Paradise Highway

Paradise Highway opens with a truck driver Sally (Juliette Binoche, Ghost in the Shell, Godzilla) groping off some illicit cargo before heading back out on ...

The same is true of Grillo’s reappearance and the attempt at a twist. What isn’t such a change is the relationship between Sally and her passenger as it follows a predictable path from hostility to wariness and then trust. It needed to get to the point sooner and keep the pace fast enough to make sure the viewer doesn’t lose interest. She has to evade her pursuers using her brains, luck, and a bit of help from her CB radio buddies. However, the one doing the killing is Leila who manages to unload a shotgun into her would-be owner. Thankfully he’s only a few days away from release and there’s just one more job left for her to run for them.

What bet did Juliette Binoche lose? I only ask because writer/director Anna Gutto's melodramatic thriller “Paradise Highway” is the kind wayward, ...

While you never really believe a New Yorker like Grillo and a French actress such as Binoche as siblings, partly because neither of them drop their accents, you do buy the maternal relationship shared by Finley and Binoche. The picture would succeed just by focusing on this storyline; instead, Gutto opts to cram together three underwhelming narratives rather than living with one. And almost none of the actors mail anything in, even when Gutto’s half-baked ending undermines them. In one shot, Sally sees a line of young girls waiting to enter a man’s cabin. In fact, every scene is composed around the women who occupy the different stratas of the trucking world: One mother begs outside of the outposts for money and food; another, a Black mother and son, are barely shown, except in a check-the-box-of-diversity fashion. Sally agrees, but gets more than she bargains for when she meets the two smugglers—Claire ( Christiane Seidel) and Terrence ( Walker Babington)—only to discover the package is a young girl, Leila ( Hala Finley), condemned to a sex trafficking ring. While Binoche is still a wonderful, affecting actress, hence my surprise to see her here, the recent downturn by Freeman defies understanding.

An excellent cast and original script, about a brother and sister getting involved in dangerous child trafficking rings, makes Paradise Highway great.

Gutto ties all the disparate pieces together in her road map of criticism, connecting the dots in a way that's both dramatically fulfilling and an unmistakable social commentary. The film recognizes that none of these single elements exist in a vacuum, and all are part of an economy of suffering, a very profitable exploitation. As the characters develop relationships and gradually reveal themselves, Paradise Highway unveils its own deliberate, damning indictment of the many systems which allow for a child to be sex trafficked. She's a very strong and stubborn woman, but one who was irrevocably damaged as a child by her father, which is the reason her sibling bond is so strong (bordering on the incestuous at times, at least for Dennis). Positioning pairs of two people in vehicles throughout the majority of the film, Gutto isolates her characters (trapped in a moving vehicle, stuck in the midst of motion) and prompts surprising interactions and conversations. That way, each polarity of this great road trip movie contains elements of difference and antagonism which interrogate each other to come to a better understanding of some type of truth.

Anna Gutto talks to Bleeding Cool about writing and directing the Lionsgate thriller Paradise Highway, trafficking, ensemble cast & more.

It was just a joy to see their work, the team with them, guide this team, and fight through different challenges we encountered in different ways. I felt like I needed to kind of graduate into that because directing is the function that oversees everything. That kind of discipline I found extremely useful for the process of writing. From the moment I landed in Mississippi, we started hard prep, and it was a little over a month or six weeks before we started shooting. So that's the beginning, and then I started to get to know these female truckers and familiarized myself with their environment. Gutto spoke to Bleeding Cool about how the project was ten years in the making, transitioning from acting to directing and working with the cast.

Juliette Binoche plays Sally, a truck driver who puts in long hours, mostly up and down the east coast. Her brother Dennis (Frank Grillo) is in prison, about to ...

I’m not sure I want to see that movie either, but the truth is always preferred. She’s a gift to acting (also catch her currently in Both Sides of the Blade, a much better movie), so any chance to see her work is worth it. I also like the way filmmaker Gutto takes the time to examine each truck stop and the seedy world outside of the real one that exists for truckers, which goes beyond just driving and sleeping. Dennis is in jail for doing something to protect her, which is why she’s so eager to see him out of prison unharmed. Just days before Dennis is sprung, Sally gets one more elicit shipping run, but this time the cargo is a young girl, perhaps not yet a teenager, named Leila (Hala Finley), and although Sally is dead set against the idea of transporting a young girl under any circumstance, she agrees to take her, thinking perhaps she can look out for her in the process. But in order to keep him alive until his release, she has been running various contraband in her truck on behalf of people in prison with Dennis who say they will kill him if she doesn’t. It’s an ugly situation, but she’s very protective of her brother, so she does it.

Set in the trucking industry and its seamy underbelly of human trafficking, the thriller centers on when her brother's life is threatened, Sally (Juliette ...

Step into the world of truck driving with the new thriller, Paradise Highway. Academy-Award winner Juliette Binoche stars as Sally, a truck driver tasked ...

We talk about the scenes and sort of make sure that we all have a common understanding of what the scene is, what it wants to accomplish. So the reason to have the scene is we want to know that Layla makes a choice to be with Sally. She doesn’t just stay with Sally because she doesn’t have anywhere to go. That comes just as much from the actors as it comes from me. And it’s interesting because I always knew that I needed to have an actress to do this movie, who is Sally for what she becomes at the end of the movie. I sort of knew that she would be able to imagine herself in this character, which obviously, I wouldn’t even have wanted to have an actress who would have had an experience as close to this character. An actress who is good enough that she could put on all of the defenses and everything that Sally has had to put on in her life. Juliette really immersed herself, and I was very impressed with what she managed to do because she’s not an easy character. Yeah. True Grit definitely kind of came up in conversations when I was talking about the film and I love that film. Definitely. I knew from the start that I wanted to direct this movie because I am more of a director than a writer, even though I love writing and I am a writer. She was able to put on what Sally is at the beginning of the movie. I just find it great to see movies that I haven’t seen before and to see stories and characters that I haven’t seen a million times before. So it’s not like I always want to be in dark topics, but I do like topics that haven’t been exposed so much.

Famous for Shameless and playing the Joker in Gotham, Cameron Monaghan tells MovieWeb he regained his faith in acting with Paradise Highway.

I started, after that film, turning down most things and saying no, in trying to just find something that I really believed in or that I thought was really special, writing my own things, just creating from my own perspective instead." "I kept hearing about a script called Paradise Highway, that a few of the same producers were also working on, and I kept hearing about how good it was and how interesting it was. "I was working on another project in Montana at the time, and to be completely candid, I was having a pretty difficult time on the set," Monaghan tells us.

The action drama film "Paradise Highway," written and directed by debutant filmmaker Anna Gutto, follows a fairly well-known plot and focuses more on its.

Dennis asks what Leila can give Sally that he cannot, and what she owes to the little girl, to which Leila herself answers that she owes her nothing. Sally quickly understands that her brother was very much involved with the child traffickers, and he had told Claire of the entire plan—he and his sister would arrive with the girl and the money, and Sally would pay the money, and then Claire and his associate would rob her of the girl too, while Dennis would pretend that he was on Sally’s side. Although the brother is doubtful of her intentions at first, she mentions how she has sold off her trailer to afford the money and asks him to go negotiate such a deal with Claire. As evening falls, Dennis wants to take the girl to an old abandoned airport so that he can make a deal with the traffickers, but Sally refuses to let Leila go alone with him and joins them. Claire now wants to get Leila back in her custody so that she can sell her off, and her associate starts roughing up Sally. While Dennis holds young Leila, he warns the attackers not to harm his sister, but seeing the male associate roughing Sally up even more, the brother pulls out a revolver and shoots the associate dead. Leila has a heartbreak, though, as she sees that their trailer is missing from the place, and she tells her companion how her mother got addicted to drugs, how she had been sent over to group homes and how she escaped from there to be caught by traffickers. The next morning, Leila asks Sally to drive them over to a nearby plot where she and her family used to live in their camping trailer, and Sally readily agrees. The woman handing over this cargo—the seller, so to speak—is a woman named Claire, and she tells Sally the instructions—she is to drive the young girl to a place across the state line and hand her over to a man named Paul. Sally obviously does not want to get involved in such delivery, knowing well enough that this is a case of child trafficking, but Claire’s threats about the danger this might pose for Dennis in prison make her finally agree. On the very same evening that Sally thinks she has lost Leila, both sides come to the truck stop looking for her, and Sterling also questions a drunk Sally, who denies knowing anything about the kidnapped girl. As the truck drives through picturesque countryside, young Leila seems to enjoy the journey, and she now starts following Sally’s instructions and helps her keep the cabin clean. Taking her truck over to the usual place of meeting, Sally sees a minivan drive up, and when she asks to see the cargo and looks into the vehicle, she sees a young girl of about twelve or thirteen inside. With the young girl about to be trafficked still with her and potential charges of murder on her hand, Sally confusedly wonders what to do next as she drives her truck away. While on her driving job, Sally visits Dennis in prison, hoping that it will be the very last time that she does so, and the siblings excitedly talk about what they will do once Dennis is out.