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Dir: John Hillcoat / USA / 2009 / 119 mins / Cert: 16

Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Robert Duvall and Guy Pearce

Language: English 
 
Director John Hillcoat offers a corrosive adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by American master Cormac McCarthy, and like the novel, The Road is spare on detail but epic in its implications.

The Man (Viggo Mortensen) wakes up one night, and he and his wife (Charlize Theron) discover the world is on the threshold of ruin. How this came to pass is never explained – instead we witness only the aftermath of a wholesale cataclysm, relayed with chilling realism. With food supplies dwindling and communities beginning to turn on each other, the Man sets out with his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) on a relentless journey of survival.

Superb cinematography and art direction capture the desolation and strange beauty of the ashen landscape, as the dispossessed pair travel through gutted cities and forests of charred trees on their way to an uncertain future. But despite the wasted, empty world, a note of hope comes through the Man's dedication to stay on the trail. Though we witness the innate frailty of human civilization, we also come to understand the implacable strength of the human spirit.

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