Sports Movie

Ferrari: Race for Impact

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adam Driver in Ferrari

Is Michael Mann secretly a conventional filmmaker? The auteur is renowned for his bracing sense of style—the sleek digital photography, the dreamy music, the propulsive momentum—but he often wields his technique in the service of familiar, fact-based narratives. There’s nothing wrong with this; Ali is a solid sports movie, while the underrated Public Enemies bristles with an electricity that belies its stature as a docudrama. Now comes Ferrari, a serviceable picture that can’t help feeling disappointingly ordinary, lacking Ali’s personal depth and Public Enemies’ invigorating… well, drive.

To the movie’s credit, it unfolds over a narrow period of time, disdaining the swollen hagiography that afflicts so many biopics. The brunt of its action takes place in 1957, when Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) is facing a reckoning in both his personal and professional lives. On the home front, his already-strained marriage with his wife, Laura (Penélope Cruz)—still grieving the death of their son, who suffered from muscular dystrophy—is at risk of collapse, given that he’s struggling to continually conceal the existence of the boy he fathered during World War II with his mistress, Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley). And in his business, he’s receiving reports of unprofitability and a corresponding erosion of the Ferrari brand—a diminution he hopes to reverse by winning the Mille Miglia, a race that (in case your grasp of Italian is even worse than mine) runs 1,000 stressful miles and carves through the country’s public roadways. Read More

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Gran Turismo: What’s in a Game?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Archie Madekwe and David Harbour in Gran Turismo

The subtitle “based on a true story” tends to be a vapid marketing ploy—a phony assertion of honesty in a medium grounded in trickery—but in the case of Gran Turismo, you can understand the appellation. The narrative arc of this movie—about a videogame wiz who transformed his joystick-tugging prowess into professional success as a bona fide race-car driver—is so improbable, audiences would deride it as ludicrous if they weren’t assured it actually happened. The screenplay, by Jason Hall (American Sniper) and Zach Baylin (King Richard), has taken considerable liberties with the factual record, but its overall thrust remains accurate: In 2011, a 19-year-old PlayStation guru named Jann Mardenborough pivoted from console to racetrack, winning an academy competition and earning a “drive” on Nissan’s motorsports team.

Directed by Neill Blomkamp, Gran Turismo follows the sports-picture playbook with sturdy competence and comforting predictability. This, naturally, places it in ironic tension with its own central theme: that Jann’s true story is an anti-establishment triumph in which raw talent and radical innovation combine to defeat the mighty powers of orthodoxy and tradition. It’s a racing movie where the number of RPMs is topped only by the volume of cinematic clichés. Read More

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From the Vault: Seabiscuit, 20 Years Later

Jeremy BeckReviews
Seabiscuit

[EDITOR’S NOTE: In 2003, long before MovieManifesto.com existed, I spent my summer as a 20-year-old college kid writing as many movie reviews as I could. My goal was to compile them all into a website, possibly hosted by Tripod or Geocities, which would surely impress all of the women in my dorm. That never happened—neither the compiling nor the impressing—but the reviews still exist. So, now that I am a wildly successful critic actually have a website, I’ll be publishing those reviews on the respective date of each movie’s 20th anniversary. Against my better judgment, these pieces remain unedited from their original form. I apologize for the quality of the writing; I am less remorseful about the character of my 20-year-old opinions.]

There is an epic majesty about Seabiscuit, and I don’t just mean the horse. This is a throwback motion picture, one that is redolent of a distant era of cinema in which filmmakers suffused their creations with spirit and passion. It is by no means a flawless film – it is too long, too sentimental, and too reverential – but it carries itself with an elegant grace and nobility, and it has unanticipated moments of considerable power. For all its faults, Seabiscuit is a complete film, both uncommonly thoughtful and undeniably exhilarating, all the way to the finish line. Read More

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Air: Shoe de Grâce

Jeremy BeckReviews
Matthew Maher, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck in Air

It’s 1984, and Air, the new movie by Ben Affleck, wants to make sure you know that. It opens with a blizzard of archival footage and pop-culture clips—the soundtrack quickly shifts from Dire Straits to Violent Femmes—transporting you to the halcyon era of the Ghostbusters, that Apple commercial, and Mr. T. Yet for Affleck, nostalgia is more than a fuzzy feeling; it’s a mode of filmmaking. He fancies himself a throwback—an old-school artisan in the vein of Howard Hawks—which is why his prior feature, the noir flick Live by Night, attempted to echo classic gangster melodramas to the point of embalmment. Air, about Nike’s quest to sign Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal (it was marketed with the subtitle “Courting a Legend”), is a less self-serious picture, and also a more enjoyable one. Watching it is a bit like watching a highlight package of an old sporting event you’ve heard about but never saw live: You can appreciate the talent and the craft on display, even though you already know which team wins at the buzzer.

Speaking of highlights, that introductory blitz isn’t the only time Affleck dips into montage. Though Air takes place exclusively during the year of “Sister Christian” and Beverly Hills Cop—Harold Faltermeyer’s famous synth theme for the latter appears on the soundtrack, even though it wasn’t released until months after the shoe signing (one of many factual liberties cheerfully taken by Alex Convery’s script)—at one point it suddenly travels through time, revealing grainy footage of classic Jordan moments (the hanging game-winner against Cleveland, the lefty layup versus the Lakers, etc.). It’s an understandable impulse, because despite being branded as a sports movie, Air features vanishingly little action or athleticism. In fact, its hero is a paunchy middle-aged white guy who can’t even manage one lap around the track. Read More

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Quick Hits: Scream VI, Cocaine Bear, Creed III, Magic Mike 3, and Emily

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michael B. Jordan in Creed III; Keri Russell in Cocaine Bear; Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera in Scream VI; Emma Mackey in Emily; Salma Hayek Pinault and Channing Tatum in Magic Mike's Last Dance

Between the Oscars, our TV rankings, and our list of the year’s best movies, it’s been a busy past month here at MovieManifesto. As a result, while I was able to write a few proper reviews of new movies (the new Shyamalan, the new Ant-Man), I neglected to make time for a bunch of additional 2023 films. That changes now! Well, sort of. Unlike Lydia Tár, I can’t stop time, so I’m unable to carve out enough space for full reviews. Instead, we’re firing off some quick-and-dirty capsules, checking in on five recent releases. Let’s get to it.

Scream VI. The clever double-act of the Scream pictures—the platonic ideal established by the first installment and never quite equaled since—is that they’re movies about scary movies and are also, well, scary movies. In the prior episode, Scream (which should have been called Scream 5, but never mind), new directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett satisfied one and only one side of that equation, cleverly skewering the toxic fandom that attends modern discourse but failing to serve up memorable carnage. Now returning with Scream VI, the pair have essentially flipped the script. The meta ideas bandied about here are a little less trenchant, but the nuts-and-bolts execution—and executions—is first-class. Read More

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