[Contains minor spoilers - for full review see link below]

…Half road trip and half learning how to make a home, “Trucker” gives Michelle Monaghan a chance to show what she can do and the result is encouraging, although twelve year old Jimmy Bennett nearly steals the show

… If Monaghan’s acting is sufficient, young Bennett’s is excellent and helped considerably by his wiser-than-his-years lines penned by Mottern.

In many films the writer/director role is too much for one person to handle. In this film Mottern is able to use a simple story to give him the time and space to work on the presentation of the character’s lines. This is vitally important in keeping the film true-to-life and not becoming a moral lecture.

The setting is the sun baked hills of Southern California and points east, and the excellently matched country-western soundtrack produced by Mychael Danna deepens the aimlessness of the open road with a touch of a silver lining. The songs seem to float along with the trucks and cars as Diane and Peter encounter one challenge after another to their attempted bonding. The trucker urban myth is not exploited in this film, but explained with the utmost realism—Diane would rather be a trucker than a waitress or a nurse.

The storyline is formulaic: the young mother has learned to live without her son and the two are only reunited due to the serious illness of her ex-hubby. Both have serious misgivings. This would be a boring story if not for the seriously funny lines of son Peter who, being the parent for most of the film, shows mom Diane why she should stop living like a kid. The two are as much enemies as allies.

Broken family films usually become either maudlin or patronizing. Indeed, this film walks that line but somehow avoids falling into the dungeon of self-pity due to Mottern’s sharp and lean dialog. Great supporting work by Nathan Fillion as Runner, Diane’s married wanna-be boyfriend. The two appear in some pretty durn good drunken shenanigans that are actually funny. Drunk jokes rarely make a film, but these are added with such perfect realism that many will reflect on having been there, whether they like it or not. Also contributing to the overall success of the film are Joey Lauren Adams and Benjamin Bratt…

• Full Review: www.monstersandcritics.com

Below you’ll find short exerpts from Trucker reviews on the web, sourced where possible. This post will be updated reguarly as reviews become available.

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I attended a press screening on Saturday at the Tribeca Film Festival. Trucker is great. Strong cast, powerful film. A bit on the predictable side but it still is solid — ProductionGirl IMDB User

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I also saw Trucker at Tribeca and I thought Michelle Monaghan and Nathan Fillion did amazing work on this film! Nathan was so incredibly hot, but not in a way he has ever been seen before. He was downright manly and had women in the audience gasping for air during one esp riveting scene. Michelle Monaghan kicked a** and should def get an Oscar. The audience was filled with people of all ages and somehow this movie seemed to touch a cord with virtually everyone. I saw 3 people who were sobbing so hard, they fled the theatre to recover. I was blown away, too. Amazing movie! Can’t wait to see it again when its released to the public!

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…(A performance like this shows you what [Michelle Monaghan] could have done in Gone Baby Gone if the Affleck Brothers had fleshed out her character with stuff from the novel. But then she would have blown Casey Affleck off the screen.) She doesn’t blow Nathan Fillion off the screen, and their chemistry is just what you’d expect from two people who know that only their scars can kiss. Her scenes with Jimmy Bennett are real and borderline shocking for all the anger and resentment that erupts in them, and … it’s totally believable. This is the kind of role for women that only seems to pop up in small films, personal films, or self-produced films. Diana is a rich, real, complicated part, and Monaghan inhabits every nasty, frustrated, hopeful moment of it. What makes this movie even more amazing: it was filmed in less than three weeks. — Horvendile

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Heart rending/warming pic in the tradition of the great seventies films like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. — Chris Hawthorne

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Evoking a gritty Diane Lane, Michelle Monaghan convincingly portrays Diane Ford, a truck driver so disconnected she can’t even bring herself to call her estranged 11-year-old son (Jimmy Bennett) by his name.

Writer/director James Mottern hits the perfect tone with Trucker’s fadeout and takes Diane’s relationship with love-struck friend Runner (charming Nathan Fillion) to a surprising climax. Mottern also successfully captures the tired Riverside, Calif., setting and its encircling crossroads of interstates, although the abundant natural sunlight can lead to distracting haziness. — Woman on Film

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The premise (loser bonds with estranged kid) has been done again and again but director James Mottern and the cast do a fresh take on the old premise and make a very honest and emotional story with some great acting.

Chemistry is necessary for this picture to work and the cast has it. Romantic chemistry between Michelle Monaghan, who does a wonderful job carrying this film, and Nathan Fillion and mother/son chemistry between Monaghan and Jimmy Benett. I also enjoyed Mottern’s script and the cinematography. — Yorick Brown, IMDB User

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The movie is a small gem. Not only is it well shot but each frame, although short, is quite seamless in telling the story over a period of time. The main character, the trucker, played by Michele Monaghan, is honest and real. Regardless of whether you support the decisions that she has made with her life, she wears everything on her sleeve and is very much in touch with who she is.

There is absolutely an audience for this film outside of the film festival. I hope that somebody picks up the film. It would play well at the Angelica or the Quad. A heartfelt film that touched me. — Gotham Gal

The third film I saw on Sunday was called Trucker. It stars Michelle Monaghan as a truck driver whose 11-year-old son from a very early marriage pops back into her life. She’s used to being kind of solitary, and really isn’t prepared for this. The director, James Mottern, told us beforehand that Michelle couldn’t be here, but she really wanted us to know that she did drive the trucks herself. She didn’t even have a regular driver’s license at the time, but she went to school to learn how to drive the big rigs.

Nathan Fillion plays yet another character that you can’t help but fall in love with. Not a bad thing to be typecast as! The actor (Jimmy Bennett) who played the little kid was very subtle for a child actor. I asked about him during the Q&A and Mottern said “Yeah, he’s really a 40 year old man.” Pretty amazing.

The last question came from Michelle’s brother, who said she made him promise not to embarrass her, but that didn’t stop him from asking “Did she have to stop every half hour and take a piss, liks she did on family vacations?” Apparently he was ok with breaking his promise.

• Full Article: http://mirka23.blogspot.com

“I like gritty,” the actress told me, following a screening of the independent film Trucker, in which she gives her Cas Diane, a hard-living truck driver who finds herself unexpectedly reunited with the son she left behind years before when she split from her husband.

“When I first read the script, I didn’t like Diane at all. She’s seriously flawed and I was appalled by her behaviour towards her son.

“But I realised she’s just being true to herself,” Michelle told me at the Tribeca Film Festival in downtown New York.

It’s a better role than - and the complete opposite of - the woman she plays in the romantic comedy Made Of Honour, which opens in UK cinemas today.

• Full Article: www.dailymail.co.uk

But she hasn’t had a chance to carry a movie until “Trucker,” which had its world premiere at New York’s recent Tribeca Film Festival, and makes us realize what we’ve been missing.

Her performance elicits the same exhilarating sense of discovery that surrounded Sally Field’s breakthrough in “Norma Rae.” And there are some parallels between those two characters. Monaghan’s Diane is a bruised, ballsy woman who’s made something of a mess of her life. She goes through a transformation during the course of the story and emerges as strong rather than merely tough. Although the film doesn’t have the social import that made “Norma Rae” a hit, it’s an affecting, small-scale film that could catch on with sophisticated audiences as well as more down-home types.

…the performances carry the movie. Writer-director James Mottern demonstrates both rigor and tenderness in his feature debut.

Monaghan shows absolutely no vanity in exposing the hard, reckless side of the character, and Bennett matches her. Already a veteran of a dozen movies, the youth exudes an unaffected ease that other child actors might envy. The strongest scenes come in the unsentimental tug of war between mother and son. Nathan Fillion is enormously likable as Diane’s best pal who might have the potential to be something more. Although Bratt’s role is rather underdeveloped, he gives dimension to his few scenes. The atmosphere of roadside Americana is genuinely portrayed, as well. The story may not be earth-shaking, but Monaghan’s star-making performance assures that it will be remembered.

• Full Review: www.reuters.com