Travel vicariously through these 10 movies
Travel from the comfort of your armchair until the world's borders open up again.
You may not be able to board and airplane, but you can travel in your own lounge.
While lockdown level 4 means our borders are still closed for travel, as are most of the borders across the world, you can still travel vicariously through these great movies.
You won’t be locked in your house forever, so watch these 10 movies to get inspiration for your travel bucket list.
While there are lots of movies showing wonderful vistas and places to visit, we have chosen some of the ones we think will have you reaching for your passport.
These movies are not all about travel, but have some of the greatest travel destinations featured in them to whet your appetite.
1. The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)
This is where it all began for Ernesto “Che” Guevara, whose road trip across Latin America with his pal Alberto Granado opened Che’s eyes to political injustice. Director Walter Salles filmed their travels through major landmarks in South America, as per Che’s memoir, from the Andes mountain range to Machu Picchu and a leper colony in San Pablo.
2. Under the Tuscan Sun (2003)
Before there was Eat, Pray, Love, there was Under the Tuscan Sun– the story of a woman who buys a villa in Italy after her marriage falls apart. As we watch Frances renovate her gorgeous new house and take day trips to the Amalfi Coast, the thought of dropping out of our real lives to move to Tuscany suddenly seems like the perfect escape from winter’s biting cold.
3. Eat, Pray, Love (2010)
Elizabeth Gilbert’s perfect world comes shattering down when she gets divorced. She then embarks on a journey across the world in an attempt to rediscover her true self. During travels, she discovers the true pleasure of nourishment by eatin in Italy, the power of prayer in India, and, finally and unexpectedly, the inner peace and balance of true love in Indonesia.
4. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)
Walter Mitty is the visual embodiment of “wanderlust,” following a daydreaming, work-laden Life magazine employee as he embarks on a journey his own imagination couldn’t have conjured. Looking for one lost, cover-worthy photo slide from renowned photojournalist Sean O’Connell, Mitty heads from the streets of Manhattan to Greenland to Iceland and the Himalayas.
5. A Good Year (2006)
London-based investment banker Max Skinner inherits his uncle’s chateau and vineyard in Provence, where he spent much of his childhood. While fixing it up, with the intention of selling it, je discovers a new laid-back lifestyle he rather enjoys.
6. The Bucket List (2007)
Two terminally ill men left with only six months to live, decide to explore life and make a bucket list comprising all the things they have never tried before.
7. Midnight in Paris (2011)
Gil Pender is a wide-eyed screenwriter and aspiring novelist on a trip to Paris with his fiancée. Like many tourists in the City of Light, he retraces the steps of Parisian creatives past, drinking coffee (and absinthe) in the same places they once did until, late one night, a car of these very icons appears, sweeping him back in time to an evening of revelry among the literati of the 1920s.
8. Before Sunrise (1995)
Richard Linklater turned the stroll-and-talk into an art form in his slow-cinema trilogy. It all began with this quiet, lovely indie, which features a baby-faced Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy flirting and philosophizing as they wander the cobblestone streets of Vienna after hours. The city becomes the third character in the romance, just as Paris would nine years later in Before Sunset, and Messenia, Greece, nine years after that in Before Midnight. All three movies are a testament to travel’s power to realign your perception of your own life.
9. The Beach (2000)
Richard finds himself tramping from one Thai hostel to the next, desperately searching for something meaningful. A tip from a fellow traveller in Bangkok sends him on a journey to a hard-to-reach island, described as the ultimate paradise – white sands, clear water, and only a handful of other travellers who’ve sworn to keep its location a secret.
10. In Bruges (2008)
“Maybe that’s what hell is: The entire rest of eternity spent in effin’.” Cinema has given us few vacationers as reluctant as Ray, an Irish hitman lying low in Belgium’s most picturesque city. With its gentle, touristy beauty, the medieval town makes an unlikely setting for a darkly comic tale of mob justice, which only makes the film funnier.
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