Fast lane feud that never loses power
★★★★✩
(12A, 152 mins)
Director: James Mangold
Stars: Matt Damon, Christian Bale, Caitriona Balfe, Tracy Letts, Noah Jupe
LAST CHRISTMAS
★✩✩✩✩
(12A, 103 mins)
Director: Paul Feig
Stars: Emilia Clarke, Emma Thompson, Henry Golding, Michelle Yeoh
MARRIAGE STORY
★★★★✩
(15, 137 mins)
Director: Noah Baumbach
Stars: Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver, Laura Dern, Ray Liotta
YOU CAN’T build a racing car by committee, Matt Damon’s designer Carroll Shelby tells a harrumphing Henry Ford II (Tracey Letts) halfway through
Le Mans ’66.
Walk The Line director James Mangold’s beautifully constructed 1960s drama (called Ford vs Ferrari in the USA) finds a smart way to push the American car giant’s attempt to buy victory at the 24-hour Le Mans race into the mould of an underdog sports movie.
The real villain here isn’t Ford’s slimy rival Enzo Ferrari but risk-averse corporate America.
Damon’s grizzled Texan and his Brummie driver best pal Ken Miles (a lean, mean Christian Bale) are no-nonsense gun-slingers who have to slug it out with the snivelling suits who pay their wages.
As film backer Fox Searchlight has since been taken over by Disney, it’s tempting to read this as a veiled dig.would the custodians of the Avengers series have green lit a big-budget drama with no sequel or merchandising potential?
I may be getting off track here, but I was heartened to see millions splashed on a film so unashamedly old-fashioned as this. It isn’t just fuelled by testosterone, petrol and (in Miles’s case) Typhoo tea, however.at its heart this is a film about male friendship.
When we meet Shelby and Miles, they’ve been working together for years and enjoy the salty banter of bickering brothers. Shelby, who had to call time on his own racing career due to a dodgy heart, knows his first battle will be to get the British maverick behind the wheel of Ford’s new racing car, the GT40.
Damon is acting well within his range but Bale has more fun with the eccentric Miles who sings “I’m H-A-P-P-Y” as he overtakes rivals and celebrates victory in Daytona with a steaming cuppa.we also get to see his touching relationships with his son Peter (Noah Jupe) and his wife Molly (Caitriona Balfe) who, in a break with convention, is fully supportive of his dangerous career.
But Mangold knows how to balance the human drama with action.we get a real sense of Le Mans being a death race where rain-lashed bends are taken at startling speeds and drivers enter clouds of black smoke unaware of what kind of horrors await them.
Snippy youngsters are already calling this a “dad movie” on social media. In an age where too many youth films are designed by committee and churned out on production lines, Mangold should wear this as a badge of honour.
Last Christmas isn’t the first film to try to fire-up an old formula with a parade of chart-topping hits. It could, however, be the most half-baked.
Before George Michael’s sudden death nearly three years ago (on, of all days, December 25) writer-producer Emma Thompson got his permission to crowbar his music into a syrupy festive rom-com.
Emilia Clarke brings her unique eyebrow-first style of acting to the role of Kate, a supposedly adorably klutzy immigrant from “former Yugoslavia” (be more specific!) who is now working as an elf in a supposedly hilariously chintzy Christmas shop in London.
As most of the early jokes fall flat, we spend the first half wondering how Thompson will jemmy in the song in the title.a twist is clearly afoot and it seems to have something to do with an unidentified major operation Kate had during the previous festive period.
Tom (Henry Golding), a mysterious hunk who keeps popping up at the shop window, also seems to have some role to play.there’s clearly something a bit ogher-worldly about his handsome stranger who talks like a self-help book, dances around like a madman and keeps disappearing before Kate’s boss (Michelle Yeoh) can clap eyes on him.
Before we get the most annoyingly obvious twist of the year, we have to endure her comically depressed mother (Thompson attempting a former Yugoslavian accent), some clunky references to Brexit and Tom and Kate’s geographically ludicrous strolls through London.
In between, the late singer’s songs keep popping up on the soundtrack. He was a lovely bloke, George Michael, but this time I wish he hadn’t been so charitable.
At first Marriage Story seems a very deceptive title for Noah Baumbach’s divorce drama. But for a relationship to become a story, it needs an ending.and this is a tale told from different perspectives – of compromises made, resentments nursed and of a little boy caught in the middle.
When they agree to “decouple”,adam Driver’s New York theatre director and Scarlett Johansson’s actress are both determined to make it as painless as possible for their eight-year-old son. But when two viperish lawyers (Laura Dern and Ray Liotta) get involved they find they are the victims in two very different narratives.
A compassionate script and two wonderfully nuanced performances mean that we are never quite sure which version to follow.