The Cruise (1998 film)

Timothy "Speed" Levitch is a New York City bus tour guide whose tours combine historical commentary, personal reflection, humor, and philosophical digressions. The film presents his work as both a guided tour of Manhattan and a portrait of Levitch.^[2]

The film was in production for three and a half years. Miller initially shot about 77 hours of Hi8 footage with another cameraperson, but discarded it after deeming it untrue to his subject and restarted from scratch.^[3] He resumed the next summer, shooting alone with a Sony VX-1000 MiniDV camera, a lavalier microphone on Levitch, and a Sennheiser shotgun microphone that was collapsible and thus easily transportable.^[4] The production team, including editor Michael Levine, spent eight months editing the film.^[5]

Miller retrospectively linked Levitch to the central figures of his later films, including Capote, Moneyball, and Foxcatcher, calling them people whose lives place them at odds with the environments they move through.^[3]

The Cruise was rejected by many film festivals.^[6] It premiered at the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival in 1998 and later screened at New York's Docfest. On October 14, 1998, The Cruise was released in New York City at the Angelika Film Center. After being picked up by distributor Artisan Entertainment, it was released nationwide on November 6, 1998.

The Cruise was released to DVD in 2006.^[7] In October 2025, it screened in the "History of Cinema" section of the 20th Rome Film Festival.^[8] In 2025, Oscilloscope Laboratories released The Cruise on Blu-ray and DVD, with supplements including additional footage and the theatrical trailer.^[9]

At the time of the film's release, Stephen Holden wrote: "Filmed in high-contrast black and white that makes the city look harshly magnificent, at once irresistible and forbidding, The Cruise could be described as a whirlwind tour both of New York and of Levitch's feverish mind."^[10] Following the film's release to DVD in 2006, Brett Cullum wrote: "Although we do get to see some familiar sites, including winsome glimpses of the World Trade Center towers, the camera hardly ever leaves the face of our tour guide. This is all one extended character study, and is not concerned with narrative or sight seeing. No, this is a dadaist manifesto delivered off the pavement leading to the Brooklyn bridge. It runs like an hour of poetic jazz—verbal scats and flourishes aplenty."^[11]

In a 2018 retrospective for Sight and Sound, filmmaker and critic Robert Greene called The Cruise an important example of 1990s DIY digital-video documentary filmmaking, arguing that Miller's use of MiniDV technology helped demonstrate the possibilities of low-cost, small-crew nonfiction production.^[4]

Film critic James Berardinelli wrote: "The Cruise is a typical example of low-budget documentary filmmaking. It's in grainy black-and-white (a blowup from the video it was shot on) with a flat audio. Oddly, however, this approach gives Levitch's New York City a timeless quality. The Gershwin song "But Not for Me" plays as the camera captures the modern skyline, creating a sense of the past and present blurring together".^[12]

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 86% based on 21 reviews, with an average rating of 7.2/10.^[13]

Awards

The Cruise was nominated for several awards, including Best Documentary from the Online Film Critics Society and the Satellite Awards. Michael Levine, the film's editor, was nominated for the Best Edited Documentary Film award ("Eddie") by the American Cinema Editors.^[14]

"The Cruise" was also nominated for the Daring Digital Award at the Jeonju Film Festival. It won the Wolfgang Statuote Award and the Don Quixote Award at the Berlin International Film Festival, demonstrating the film's international diffusion, and the Best Documentary Audience Award and the Feature Competition Special Jury Award at the Newport International Film Festival.