The Wrong Move is a 1975 German road movie directed by Wim Wenders. This was the second part of Wenders' "Road Movie trilogy" which included Alice in the Cities (1974) and Kings of the Road (1976).
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Author Peter Handke adapted Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship for Wrong Move, marking his second collaboration with director Wim Wenders.
Filming took place over the Elbe River.
Filmmaker Wim Wenders received the German Film Award for Best Direction for Wrong Move.
A road movie is a film genre in which the main characters leave home on a road trip, typically altering the perspective from their everyday lives. Road movies often depict travel in the hinterlands, with the films exploring the theme of alienation and examining the tensions and issues of the cultural identity of a nation or historical period; this is all often enmeshed in a mood of actual or potential menace, lawlessness, and violence, a "distinctly existential air" and is populated by restless, "frustrated, often desperate characters". The setting includes not just the close confines of the car as it moves on highways and roads, but also booths in diners and rooms in roadside motels, all of which helps to create intimacy and tension between the characters. Road movies tend to focus on the theme of masculinity, some type of rebellion, car culture, and self-discovery. The core theme of road movies is "rebellion against conservative social norms".
Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945), a film noir about a musician travelling from New York City to Hollywood who sees a nation absorbed by greed.
It Happened One Night (1934) is about a rich woman who learns about regular Americans when she travels the highway system by car.
The 2010 film Mother Fish, which depicts travel over water, has been called a "No Road"-style road film, as it uses the road movie journey narrative without using roads as a setting.
John Ford's 1939 Western Stagecoach has been called a proto-road movie.
