Gas Food Lodging

Name: Gas Food Lodging
Director: Allison Anders
Released: 1992

Allison Anders

1992

Synopsis

Nora, a single mother raising two teenage daughters, Shade and Trudi, waits tables at a truck-stop diner in a small New Mexico town. The beautiful and rebellious Trudi drops out of school and gets a job alongside Nora, while the younger Shade whittles away her time at Spanish movie matinees. Their lives are turned upside down when Trudi becomes pregnant and the girls' absent father returns.

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Recommendations

100
Washington Post
Splendid... It's a great movie about making do.
90
The New York Times
There are subtly etched characters, effortlessly fine performances, and a moving story that is not easily forgotten.
90
Variety
Gas, Food Lodging is filled with the kind of personal, small-scale rewards indie filmmakers seem best at delivering. Lensed on location in Deming, NM, on a budget of about $1.3 million, Allison Anders' fresh and unfettered pic [from Richard Peck's novel Don't Look and It Won't Hurt] emerges distinctively as an example of a new cinema made by women and expressive of their lives.
90
Time Out
Far from gloomy fare, this debut from an American independent offers humour, wry observation and sympathetic characterisation. Without patronising her characters, writer-director Anders captures the frustrations of both generations, and the concluding optimistic note isn't forced. Delightfully oddball and strangely sane.
90
Film Threat
Bleached by the Southwestern sun, this blunt and biting look at a shattered family’s struggle to survive everyday life in Nowheresville, New Mexico, is not only inspired and entertaining, but accessible to thick-headed louts like myself.
88
ReelViews
Gas Food Lodging deals with issues, but its strength lies in the characters that struggle at the heart of the story. Anders has made this film far from the glitz of Hollywood and the money that comes with the limelight. Hopefully, for her next project, she'll be able to maintain the gritty quality which makes her debut such a memorable effort.
83
Entertainment Weekly
Gas Food Lodging is really about the same thing Thelma & Louise was about: It’s a portrait of working-class women betrayed and abandoned by men. Yet I vastly preferred this movie’s generous and buoyant tone.
80
TV Guide Magazine
Bleak and beautiful, GAS FOOD LODGING is a richly evocative look at lives in waiting.