Tom Salinsky

Nostalgia sells, whether it’s Michael Keaton reprising his role as Batman in The Flash, Harrison Ford reprising his role as Indiana Jones in The Dial of Destiny, Michael Keaton reprising his role as Batman in Batgirl, Harrison Ford reprising his role as Deckard in Blade Runner 2049 or now Michael Keaton reprising his role as Beetlejuice in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Who cares that you first played the role when you were mid-thirties and now you’re early-seventies? There’s nothing the public likes more than a legacy sequel. Despite the fact that of the movies mentioned above one was shelved, three lost money and only one – the one under discussion – looks like the studios’ familiar-IP, target-the-boomers, stay-safe strategy has actually worked.

How amazing then, that it’s the film I liked the least out of the ones listed above?

Blade Runner 2049 is a bit ponderous, but it’s a decent stab at a follow on to an all-time classic that didn’t need it. Dial of Destiny flails about a bit but includes some impressive sequences. The Flash is a mess but has a certain amount of charm. Obviously, I haven’t seen Batgirl. But this? The long-awaited follow-up to the 1988 film which solidified the star status of Winona Ryder, Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, which made stars of Michael Keaton, Tim Burton and Danny Elfman? The beloved cult favourite which spawned an animated spin-off, multiple video games and a Broadway musical? This is a trainwreck.

The original’s storytelling is both brilliantly original and elegantly streamlined. Happy couple Adam and Barbara die in a freak accident and end up with their dream house haunted by the living. To drive out the new arrivals, they enlist the help of a demon but that help comes with strings attached. It makes only as much sense as it needs to (the vagaries of how life after death works are conveniently hidden behind a hilariously hard-to-parse handbook), the performances are top-notch, and Burton hasn’t yet fallen victim to the leaden paced staging which sank the almost-wonderful Mars Attacks (and often plagues both his Batman films).

This is beset with problems, right from the off. The opening sally with Monica Bellucci staple-gunning herself back together is deliciously macabre, even if we’ve seen the visual before in countless other Burton joints (she’s a blend of Edward Scissorhands, Emily the Corpse Bride and Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas, probably others). But rather than presenting a problem for anyone we care about, her character listlessly orbits the main plot of the film, endlessly repeating her signature packing cube death-for-the-dead routine, before turning up at the finale in time to be very easily despatched.

And you can say the same about all the various plot strands, of which there are far too many, none of them intersecting in interesting ways, so the overall effect is like switching channels between about five different (or rather indifferent) unrelated Beetlejuice sequels. Did you prefer the pitch about how Lydia is getting married to a douche who doesn’t believe she can see ghosts? How about Lydia’s daughter Astrid having the hots for a dishy demon in a tree house? Can you bring yourself to give a shit about Lydia’s daughter’s dead dad, who was killed at sea? Or would you rather we spent time with Delia, trying to reunite with her husband who was killed… (checks notes) also at sea, it seems. Tell you what, how about we have an actor who used to play a cop on TV who now runs the underworld police? No? What if we could get Willem Dafoe? Honestly, it feels like the studio got half-a-dozen different pitches and just said yes to all of them.

Only Keaton, Ryder and O’Hara return for this go-around. Glenn Shadix died in 2010, and recasting Otho seemingly wasn’t considered. Davis and Baldwin were presumably too expensive and/or old (and Baldwin has his own misfortunes to contend with) – but the Maitlands are discarded with about the lamest line of barely-even-exposition I’ve ever heard – “they found a loophole and moved on,” which felt like a real “fuck you” to a loyal audience and a pair of terrific actors who were at the centre of the original. And obviously, we can’t be giving Jeffrey Jones any work, so – very wisely – almost the first thing the film does is to write-out Charles Deetz…

…and then depicts the character’s last moments with a Claymation puppet of Jeffrey Jones…

…and then has pictures of Jeffrey Jones on various bits of props and set dressing…

…and then makes Charles Deetz’s funeral a significant setting and plot point…

…and has another actor in a revolting half-eaten costume run around the underworld sets while someone impersonates Jeffrey Jones’s voice…

Excuse me? This is how you make sure that nobody watching this film has cause to remember what Jeffrey Jones was arrested for in 2002. And 2004. And 2010. What the actual fuck?

And for a film presumably made for fans of the original (surely no-one else would sit still for the hour or so it takes for this slovenly movie to finally generate any kind of forward plot momentum) it’s remarkably bad at sticking to the few rules established in the first one, and sometimes the writers seem to mis-remember what happened to Lydia vs what happened to Barbara. Lydia knows that “home home home” will get her out of Beetlejuice’s world (which only Adam and Barbara would know) but doesn’t know that when you’ve let Beetlejuice out, you have to put him back (which surely would have been one of the things Barbara told her at the same time as she told her about “home home home”).

And the one thing we surely all know about how being dead works in Beetlejuice films is that upon dying, you are translated back to the place you will be haunting with only an unreadable handbook for explication. Yet, everyone who dies in the sequel (Charles Deetz, Delia, and seemingly Richard, Astrid’s dad) is taken straight to the afterlife waiting room instead. And as more details pile up about exactly how the afterlife works, it starts to become banal and ordinary, instead of the fascinating and inexplicable glimpses which were all we were afforded last time. Nothing exemplifies this more than a bored looking Michael Keaton re-enacting a particularly dull episode of The Office with a small army of shrunken head underlings. This is what I wanted from the long-awaited return of The Ghost with Most – a bonkers subplot about new HR processes.

Among the slurry there are a few bright spots. Justin Theroux is having fun as Lydia’s sleazy boyfriend (although a little of him goes a long way). Burn Gorman is rather a treat as the pragmatic Father Damien. Beetlejuice himself isn’t overused, and although he isn’t always used effectively, when he is, the film does come to life – such as in the very funny couples counselling scene. And although we do get a rendition of Day-O, by and large the musical palate has shifted to soul and disco, which is a great way to freshen up a familiar idea. Although the lack of tension when Astrid is being taken away on the Soul Train is extraordinary (and Jenna Ortega is never given anything interesting to do). Finally, the end of the second film is essentially identical to the end of the first one – only not set up as well.

This is barely a film at all. It’s a dozen different ideas for things that could happen in a Beetlejuice sequel slopped into a cauldron and ladled out in an arbitrary order. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that, of all directors, Tim Burton isn’t really in command of the storytelling here, but he’s hardly stretching himself as a visual stylist either. This was a film I was really looking forward to, but sad to say, it’s not only dead on arrival, rigor mortis has firmly set in.

Thirty years after Beyond Thunderdome, and to everyone’s surprise, George Miller returned to the world of Mad Max and brought us the astonishing Fury Road, which hoovered up dollars, acclaim and awards in pretty much equal measure. Since, by all accounts, a detailed backstory for Charlize Theron’s Furiosa had already been written, the surprise this time around is that it took a further nine years for the prequel to hit our screens. But, while the new film is still a wildly entertaining, beautifully shot, thrill-ride, it doesn’t have the ice-water shock of the 2015 film, and nor does it have anything new to say, despite being a good half-hour longer.

What it does do is split its narrative into individually-named chapters, a gimmick I always appreciate. But while this lends a welcome feeling of a sure hand on the tiller – “I know you aren’t sure what the story is quite yet, but sit back, you’re in safe hands” – I came away feeling I’d seen half-a-dozen very exciting but rather samey short action films. Fury Road didn’t have this gimmick and didn’t need it. It was stripped to the bones. The first half is running away and the second half is going back again. Nothing else is needed.

Here, it’s all a bit more complicated and convoluted. We don’t even see Anya Taylor-Joy (taking over from an absent Theron) until about an hour in, because we’re seeing the adventures of a prepubescent Furiosa first. And it’s all very well done, with a nice turn from Tom Burke in the middle, and there’s no shortage of demented action set pieces, eye-popping visuals and the familiar rogues gallery of badguys and misfits. Miller even seems to be aping Sam Raimi with his bonkers push-ins through the windscreens of various vehicles, and there’s almost as much undercranking here as in a 1960s James Bond movie.

Saving grace of what could have been a fine, rather exhausting, over-familiar affair is the amazing performance of Chris Hemsworth as Dementus, and it’s greatly to the film’s credit that the climactic scene is all about him and Furiosa as people, rather than as ballistic objects.

Speaking of ballistic objects, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers sees a profoundly odd trio of actors (Spiderman’s girlfriend, Prince Charles and Riff from West Side Story) hashing out their complicated romantic feelings via the medium of tennis. I wouldn’t have seen this coming from the director of Call Me By Your Name, who’s always proven to be a keen observer of human nature, but who hasn’t previously struck me as much of a visual stylist. Here he goes to town on the material, slamming Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s techno score into ordinary dialogue scenes, shooting arguments like tennis matches and tennis matches like video games.

Too much of this stuff and you’d get the impression that the director doesn’t trust the material, a feeling emphasised by the free-floating timeline with early scenes turning up in what almost feels like a random order. But the playing of the three leads holds it together and when a should-be low-stakes tennis match in a no-name tournament starts to become the spine of the story, the central trunk to which all the other scenes connect, then it comes fully into focus. Just as I was beginning to get exasperated at it, the pulpy soap-opera plotting pulled me back in, and then I surrendered to the beguiling excess of it all.

This could have been a very good film. In fact, it almost touches on greatness, and the difference is largely down to the powerhouse performances of Oliva Colman and Jessie Buckley, who lead a very strong cast. Jonny Sweet’s well-constructed script re-tells a largely true story which rocked the peaceful town of Littlehampton in 1920. Spinsterish pillar of the community Edith Swan (Colman) begins receiving profanity-laced poison pen letters and immediately suspects her freewheeling neighbour (Buckley). Only “Woman Police Office” Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan) suspects that the culprit might not be so obvious.

Littered with a wealth of comedy acting talent from newer faces like Vasan or Lolly Adefope (or Matilda herself, Alisha Weir) to stalwart campaigners like Eileen Atkins and Gemma Jones, this is a constant delight and you’re never far from another wonderful bit of business, sharp one-liner or marvellous moment. But there’s an extra bit of ballast which comes from the incredibly layered and detailed playing of the two leads, given extra weight by a truly sinister turn from a terrifying Timothy Spall, embodying the patriarchy as Edith’s horrendous father.

Director Thea Sharrock marshals these competing forces expertly, and while this has no aspirations to be much more than a delightful 100 minutes at the cinema, that is no small feat, and when it can touch on something a bit deeper or more profound, it does so without capsizing the whole enterprise. If you loved See How They Run, then you’ll enjoy this just as much. It isn’t quite as intricately constructed, but it’s arguably got more to say.

Cord Jefferson’s satire on the publishing business through a Black lens is many things. One thing it isn’t is the riproaring, one-liner stuffed, broad comedy which the trailer sells it as. By taking the ten best jokes and stitching them together, the marketeers have badly misrepresented this smart, painful, incisive, thoughtful – and yes, sometimes very funny – film. Ironically, despite the frustrations that this might cause, it seems appropriate for a story in which things are not what they seem, commercial imperatives trump artistic integrity and even vaunted literary prizes are hotbeds of pandering and intellectual shortcuts.

The cast is unimpeachable. Jeffrey Wright has never been better and is given a strong family unit comprising sister Tracee Ellis Ross, mother Leslie Uggams and brother Sterling K Brown. The early part of the story dismantles this strong family, forcing Wright’s hand much in the way that the St Valentine’s day massacre forces Joe and Jerry’s hand in Some Like it Hot. Only the incredibly convenient arrival of the perfect suitor for their live-in-maid strains credulity a little.

Based on what sounds like an unadaptable novel, the film’s unwillingness to settle for a single ending (or a single clear message) is probably the best way of taking the book’s style and finding a cinematic analogue, and Jefferson is careful to pave the way for this development in the way he structures and shoots some earlier moments (which include a lovely cameo from Keith David). He’s also careful to smudge the outline of what could have been too strident a moral, shading Issa Rae’s initially comical character with more depth and unafraid to make out hero seem like something of an asshole from time-to-time.

Possibly the best joke in the whole film, and one the trailer couldn’t spoil (so I will), is the conclusion of the literary judging process in which the three white jurors overrule the two Black ones on the basis that “It’s time to listen to Black voices.” Sharply satirical, but also oddly warm and even moving, this definitely isn’t what was sold to me, but is arguably better.

Have just discovered this languishing in my drafts folder. Apologies for the inconvenience.

The Oscar nominations are out and once again, we have ten Best Picture nominees. I have already seen a triumphant eight of these, and will be trying to mop up some of the International and Documentary features in the next few weeks. Here are the runners and riders.

American Fiction is one of the two I haven’t seen, but the trailer is very appealing (although you’d be forgiven for overlooking Sterling K Brown who is glimpsed only briefly, but who notches up a Best Supporting Actor nomination). Full review to follow.

Anatomy of a Fall. Terrific slab of Euro-intrigue which remakes the courtroom drama in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible, blessed with a remarkable tri-lingual script and a tremendous central performance from Sandra Hüller. Full review here.

Barbie. Thrillingly bonkers Mattel tie-in, which subverts the very play logic which it shockingly embraces to deliver a simplistic but deeply heartfelt feminism-for-beginners message. I briefly wondered if it might gather enough momentum to be a real contender for Best Picture, but with only eight nominations and nothing for Greta Gerwig as director or Margot Robbie as leading actress, I think we can write it off from this contest at least.

The Holdovers. Very Oscar-friendly, but probably not extraordinary enough to win. Full review here.

Killers of the Flower Moon. Scorsese demonstrates that he hasn’t lost his touch, blending the intimate with the epic, but I would have preferred a more focused two-hour version or a more exploratory six-hour mini-series which would have given more of a voice to the Osage people. Full review here.

Maestro. Despite all of the effort poured in by Bradley Cooper and the wealth of talent he has surrounded himself with, I kept waiting for the story to kick in. This feels like it’s run out of gas already.

Oppenheimer. Clear front-runner, with the most important story to tell, the biggest cultural footprint (possibly with the exception of Barbie) and it made a ton of money to boot.

Past Lives. Beautifully observed, painstakingly assembled, and far more original than its premise would suggest. Doesn’t have much of a chance at the big prize.

Poor Things. Lanthimos’s horny fairy tale horror has the potential to pull off a major upset, and I wouldn’t be mad at it for doing so, despite my reservations about the film. Full review here.

The Zone of Interest. The other one I haven’t seen but advance word is very strong.

In other categories, Best Director looks nailed on for Nolan, regardless of who wins Best Picture. The omission of Greta Gerwig is appalling but somehow not surprising. Nice to see Justine Triet there though. Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor also look set to go Oppenheimer‘s way. Best Actress is a straight fight between Emma Stone and Lily Gladstone. Best Supporting Actress looks more open with probably Emily Blunt the least likely to succeed, but a case could be made for any of the others. Original Screenplay looks like a two horse race between Anatomy of a Fall and The Holdovers. Adapted Screenplay is Nolan’s to lose.

Jonathan Glazer’s approach to the Holocaust is a terrifying exercise in cinematic minimalism. Although I haven’t read it, it seems that he has taken Martin Amis’s novel about Auschwitz CEO Rudolph Höss, stripped it off almost everything resembling a plot, and then shot it with fly-on-the-wall cameras. The result is very much a one-trick film – but it’s one hell of a good trick. As we watch the bourgeois 1940s German family playing with their kids, entertaining friends and relatives, tending the garden, splashing in the pool, the soundtrack never ceases to be filled with the ghastly sounds of the final solution emanating from the camp next door to their middle-class paradise.

Although the goings-on at the death camps are rarely evoked in dialogue, this is not a tale of people blithely looking the other way. They know exactly what is happening, it just isn’t relevant to their day-to-day interests. Yes, the presence of human remains near where his children are playing is enough for an underling to earn a telling-off from Höss, but otherwise the tragedy and brutal evil of the Nazi purge happens in the corners and off-screen.

There’s an element of absurdity in the way that the family refuse to acknowledge the sounds and sights of death and terror right on their doorstep – almost like something out of The Bed Sitting Room or Synecdoche, New York – until you remember that all of this was real, that Auschwitz happened and that the Höss family were real people. That isn’t to say there’s no artistic licence here. The real Auschwitz was a little further away from the Höss garden, I understand, so the absurdity is partly Glazer’s doing, but this is a matter of degree more than anything else.

Something barely resembling a story crops up after about an hour when Höss is transferred and his wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller from Anatomy of a Fall) refuses to uproot herself and her children, but otherwise this is all Glazer’s Kubrickian detachments from the unholy terrors happening at the edges, with Łukasz Żal’s cinematography giving the sunny days an overlit, almost nuclear, whiteness, and the winter months a cool blue blanket.

Rating this film is something of a struggle for me. I don’t want to see it again, I note the excellent performances, and admire the rigour of the form, but I felt overwhelmed by it, rather than drawn in. That may be what Glazer intended, but it doesn’t make this a film I’m likely to recommend to friends and family. And I felt that restraint slip in the phone call where Höss talks to Hedwig about (theoretically) how to gas a ballroom of partygoers.

Another day, another musical film of the musical play of the film of the book. And another property I wasn’t that invested in. I saw the original Lindsay Lohan Mean Girls only a few years ago and thought it was fine, but lacking the savage punk energy of the sublime Heathers to which it appears to owe a significant debt. And the unreality of Heathers means that it musicalises really very well (surely the musical film of Heathers can’t be too far away?) whereas this doesn’t have quite the same scope – but also it isn’t trying to be a heartfelt drama about important social issues either.

The cast are all pretty great, most of them new to me. Angourie Rice is a suitably winsome lead, Reneé Rapp, reprising her stage role, is excellent (taking over from Rachel McAdams) but Busy Philipps is a bit of a downgrade from Amy Poehler (whereas Tina Fey and Tim Meadows just reprise their roles, although Fey bizarrely has omitted to give herself anything funny to do). Jon Hamm has three lines, two of them in the trailer. MVP is the hilarious Avantika who bristles with comic energy whenever she’s on screen.

The plot is… Mean Girls. The songs are fine… There’s some sharp lyric writing and some nifty choreography, but I couldn’t hum any of the tunes today, less than 48 hours after seeing the movie. Without the novelty of seeing this for the first time in 2004, and without the excitement of a live performance, this feels constrained (as opposed to the film of Matilda which exploded off the big screen). Directing team Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr make it flow and feel cohesive in the way that Blitz Bazawule didn’t with The Color Purple, and there are flickers of imagination in numbers like “Apex Predator” but overall, this just seems a bit… plastic.

I don’t have a big investment in this property. I’ve never read the book and I didn’t see the Spielberg movie until a few years ago as part of my Best Pick project. Sitting down to watch this musicalised version (from the 2004 Broadway play), I realised that much of the previous movie had failed to stay with me. I remembered a couple of isolated scenes, a couple of characters and that was about all. Possibly a blessing as the twists and turns of the plot took me by surprise.

It’s not that I’ve got anything against this story, it’s just that it doesn’t mean much to me, so I’m unlikely to get cross if the creative team has made changes to the source material (or the source material of the source material). I can enjoy it – or not – on its own terms. And there is much to enjoy here. It all looks great, with outstanding production design from Paul D Austerberry, beautifully photographed by Dan Laustsen, and the story is as strong as ever. Does that story of rape, child murder, deprivation, spousal abuse, and general brutality work as a toe-tapping musical? Well, it doesn’t not work, and the best of the songs are suitably rousing, many of them gospel inflected.

But what’s weird about this is that it doesn’t really work as a musical film. My Fair Lady, for all its many virtues, is a bit of a slog, because it’s basically the entire text of Pygmalion with half of the dialogue reprised in song form, which means it takes far longer than is really necessary. This version of Alice Walker’s story has been carefully streamlined, winnowed to its essentials, so that even with around 16 songs, it actually runs slightly shorter than the 1985 version. (About a dozen more from the stage version were not ported over, which makes me think that the stage version might have been a bit of a slog too.)

But there’s no attempt to integrate the songs into the rest of the production. They’re almost all cut brutally short – less than two minutes. Once they’re over, they’re over – they never spill over into the next bit of dialogue, let alone the next scene. And there’s no hint in the rest of the action that this is a world in which people might start spontaneously singing and dancing. The songs never cover the moments of realisation, decisions made, corners turned, epiphanies experienced or relationships altering. All of that stuff happens between the musical numbers, meaning that this is a tale interrupted by songs, not a story told through music.

This is not a problem which seemed to affect other recent film musicals – it certainly isn’t an issue in the sublime movie version of Matilda for example, and nor did I notice it in the otherwise badly flawed Wonka. And I’m not saying that either the drama scenes or the musical numbers are bad – the best musical numbers are terrific (Miss Celie’s Pants was probably my favourite). But if you can go through your musical film and cut out all the musical numbers and have everything still work fine – which I reckon you could – then it does suggest that not all has gone according to plan.

The real pleasures here are in the performances. Top-billed Taraji P Henson is luminous as Shug, Colman Domingo (whose wry charisma enlivened many otherwise dull episodes of Fear the Walking Dead) is amazing as Mister – the character who arguably goes on the biggest journey. Danielle Brooks is a blazing, radiant presence, and when she’s crushed by incarceration, it almost feels like a death, until she finds her voice again (arguably a bit too quickly). But it’s movie debutante Fantasia Barrino as Celie who owns this film. Her wonderfully expressive eyes, her soaring voice, her fierce determination cover any number of structural issues – and she even tap dances at one point.

Ever find you just can’t remember the name of a film? I really enjoyed The End We Start From but whenever I wanted to tell someone about it, I couldn’t remember what it was called. Begin at the End? Starting at the End? Ending the Story? Finishing the Starting? So it was with Strange People, I mean All Strange Together, I mean The Strangers We Are, oh look, you know what I mean.

I have to confess that the prospect of watching this one struck me as the cinematic equivalent of eating my greens – Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal being gloomy for two hours, yay – but I was completely unprepared for how weird, off-kilter, lyrical and moving this ended up being. To examine it fully means spoilers, so I’ll dance around a few things in this brief review, but honestly – do yourself a favour and just go and see it.

Scott’s Adam is an isolated writer living in a terrifyingly uninhabited huge tower block, who reluctantly hooks up with Mescal’s Harry before a personal crisis takes him back to his home town, where he seemingly interacts with his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) who haven’t seen him since he was twelve years old, for the very good reason that that was how old he was when they both died in a car crash.

Mescal and Scott are seemingly an odd pairing. Scott’s a very “busy” actor, and it’s greatly to his credit that I’ve never seen a performance of his collapse under the weight of tics and mannerisms. But cut Paul Mescal and he bleeds pure naturalism. Although also Irish, he sounds Manchester here, and it’s never distracting, and despite their differing approaches, this also never feels like a clash of acting styles. Foy and Bell are superb too, and the only other credited actors are Adam’s 12-year-old self and a waitress.

But don’t let that fool you into thinking that this feels like a play. Although it is mainly people talking in rooms, writer-director Andrew Haigh makes it all feel effortlessly cinematic. And given the premise, you’ll rapidly grasp that few if any of the conversations are in any way possible, and yet all of them feel completely convincing, detailed and relatable.

Things get further fractured, dreamlike and bizarre from there, but Haigh wants us to feel, and not to question. The final twist never feels like a Twilight Zone ending – further cementing a kinship between this and Mescal’s triumph in Aftersun. To me there seemed to be clues throughout that Adam had died in a fire basically as soon as the movie started, but there’s no Jacob’s Ladder-style pull-back-and-reveal and so I wasn’t left feeling unfulfilled because I wasn’t being offered a nice neat ending, rather I felt vaguely ashamed that I’d been thinking along such ploddingly prosaic lines.

I gather this was based on Japanese book by one Taichi Yamada whose oeuvre I am not familiar with. But if the very cursory synopsis on Wikipedia is any guide at all, it seems as if the novel would be the shit version of this idea, whereas the movie version is quite transcendent.

Spoilers are funny things. Sometimes you just guess what’s coming next, which I generally think is bad luck more than anything else. Whenever you’re being told a story, you’re guessing what’s coming next. Anticipation is part of the pleasure, and knowing what’s coming next isn’t necessarily a problem. But if something is supposed to come at you from left-field and on your first viewing, you are able to predict it half an hour out, that doesn’t make for the best viewing experience.

What about stories based on life? Does it harm your enjoyment of Apollo 13 if you know the crew were all safely returned to Earth? Will you refuse to see Napoleon because you know what happens at Waterloo? Anyway. If the phrase “Ferrari 1957” doesn’t stir memories in you, you might prefer to watch this film first, and read this review later, because I had no idea what was coming and in the middle of a crowded cinema, I audibly gasped “Jesus!” But, Michael Mann’s narrowly-focused biopic has problems besides – although a key one is the placement of this historic event.

Early on, Mann does very little hand-holding. About the first twenty minutes of this movie is anonymous people getting on and off trains, leaving one house to go to another, making calls in which one person we don’t know tells another person we don’t know that a third person we don’t know has done something whose significance is uncertain. A few introductory captions or a “new kid” to whom things could be explained would have helped a lot.

Eventually things come into focus, and it becomes clear that Enzo Ferrari is struggling to hold his business together, juggling two families and pinning all of his hopes on winning the famous thousand mile “Mille Miglia” race, the glory of which will regenerate his car manufacturing business. But there’s precious little drama in any of this, and bizarrely having cast passionate, explosive Adam Driver (nominative determinism strikes again!) he’s then encouraged him to greet every turn of events – whether fortuitous, disastrous, bizarre or mundane – with the same dignified glower. It deadens the narrative and is a frankly confounding choice.

Penélope Cruz and Shailene Woodley feel a little freer – but all of these American actors have been asked to do Chico Marx Italian accents (except Cruz who just sticks with her natural Spanish) which adds an additional layer of absurdity. So after two hours of planning, pontificating, organising and glowering (mainly glowering), it’s race time. And the tired old Hollywood sports movie structure would suggest that this is when Ferrari seizes victory from the jaws of defeat. However, the problem here is that victory is in the hands of his drivers and all Ferrari can do is offer futile advice from the sidelines.

What actually happens – as you very well may know – is that although one of his drivers wins the race, another one has a blow-out at 120 miles an hour and spins off the road into a collection of excited onlookers, in a devastating accident which left eleven people dead, one of them gruesomely bisected. Five of them children. It’s an astonishing moment, and the power of it does galvanise the rest of the film. But if you were hoping to discover the effect that this has on Ferrari – as engineer, as one-time race driver, as family man, as entrepreneur – then you’ll be disappointed because ten minutes later the credits are rolling. Why is this hideous turning point not positioned in the middle of the film, so we can deal with the aftermath properly? (Wikipedia tells me that the court cases rumbled on for years.)

Everything is shot with Mann’s customary style and energy, and this did a decent job of teaching me about a bit of history I had no knowledge of. But it’s weighed down by poor choices in the fundamental organisation of the material, and a hugely disappointing turn from the magnificently talented Driver.