Cars is back on the big screen, and Brookings finally gets its lane

If you have a kid who has ever owned a single piece of Lightning McQueen merchandise, or if you were that kid twenty years ago, you probably already know Cars is rolling back into theaters this month. For Brookings, that means a trip down 6th Street to Brookings Cinema 8, where the film opens September 17. No streaming subscription, no waiting for it to show up on a rotating Disney+ carousel. Just a dark room, a big screen, and Route 66 stretched out in Pixar's version of Radiator Springs.

That local angle matters more than it might seem. Brookings sits in farm country, on the edge of the interstate system, in a state where the drive between towns is long enough that you start noticing the landscape the way this movie wants you to. Cars was always a movie about slowing down and looking at the road instead of just using it to get somewhere else. That message plays a little differently in South Dakota than it does in a coastal multiplex.

The real story behind Cars, though, is less about nostalgia and more about where Pixar was as a studio in 2006. This was the film that came right after The Incredibles, at a point when Pixar was still Disney's golden goose but hadn't yet locked into the reputation for emotional gut-punches that Up and Toy Story 3 would later cement. Cars was John Lasseter's passion project, reportedly born out of his own love of long American road trips with his family. It was also, notably, the last film Paul Newman ever voiced, and the last film George Carlin worked on before his death. Those two facts alone give the movie a weight that a simple “talking cars” premise doesn't suggest on paper.

For anyone who's never seen it or needs a refresher: Cars follows Lightning McQueen, a hotshot rookie race car voiced by Owen Wilson, who gets stranded in the fading Route 66 town of Radiator Springs on his way to a championship race. The town is full of half-forgotten locals, including a gruff old veteran voiced by Paul Newman, and McQueen's stay there ends up reshaping how he thinks about winning. That's the whole premise, and I'll leave it there. The pleasure of this one is in the town, not the plot twists.

Here's where I want to be straight with you about how this movie actually landed with critics, because the record is a little more mixed than the “beloved Pixar classic” label suggests. Rotten Tomatoes has it at a healthy 75 percent positive, which sounds like a clear thumbs up. But dig one layer deeper and the site's own average critic rating sits at 6.9 out of 10, and Metacritic's weighted score comes in at 73. Those numbers point to something specific: a majority of critics liked Cars, but not many loved it. It's the kind of reception where the headline percentage says “recommended” while the fine print says “solid, not spectacular.” That's a real gap, and it's worth sitting with rather than smoothing over.

Having spent time with the film again, I think that split verdict is fair. Cars is gorgeous, especially in its landscape work, and the Radiator Springs stretch has genuine warmth, largely because of Newman's performance, which is quieter and more textured than you'd expect from a movie about talking vehicles. But the racing scenes drag a little, the pacing sags in the middle third, and some of the comic relief characters haven't aged as gracefully as the emotional core has. It's a good movie with a great movie's reputation attached to it, inflated over twenty years by merchandise, sequels, and a theme park land that didn't exist when it first opened.

If you're taking kids, or you want an easy, unhurried couple of hours that looks terrific on a big screen, this is worth the trip to Brookings Cinema 8, especially if you catch one of their $5 Tuesday showings. Just don't go in expecting the emotional wallop of Pixar's absolute best work. Go in expecting a well-made, occasionally beautiful movie that critics at the time correctly clocked as good, not great.

Facts verified as of September 23, 2026.