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• Director: Alfonso Cuarón
• Mexico, 2001
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What’s odd about Y Tu Mamá También is how it can be so many things all at once: a road movie, a coming of age comedy, a sexy love story, a political critique. By way of illustration, this latter motif peppers the movie: there are soldiers and police and beggars and put-upon peasants. Somewhat oddly, however, the three characters who take us on their Mexican odyssey seem never to notice what’s out there.

The business of explanation is left to a kindly narrator whose voiceover comes right out of a Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie. He seems to encourage us not to judge Julio, Tenoch and Luisa too harshly, instead coughing up furballs of pathos that stockpile the humanity in a way two teenage bums and a broken-hearted ague could never do.

Let us make no mistake, this film is a coquettish charmer. We absolutely have to love it, because it loves life and so must we. Here the relentless positivity and positive absurdity of the youthful condition reunite us with that sense of adventure that grows harder to maintain the older we become.

• Director: Wes Anderson
• United States, 2007
• 

Anderson’s films are often about families or groups of individuals who form strong bonds. What’s becoming increasingly clear after seeing Darjeeling is that the director’s troupe of actors is imitating his art: almost all of the cast here seem to have appeared in multiple Anderson movies.

And Darjeeling is hardly the black sheep. It’s probably his most accessible effort yet and the humour and human story here are uncomplicated. Yet the audiences have been consistently small and the publicity was probably overshadowed by Owen Wilson’s personal troubles.

More’s the pity, because as three very different characters, Brody, Wilson and Schwartzmann are incredibly convincing siblings, travelling across India on the eponymous train and trying to make sense of each other.

• Director: Martin Brest
• United States, 1988
• 

This is a buddy-road movie, but it’s sharp enough and clever enough to outrun just about all of the chasers in what is a horribly overpopulated subgenre.

Bounty hunter ex-cop De Niro has to deliver mob accountant Grodin to the bailbondsman within five days to pick up an hundred thousand dollars and thereby fulfill his slightly dubious dream of opening a coffee shop, but the FBI wants the accountant as a witness and the mob wants him dead. When you can summarise a movie as easily as that, you know it’s got to be pretty straightforward.

There are some charming moments along the way though and these are what lift Midnight Run out of the pit of mediocrity: the bounty hunter’s reunion with his ex-wife and daughter after nine years because he’s strapped for cash is wonderfully played.