FORD V FERRARI

rate lawyer who sued DuPont for, in essence, poisoning a West Virginia community with a chemical used to make Teflon. The most obvious one is undertaken by the film’s producer and star, Mark Ruffalo, who, as real-life Cincinnati attorney Rob Bilott, erases his movie-star persona beneath an unflattering haircut, cheap suit, bad posture and the ever-present pout (and jutting lower lip) of an avenging nebbish. The second is by Bill Camp as Wilbur Tennant, the Parkersburg cattle farmer who first noticed that his cows were dying off in high numbers, and who sought the assistance of Bilott because Tennant knew the lawyer’s mother. We’re used to seeing Camp, one of the great unsung character actors, vanish inside a role, and here he does it again, delivering his lines with a gruff affect and thick accent that is unintelligible much of the time. (It’s not a flaw of the performance. This detail is wholly accurate, according to the New York Times article that inspired the film.) But perhaps the most superficially startling disappearing act is the one performed by the film’s director, Todd Haynes, who brings a sort of aggressive stylelessness to a subject that initially seems a surprising choice for the director of the lavishly cinematic period pieces “Carol” and “Far From Heaven.” But “Dark Waters” feels like the kind of issue film that almost anyone could have made. But it is an effective outrage machine: If you like “Erin Brockovich,” you’ll probably like this too. — Michael O’Sullivan, The Washington Post

1/2 PG-13, 152 minutes. Through tonight only at Niantic. Still playing at 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, almost-over-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.”

PG, 103 minutes. Niantic, Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Sequels are tough! Especially with musicals. The good-enough success of “Frozen 2,” then, deserves medium thanks and your allotted Disney money. The story pulls Elsa the Snow Queen and her less magical but nonetheless charismatic younger sister, Anna, into a murky web of Shakespearean political intrigue, with a large dose of Scandinavian pagan mythology; late-’80s/ early-’90s-style power ballads from songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez; and just enough Olaf (snowman) and Sven (reindeer) to please younger viewers who, for years, after the first “Frozen” conquered the world in 2013, went to bed and then woke up signing “Let It Go.” In one surefire comic interlude, at top speed Olaf recaps the narrative events of the first “Frozen.” And the lightning-quick “Let It Go” reference proves that the Lopez duo hasn’t lost its comic instinct. That said, “Frozen 2” is more of a hairy quest deal, and knottier emotionally than the first. All’s well in the kingdom of Arendelle long enough for a generic happy-townsfolk number. Then Elsa (voiced and belted by Idina Menzel) starts hearing a siren-song female vocalist emanating from somewhere up north, beckoning, waiting to reveal the truth behind her magical snow-sculpture powers, and the sisters’ parents’ death by shipwreck (another Shakespearean flourish). With Anna (Kristen Bell), Anna’s amiable, supportive b.f. Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), and Olaf (Josh Gad) in tow, Elsa discovers a mist-shrouded land and a new set of human characters. One of many intriguing notions in “Frozen 2” deals with the memory properties of water, so that water, in various forms, manifests a series of visual clues to the sisters’ fraught childhood. It’s like Emily in “Our Town,” revisiting her past, if Emily had ever learned to sing “Let It Go” in her more repressive era. The moral here is clear and repeated frequently: Always do “the next right thing.” That includes letting a couple of Disney princesses wear pants when they trek to lands unknown. The Lopez songs do the job without unearthing another enough, already earworm on the order of “Let It Go.” The movie itself occasionally gets lost in those woods, but finds its way back out again. — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune