Ten films for the long evening.

Companion pieces for the nights the bike is in the shed and the next trip is six weeks away. Arranged by what they teach, not by quality.

These are not masterclasses. They are the long version of why a person ends up putting all their stuff into two waterproof cases and pointing the front wheel at a horizon. A few are documentaries, a few are fiction, one or two pretend to be neither. The selection criterion was simple — the film had to leave me wanting to ride the next morning.

1. The Motorcycle Diaries (2004)

Walter Salles. Gael García Bernal as a twenty-three-year-old Ernesto Guevara, riding a battered 1939 Norton 500 from Buenos Aires up the Andes to the leper colony at San Pablo, with his friend Alberto Granado on the back. The bike breaks down inside the first hour and is out of the picture by the second act. What the film actually does well is the thing every adventure rider hopes a long trip will do — the slow alteration of the young man over the kilometres. The closing diary entry is the closing diary entry every rider half-hopes for and half-fears.

2. On Any Sunday (1971)

Bruce Brown’s documentary on American motorcycling at the moment it stopped being a subculture and became a generation. Three protagonists — Mert Lawwill the professional flat-tracker, Malcolm Smith the desert racer, Steve McQueen the actor who could ride. The genius is the editing rhythm and the unironic pleasure the camera takes in watching adults ride bikes badly on purpose. Sit through to the closing beach sequence. Watch it twice if you have ever wondered why the older blokes in the shop seem so happy.

3. Long Way Round (2004)

Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman, London to New York the long way, on BMW R1150GS Adventures with a support crew that has been quietly written out of the version most riders remember. The series is uneven and the production sometimes intrudes — but the Mongolia and Road of Bones sequences are the truest depiction of what it looks like when a long trip stops being fun and starts being a matter of getting through. Skip Long Way Down. Watch Long Way Up if you want to see the same two men twenty years older, slower, and more honest.

4. Why We Ride (2013)

Bryan H. Carroll’s documentary, made on a fraction of the budget of On Any Sunday and roughly three times as sentimental, but the interviews are honest and the subject is the right one. Best watched with someone in your life who has never quite understood why you spend the weekend in a damp paddock with a small fire. Will not convert them. Might explain you.

5. Easy Rider (1969)

Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson. Two men ride choppers across America after a cocaine deal. The film is, by any modern measure, slow, broken-backed, and fully aware of its own myth. Watch it for the rhythm of the riding scenes, the soundtrack, and the bleakly accurate ending. The film named the road movie as a genre. None of the bikes were good bikes. None of the bikes had to be.

6. Hitting the Apex (2015)

Mark Neale’s MotoGP documentary, narrated by Brad Pitt, following the 2011 to 2013 seasons. Not an adventure film. The reason it belongs on this list is that nothing else shows as clearly what disciplined attention at three hundred kilometres an hour actually looks like — and the question of how that attention is built and lost is the same question the long-distance rider faces at fifty kilometres an hour on day six. Watch it for Marc Márquez at the front and Casey Stoner explaining, in a flat Australian voice, why he stopped.

7. Stone (1974)

Sandy Harbutt’s Australian outlaw-biker film, made on no money outside Sydney with a club called the Hells Angels of Sydney standing in for themselves. Not a good film by the conventional grammar. A genuinely interesting one for anyone who rides in Australia and wonders what the local mythology of the bike actually was. The funeral scene through the Royal National Park is the only sequence in any Australian film that has ever made me miss a bike I never owned.

8. Mondo Enduro (1998)

Six English blokes, six Suzuki DR350s, around the world the long way, filmed entirely on Hi-8 by themselves. The kind of project that would never be greenlit and is precious because it was never asked to be. The Siberia sequence is the one. The lesson is that the trip you would actually like to take is not the one a production company would let you take. Watch it for the unspoken thesis — amateurs make the better adventure film, because the trip is the actual point.

9. Riding Solo to the Top of the World (2006)

Gaurav Jani’s self-shot solo trip to the Changthang plateau in Ladakh on a 350cc Royal Enfield Bullet. A slow film. Some of the best long-shot composition I have seen in any travel documentary. Jani is not trying to entertain you and the film is the better for it. This is what an adventure film looks like when it is made by a rider, not by a production company who has hired one.

10. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

David Lean’s three-and-a-half-hour film, which is not on most lists of motorcycling films and ought to be. The film opens on the Brough Superior SS100 that killed T E Lawrence on a Dorset lane in 1935, then flashes back to the desert, then closes on the empty road. Lawrence rode Broughs all his adult life and crashed swerving for two boys on bicycles. He died six days later. The film is about a man who is too alive for the peacetime that catches up with him, and the bike is the bracket around the four-hour middle. It is also one of the best arguments ever filmed for going somewhere quiet on something that scares you. Watch it on the largest screen you can find.

The honourable mention is the YouTube channel Itchy Boots — Noraly Schoenmaker, the Dutch geologist on a 411cc Himalayan, then a 401cc KTM, doing the long-form trip in the format that suits the long-form trip. Not a film, not on the list, but the closest thing the current decade has to a successor to the documentaries above.

The companion piece is Ten books for the tank bag — the same exercise, with paper instead of a screen.