Name: The Last One for the Road
Director: Francesco Sossai
Genre: Comedy
Released: 2025-09-25T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 98 min
Cast: Filippo Scotti, Sergio Romano, Pierpaolo Capovilla, Roberto Citran, Andrea Pennacchi

Two men well into their fifties, broke and gloriously unbothered by it, spend a night driving the flatlands of the Veneto in search of one more bar, one more glass, one more excuse not to go home. Into their orbit stumbles Giulio, a shy architecture student who expected the evening to end early. The Last One for the Road follows the three of them from counter to counter across the Italian plain, and the film’s whole comic engine is the gap between the student’s careful, blueprinted idea of the world and the two drunks’ refusal to plan past the next drink.

It is a road movie that never really leaves home, a picaresque built out of provincial osterie, half-remembered legends and a rumored buried treasure that gives the wandering just enough shape to feel like a quest. The treasure, needless to say, matters less than the looking; the film keeps promising a payoff it has no intention of delivering straight, because the point was always the detour. Sossai treats the flat, unglamorous country between the region’s towns as a landscape worth taking seriously, and lets his trio’s aimlessness curdle, slowly, into something closer to an education. What starts as a comedy about men avoiding sleep becomes a film about how an older, messier generation hands its appetites and its disappointments down to a younger one, and about how little either party can do to stop the transfer.

The casting is the argument. Sergio Romano and Pierpaolo Capovilla play Carlobianchi and Doriano as a double act of frayed dignity, not comic relief so much as the film’s melancholy center, two men whose bravado is mostly a way of staying upright. Romano in particular anchors the whole thing, and the industry noticed: his Carlobianchi took the best-actor prize at Italy’s national awards. As Giulio, Filippo Scotti, the young lead of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Hand of God, plays the straight man, all watchfulness and unfinished sentences, a face built for absorbing other people’s chaos. The pairing tells you what kind of film this wants to be, not a youth movie but a study of what the young inherit.

For a first feature, it arrives with an unusually clear sense of its ancestors. Two older reprobates and one callow youth is the spine of Italian road comedy, the shape Dino Risi and his peers built out of a fast car, a reckless older man and a younger one too polite to say no, and Sossai plays inside that tradition rather than pretending to invent it. He threads in something more particular, too: Giulio’s studies pull the film toward real architecture, including a detour to Carlo Scarpa’s severe, circular concrete memorial, so that the drinking and the design keep quietly commenting on each other. Sossai films the Veneto not as postcard Italy but as the flat, foggy, half-industrial north that rarely reaches the screen, and that specificity is the movie’s real argument for itself. It is a debut that reads the tradition it belongs to and revises it from within.

That fluency has been rewarded. The film launched in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, then went home and swept the David di Donatello, Italy’s national film awards, winning eight statuettes including best film, best director and best original screenplay. A debut taking the top national prize outright is rare enough to register as a statement about where Italian cinema thinks its future lies, in regional texture and unfashionable subject matter rather than export-ready gloss.

None of that guarantees the film travels. Its comedy is soaked in a specific provincial register, dialect cadences, local melancholy, the particular boredom of towns most viewers will never place on a map, and subtitles flatten exactly the texture a home audience rewarded. An awards sweep is a domestic verdict, not an international one, and plenty of nationally beloved comedies stall the moment they cross a border. The English retitling makes the risk visible on the poster: The Last One for the Road trades the original’s geographic melancholy, Le città di pianura, the cities of the plain, for a pub-crawl tagline, and something specific goes missing in the swap.

A still from the Francesco Sossai film The Last One for the Road released in 2025 — A scene from The Last One for the Road (2025)

Alongside Romano, Capovilla and Scotti, the ensemble includes Roberto Citran as Cavalier Fadìga and Andrea Pennacchi as Genio. Sossai directs from a script he wrote with Adriano Candiago. The film is a co-production between Italy and Germany, made by Vivo Film and Rai Cinema with Germany’s Maze Pictures, with international sales handled by Lucky Number and Italian distribution by Lucky Red; Music Box Films is releasing it in North America.

The Last One for the Road runs about 98 minutes. It opened in Italy last autumn and reached French cinemas in the spring; Music Box Films began a select US theatrical run on May 1, and it arrived on UK screens on July 10. A Spanish release, retitled La última ronda en Venecia, follows on July 31. A German theatrical date, despite the film’s German co-production, has yet to be confirmed.