'Ferrari': The Need for Speed … and Beauty

Michael Mann is famous for crime dramas like Thief (1981), Heat (1995), and Collateral (2004) that suggest that only criminals can be free, since the rest of us are constantly bossed around. There is something of the Old Left as well as Romanticism in Mann’s attitude, and both elements of his artistic vision are foreign to our entertainment, just as his protagonists are marginal figures in our society. Most of his movies, moreover, are studies of men who are really good at getting what they want, and ours is a time when successful men are rejected, so Mann seems almost reactionary.