Planes, Trains & Automobiles

John Hughes | 1987 | ★★★★½
A conservative advertising agent, striving to get home from his New York office for Thanksgiving, finds himself forced to pool resources and wits with a gregarious shower curtain ring salesman – despite a great personality clash – after their flight is diverted from Chicago to Wichita due to bad weather. As they travel by train, bus, and eventually car, their luck becomes ever worse and their relationship ever more strained. However, against all the odds, eventually they begin to form some sort of a bond. Investing his characters with real warmth and affection, Hughes’s film transcends its knockabout comedy frame by resisting the urge to mock, and in so doing proves itself tremendously affecting and all the more hilarious for it, raising it far above most films of a similar ilk, which tend to resort to cruelty and contempt in order to illicit laughs.