John Travolta's Directorial Debut Does Not Fly

John Travolta has finally stepped behind the camera—and Nicholas Barber at the BBC says the result helps explain why big-name actors don't always make strong directors. Propeller One-Way Night Coach, Travolta's first feature as director, premiered at Cannes as a 61-minute, light-on-plot autobiographical reminiscence about an 8-year-old boy flying across the US with his mother in 1962. Chase Hutchinson at the Wrap branded it "a stiff, agonizingly lifeless affair" that "is not a movie," and Barber argues that the film feels more like a modest magazine piece or children's book (which Travolta already published in 1997) than something that needed the full feature-film treatment, complete with wall-to-wall voiceover and little in the way of drama.

Barber places Travolta in a broader pattern: once actors reach a certain level of fame, they can get deeply personal "passion projects" made—and festivals snap them up for the red-carpet glow, even when the films themselves are slight, strange, or self-indulgent. He cites Ryan Gosling's Lost River, Chris Pine's Poolman, Kevin Costner's Horizon, and recent Cannes debuts by Scarlett Johansson and others as cautionary examples. Get Barber's full take on why festivals can't resist these movies here.