The Go-Getter.

"Part travelogue, part search for the self, the road movie - like its literary cousin, the on-the-road memoir - is a distinctly American genre, and we should enjoy good new specimens while we can, before the escalating price of gas means the notion of non-rich people driving cross-country has all the verisimilitude of Flash Gordon and Dr Zarkov taking a rocket ship to the planet Mongo," writes David Edelstein in New York. "Martin Hynes's first film, The Go-Getter, is an especially wonderful addition to the genre, with the right - flickering - mixture of loneliness and enchantment, and with jokes that come at you from just around the bend."

"[I]f you can look past writer-director Martin Hynes's familiar fest formula, his film modestly rewards with gorgeous sun-spotted cinematography, tender digressions in rather brave quantities, and believably charming dialogue that doesn't all sound like it came from the same brain (listen up, Diablo Cody)," writes Aaron Hillis in the Voice.

"Its contrivances are many and immoderate, and there's something self-consciously stilted and performative about the dialogue (you never get the sense that anybody is being sincere, even when they're supposed to be at their most sincere), but The Go-Getter... does have its slight, passing charms," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times.

"Mr Hynes, who wrote the screenplay, seems well aware of the challenge of breathing fresh life into a familiar formula," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Much of the dialogue is so quirky it sounds overheard instead of scripted. The performances are correspondingly spontaneous."

"More than a movie about becoming an adult, The Go-Getter is a feature-length audition reel for [Zooey] Deschanel to finally get the roles she deserves," writes Mark Peikert in the New York Press.

For Filmmaker, Nick Dawson talks with Hynes "about his move away from acting, the roots of The Go-Getter, and abandoning his lead actor while shooting guerrilla-style in Mexico."

Posted by dwhudson at June 6, 2008 7:00 AM