Mexico City itself is the dominant presence in Alonso Ruizpalacios’ debut feature Güeros, a road movie that restricts its journey to that megapolis and its environs. It’s not just the traffic that holds them up, more the fact that they don’t really have a destination. As one of its initially dispirited student protagonists says, “Why go if we’re going to end up back here again?”

As further proof that films in a lower-key can often land with the greatest impact, along comes Mississippi Grind, a casually mournful, beautifully made road movie that is perhaps best described as the picture that Robert Altman didn't live to make. A conscious throwback to the era of Altman's California Split, this latest from the writer-director team of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden locates an almost Chekhovian melancholy in its portrait of two gambling men, drifters both, in search of an actual and metaphoric pay-off from life. 

As unforced in its telling as the neatly arrived-at rapport between leading men Ryan Reynolds and the wonderful Ben Mendelsohn, the movie is likely to be swamped by bigger, noisier titles from every side, but its quiet virtues seem guaranteed to endure. 

To be sure, the picaresque quality to the script may frustrate those who want more overt juice from a journey whose origins in an earlier celluloid age are directly referenced by the appearance of veteran director James Toback in a vivid cameo – Toback having written the 1974 Karel Reisz/James Caan film The Gambler that was recently remade (to poor reviews) with Mark Wahlberg in the lead. As was evident in the filmmakers' previous collaboration, Half Nelson, which brought Ryan Gosling a 2007 Oscar nod, Boden and Fleck prefer gently inflected observation to manufactured Big Moments, and the results are all the better for it. 

Gerry (Mendelsohn, sporting not a trace of his native Australian accent) and Curtis (Reynolds) enter one another's lives at a poker table in Dubuque, the American economy being debated on TV in the background while the two men attempt to boost their own personal fortunes. Before long, their easeful banter finds them taking off together for a drive south to New Orleans, their need to re-connect representing the highest stakes of all. The pair's route lead them towards various women who have figured in their lives, among whom Robin Weigert stands out as the inevitably cautious mother of a daughter whom ex-husband Gerry says is seven – or maybe six: significantly, her father isn't quite sure which it is. Nor are facts, one senses, as important as the feeling the men come to share that they might in fact be talismanic for one another, Gerry admiring Curtis's unexpected emergence in his life as "a big handsome leprechaun", which isn't a bad way of characterising this underrated actor's allure. 

Is their car ride an emblem of freedom or escape – are they merely absolving themselves of social obligations by flooring the accelerator and leaving the responsibilities that come with adulthood behind? Mississippi Grind to its credit doesn't cast judgement. Instead, it allows the actors to draw their own complete, composite portraits of a pair for whom the necessary posturing that comes with gambling only goes so far. "I'm not a good person," Gerry tells Curtis, Mendelsohn turning suddenly sad-eyed as if to suggest a cumulative regret he will never be able to voice. The film may take its title from a horse at the racetrack that may or may not be a good bet, but when it comes to gradually laying bare a character's inner life, Mendelsohn really does rank among the best.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for Mississippi Grind 

Blues is an old man’s game. To do it properly you really have to have lived, and to have the scars and the criminal record to show for it. How do I know? Because Mac “Dr John” Rebennack is living proof. As he shuffled on at Ronnie Scott’s last night to join his NiteTripper four-piece, with a walking stick in each hand and his dreadlocked pony tail hanging over one shoulder, he had the look of a man who’s done himself serious damage over the years. But his music was all the better for it.

Melissa McCarthy has been one of the decade's most notable comic finds. Although she's been plugging away for years on TV, as a stand-up, in sketch troupe the Groundlings and in various supporting roles, it was Bridesmaids and The Heat which brought her much deserved attention - including an Oscar nomination for her part in the former. More than just comic fodder, these characters were tough (but sensitive), smart and sisterly women railing against preconceptions and prejudice.

You can almost feel the dust on your skin in Spanish director Diego Quemada-Diez’s debut feature The Golden Dream. It’s the dust of the precarious journey from Central America towards the US, undertaken by four teenage Guatemalan kids intent on finding a better life north of the final border. And of the gritty immigrant experience of jumping train after train, and struggles with the authorities, where each new stage presents new challenges, and more acts of betrayal than of kindness are to be found along the way.

Alexander Payne is at home with the road movie. From mid-life crisis in Californian wine country in Sideways to dealing with life after the death of a loved one in About Schmidt, he has a knack of tapping into the human spirit and an affinity with the American landscape. Taking great lengths to elicit the whirs and hums of vehicles and the many bumps along the open road, his exploration of the USA is always an eye-opening experience.

We're the Millers is a road movie which sees a group of outsiders learn how to fill traditional roles and find happiness. It's a film that flirts with rebellion but ultimately reveals itself to be boringly conformist. Director Rawson Marshall Thurber had a memorable hit with his debut Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story but, in the manner of one of that film's KOs, he falls flat on his back here.

Latin Americans are the current masters of minimalist cinema, films in which nothing much seems to be happening on the surface, but a world of emotion and meaning bubbles beneath. Such films require a little patience and investment, for sure, but offer considerable returns. And like last year’s award-winning Las acacias from Argentina, the Chilean Thursday Till Sunday signals the debut of a filmmaker with the skill to match her cinematic convictions.

For anyone who missed Sightseers in the cinema, purchasing it on DVD is a must. Its blend of the shocking and what initially seems a quirky, Mike Leigh-style British road movie is audacious. Mischievously subverting the familiar, it’s funny, pathos-filled and openly questions the nature of morality. It’s hugely entertaining too.

Of all the pairings you might have thought would star in a cross-generational road movie, I suspect Seth Rogen and Barbra Streisand would be the last names you would have put together, despite their undoubted comedic talents.