fandango; Road Trip; and A Goofy Movie.

• In Easy Rider, Wyatt complains that his life is like being in a road movie.
• They Might Be Giants wrote a song entitled "Road Movie to Berlin," featured on the album Flood
• In the Family Guy episodes "Road to Rhode Island" and "Road to Europe," large portions of the film series are grafted onto the show

Main article: Road to...

Road to... also refers to seven comedy films starring Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, and Dorothy Lamour.

• Road Movie Filmography (via UC Berkeley)

• Road Movies: A Bibliography of Materials in the UC Berkeley Library
• The Road Story and the Rebel: Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television by Katie Mills
• Save the Cat by Blake Snyder

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