Ford v Ferrari Review

Mangold is making an old fashioned picture on purpose and the confidence is the appeal. The racing is shot with real cars at real speed by Phedon Papamichael, cutting between wheel level and cockpit and the driver's hands, and the sound design, which won an Academy Award, does most of the tension by letting you hear the gearbox being punished. Christian Bale plays Ken Miles as a spiky, funny, difficult man rather than a lovable eccentric, and Matt Damon underplays Carroll Shelby as the one person in the room who understands both engineering and politics.

The real conflict is not with Ferrari at all. It is with the Ford executives, and the senior one is written as a cartoon villain in a film that otherwise takes its people seriously. The domestic scenes with Caitriona Balfe are better written than this kind of picture usually manages. It runs long, it simplifies the history, and it is still the most purely enjoyable two and a half hours a major studio produced that year.