DAYS OF THUNDER (1990)
Director: Tony Scott
​Tom Cruise stars in the NASCAR epic he also wrote with Robert Towne, based loosely on the exploits of racer Tim Richmond and his crew chief Harry Hyde, with great performances from Robert Duvall, Randy Quaid, Nicole Kidman, Cary Elwes and Michael Rooker. The play-by-play is incredibly stylised and cliched as were most Tom Cruise films in the late 80s and early 90s, but it's as glorious as it is cheesy. The purists hate this movie because of how tongue-in-cheek and how unashamedly brazen the movie is, and yet motorsport fans can't quite resist it. The terms 'rubbin's racing' and 'hit the pace car' have now become folklore and it stands out in the mind of many fans. I personally love it, as it is the very embodiment of NASCAR. The fact that the team began shooting without a script is no real surprise - there's more ego in this movie than actual plot. But it certainly paints a quasi-realistic portrait of the machismo of motorsport in the American stock car racing scene. It's not a perfect film, but it certainly gets the pulses racing and many believe its the finest work of NASCAR fiction ever.

SANSON'S SCORE - 7/10 - It's cheesy and macho, blatantly dramatic, scores high on the 'fake gear change, fake throttle pedal' traps, but it's Oscar nomination for Best Sound was wholly deserved.

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MICHEL VAILLANT - 2003
Director: Louis-Pascal Couvelaire
We have to keep reminding ourselves here that this is a comic book, and in fact I'm a huge fan and collector of Jean Graton's creation. The characters in the big screen version do pay a nod to the characters on the page, but ultimately a car racing movie from France needs a few mandatory features - crashes (as big as possible), soap opera shenanigans, implausible plots and a quite unrealistic depiction of motorsport. You would think that the nation who started it all would be more in touch with the culture of it all, and yet this movie is probably France's greatest motorsport exponent. The cast lets this movie down a lot, as both Sagamore Stevenin and Peter Youngblood Hills are about as robotic as Marvin the Paranoid Android, but the storytelling is quite true to the character building and detail of the comics. The English are the baddies, the accidents defy the laws of physics and the editing gives you a headache. But Diane Kruger does make an effort in her leading lady stature, and its rare to see sportscars and rallying within the same movie. What it does well, it really does well.

SANSON'S SCORE - 6/10 - What lets this movie down is actually the editing suite. The idea and the concept are brilliant, and as much as my affection for Jean Graton's comic strips is sky high, the execution of the film is disappointing.

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