FERRARI TBC

Mann and machines…

★★★★★ OUT 26 DECEMBER CINEMAS

Summer, 1957: ex-racer Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) is at a crossroads. No longer in love with business partner/wife Laura (Penélope Cruz), he’s keeping an affair (and child) with wartime lover Lina (Shailene Woodley) a secret. Meanwhile, in a bid to rev up his failing car company, Ferrari enters five of his hot rods in the cross-country, high-risk Mille Miglia race…

Like Le Mans ’66, Michael Mann’s stately biopic has a fetish for fast cars and the thrill/terror of sitting unprotected in little more than a bomb on wheels. The director doesn’t shy from showing us the dangers involved, particularly in one truly horrifying limb-ripping moment. Shame, though, that some of the CGI in the racing sequences feels unfinished.

Thankfully, the handling of Ferrari’s personal demons is more refined. Though Driver reheats his House of Gucci accent and attitude, his interactions with the women in his life add power to the picture. Cruz, in particular, is luminescent throughout as a woman battling not only for her rightful place at the table, but for answers about the recent death of her beloved son Dino. Like Ferrari’s motors, this is sleek, expensive-looking and runs handsomely. Yet it also takes time running the tyres in, only really reaching top gear in its second half. Ferrari works as a companion piece to Le Mans ’66, but doesn’t manage to surpass it.

THE VERDICT A well-oiled, well-acted biopic that lacks a certain something under the hood to really make it fly.

‘Why was I cast?, I’m Adam Driver’

SOCIETY OF THE SNOW 15

Chill factor…

★★★★★ OUT 22 DECEMBER CINEMAS 4 JANUARY NETFLIX

With The Orphanage and The Impossible, director J.A. Bayona brought humane depths and visceral power to tales of unimaginable terror. After a Jurassic-era wobble, he’s on form again with his long-gestating fifth feature. The 1972 story of Uruguayan rugby players whose plane crashes in the Andes has been filmed before as Alive (1993), but Bayona brings a soulful and often shattering punch to the tale.

THE VERDICT A true-life horror movie with heart, Bayona’s passion project is a haunting, harrowing hymn for the lost.

The crash itself is brutally immersive, slamming you into the cabin as it concertinas. Then the real hell starts… In the killer cold, survivors including Numa (Enzo Vogrincic) and Nando (Agustín Pardella) face avalanches, starvation and worse as weeks stretch out. Only pulling back to emphasise their isolation, Bayona stays close to his characters, feeling their fear. Every character is honoured, including – in a ghostly touch - the dead, and their collective spirit and inner torments register keenly. When the living are forced to consume the deceased, the moral anguish stings.

That sense of conviction is bolstered by non-starry casting and a potent sound mix, which lends horrors psychological and elemental an equivalent immediacy. True, the rousing conclusion is a given. But Bayona’s fine details rise above his broader strokes: as hope beckons, a shot of a trembling hand speaks quiet volumes about the lingering effects of trauma and grief.