FORD V FERRARI

THE IRISHMAN

1/2 R, 209 minutes. Starts Friday at Madison Art Cinemas. The boys are back, substantially older but no less prone to mayhem, in Martin Scorsese’s wiseguy epic “The Irishman.” It’s the director’s first collaboration with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci since “Casino” almost 25 years ago, and his first ever with an actor who has bafflingly escaped his orbit, Al Pacino. Throw in a brief Harvey Keitel, a star of Scorsese’s breakout film “Mean Streets” from 1973, and you’ve got a mob-movie supergroup the likes of which we may never see again. There’s an appealing mix of nostalgia and excitement in this cinematic reunion tour, which sees De Niro effortlessly playing the title role of Frank Sheeran, a real-life Irish-American who joined the East Coast mob after World War II. Pesci is the world-weary crime boss Russell Bufalino, while Pacino huffs and puffs marvelously as none other than Jimmy Hoffa, the charismatic Teamsters leader who mysteriously vanished in 1975. Written by Steven Zaillian from Charles Brandt’s book “I Heard You Paint Houses,” which details Sheeran’s involvement in Hoffa’s disappearance, “The Irishman” spans more than 50 years and uses digital technology to turn back the clock on its septuagenarian cast. (The nearly imperceptible de-aging effects come from Industrial Light & Magic.) If it all sounds like familiar Scorsese territory, that’s intentional. “The Irishman” feels like the director’s attempt to fill in and flesh out the themes of loyalty and betrayal that have informed his most famous films, notably his 1990 classic “Goodfellas.” What sets “The Irishman” apart is the ruminative mood that seeps into Scorsese’s usual point-blank violence. As Sheeran ages and the ghosts he’s created begin to haunt him, “The Irishman” begins to feel something like Clint Eastwood’s “The Unforgiven” — a look back at a life, an era and a cinematic genre all at once. Unexpectedly, there’s also more humor than usual here, as Scorsese gently pokes fun at the very mob movie cliches — nicknames, untimely deaths, tacky weddings — that he helped create. You could make a long list of probable Oscar nods here, including production design (many of the midcentury period scenes were filmed on Long Island) and editing (by Scorsese’s longtime collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker). The standouts are clearly De Niro, as a man clinging to a code of silence, and Pesci, playing what feels like an older version of Tommy DeVito, the violent jack-in-the-box role that earned him an Oscar in “Goodfellas.” Their performances are riveting, full of mystery, monstrosity and human frailty. Despite

1/2 PG-13, 152 minutes. Starts Friday at Niantic. Starts tonight at Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Cops might do well to position their speed traps near movie theaters wherever the new film “Ford v Ferrari” is playing. They might fund their whole year’s budget busting speeders peeling out of the parking lots. This infectious and engrossing story of the 1966 showdown on a French racetrack between car giants Ford and Ferrari is a high-octane ride that will make you instinctively stomp on a ghostly gas pedal from your movie seat. But you don’t need to be a motorhead to enjoy Matt Damon and Christian Bale as a pair of rebels risking it all for purity and glory. Yes, director James Mangold takes you down onto the raceway, with cameras low to the ground and care to show the crack of gear shifts and feet on pedals. Yet he’s not created a “Fast and Furious” film — this is more a drama about a pair of visionaries who fight against a smarmy bureaucracy. That vision happens to be on a track. The first three-quarters of “Ford v Ferrari “sets the stage for the furious 40-minute restaging of the exhausting Le Mans race — a 3,000-mile, 24-hour slalom through country roads. So meticulous have the filmmakers been that they built an entire accurate Le Mans in Georgia because the original has been too altered in the intervening years. (There are not many cases when Georgia acts as a stand-in for La France.) Damon plays the legendary American driver and car designer Carroll Shelby, who won Le Mans in 1959 but gets sidelined from driving due to a bad heart. He considers the best driver in the world to be Ken Miles, a daredevil British missile played by Bale. If Damon is a bad boy, then Bale is a bad-bad boy, a role perfectly in his wheelhouse, another intense, almostover-the-top role. But it’s Damon, almost subdued with little fireworks necessary, who shows real compassion as a man caught between corporate responsibility and honor. Le Mans by the mid-60s was a plaything of Ferrari, which dominated year after year. Lee Iacocca, then an executive with the Ford Motor Company, convinces his boss, Henry Ford II, to enter the racing world and win Le Mans — not necessarily for glory but to make the company appealing to young buyers. “James Bond does not drive a Ford, sir,” Iacocca (played by Jon Bernthal, perfectly cast, showing layers) tells Ford. “We need to think like Ferrari.” Ford initially tries to do that by just buying Ferrari — but Italian head Enzo Ferrari tells the Ford delegation to

“go back to Michigan, back to your big ugly factory.” Boo! That naturally ruffles the feathers of Henry Ford’s son (Tracy Letts, lighting up every scene with unpredictable energy) and so Ford is now ready to build its own race team. The screenwriters Jez Butterworth, John-Henry Butterworth and Jason Keller have fleshed out the tale with glimpses into the personal costs to Miles’ family (the enchanting Caitriona Balfe as his wife and their

PG-13, 118 minutes. Starts tonight at Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. The latest reboot of the TV series stars Naomi Scott, Kristen Stewart, Ella Balinska, Elizabeth Banks, and Sam Claflin.