This list was originally published August 15, 2017. It’s been updated to include new movies, including Ferrari.
It seems like a good bet that the car movie will always be with us. Of course, a “car movie†can mean many things — from a racing flick to a road movie to, well, a film that’s just set among cars in general. Regardless, let’s take a step back and look at some of the best car movies over the years, and do so in an all-encompassing, inclusive way. This list of movies is quite eclectic — it includes gearhead classics, cult standbys, noirs, modern blockbusters, art-house favorites, and even some genuine obscurities. Along the way, it became clear to us that a “car movie,†more than anything, is a film where a car plays a key role in the way a character interacts with the world — be it as a weapon, a tool, a dream, a setting, or a metaphor. Here are the 39 greatest car movies. (And as usual, we’ve stuck to one film per franchise, lest you wonder why there aren’t half a dozen Fast and Furious movies on this list.)
39. The Car (1977)
This is basically Jaws with a car, and it’s just as loony as that sounds. A black automobile, presumably from the depths of Hell, terrorizes a small town, and it’s local lawman James Brolin’s job to stop it. Utterly ridiculous, at times laughably so. But that’s kind of its genius, too: Because this car does all sorts of things a car could never actually do, you never quite know what to expect. Directed by Elliot Silverstein, this cult horror flick was a late-show mainstay: Any kid switching channels late at night in the ’80s when those ominous “Dies Irae†chords came on knew he or she was in for something special.
38. Drive (2011)
This movie isn’t quite the masterpiece it was billed as at the time, but it is a fascinating blend of pop influences — the terse gearhead classics of the ’70s, the New Age stylings of the ’80s, the hip irony of the millennial era. Director Nicolas Winding Refn knows how to shoot violence, but more important, he knows how to anticipate violence. And using an almost comically inexpressive Ryan Gosling (playing a stunt-driver-cum-getaway-driver, not unlike Ryan O’Neal in The Driver), he builds elaborate, deadpan set pieces that are unnerving in the way they promise graphic, brutal horrors that the film only occasionally shows. Plus, let’s face it, the soundtrack is cool.
37. Thunder Road (1958)
In this classic 1958 noir set in the world of illegal mountain moonshiners, Robert Mitchum plays a young vet working as a transporter — one of “those wild and reckless men, who transport illegal whisky from its source to its point of distribution,†using souped-up cars. This wasn’t a fanciful movie creation; it was an actual subculture. The film may not have the authentic details of those classic car movies that would start to come out a decade or so later, but Mitchum is, and will always be, the coolest cat onscreen. Give him a hot rod, and he’s suddenly cooler.
36. The Italian Job (1969)
“You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!†Cockney con man Michael Caine, recently released from the clink, puts together a truly ludicrous heist to steal $4 million in Mafia gold bullion from the middle of Turin using Mini Coopers. It’s an odd, silly little movie, but it’s filled with charming bits, from Noel Coward as an aristocratic gangster to Benny Hill as a pervy prof to Quincy Jones’s jazzy score. Most importantly, the central heist and its ludicrous aftermath are delightfully well-executed. Though quite different in tone and style, the Fast and Furious movies owe a lot to this bubbly cult classic.
35. The Transporter (2002)
Jason Statham, who has now joined the Fast and Furious franchise, scored his first franchise playing an expert driver who gets paid to transport cargo — any kind of cargo, no questions asked. Many of us underrated this movie at the time; the silliness just seemed to be too much, and Statham’s stoic demeanor felt stiff, despite his considerable physical prowess. But over the years, he and the film have grown on us, gaining a wonderfully surreal, retroactive sheen. This is a fun, freewheeling, and oh-so-French action flick — the kind of movie that can slow down to ruminate on madeleines and Proust before proceeding with the mayhem. That, of course, is the EuropaCorp house style. The Luc Besson–led production company has also given us the Taken films, Lucy, and any number of other nutty, corny, go-for-broke action spectacles.
34. Mercedes, Mon Amour (1992)
Part The Bicycle Thieves, part The Old Man and the Sea, this little-known Turkish gem is a hilarious, poignant tale of a poor villager who goes to work in Germany and saves up to buy himself a beloved yellow Mercedes. Hoping to bask in the glory of his hard-earned success, he attempts to drive it back to his village, only to meet many roadblocks along the way — much of them having to do with his own venality and materialism, as well as Turkey’s infamously horrendous drivers. A very human tale that manages also to be a keen social satire.
33. Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (1974)
Peter Fonda and Adam Roarke play two zero-to-100 holdup artists/racers who rob a huge supermarket, only to get saddled with the NASCAR groupie (Susan George) whom Fonda’s character bedded the night before. Speeding away from the cops in, first, a souped-up 68 Chevy Impala, and then a garish Dodge Challenger, the trio bicker and banter relentlessly. Meanwhile, the pissy, frustrated lawman (Kenneth Tobey) trying to coordinate the manhunt has to deal with abject incompetence and mind-boggling bureaucracy, as well as his own desire to relive his youth. There isn’t a single sane person in this movie, but the tremendous stunts, crossed with the film’s surprisingly easygoing atmosphere, have made this a car classic.
32. Gone in 60 Seconds (2000)
First, a word about the original: The 1974 Gone in 60 Seconds, directed by stuntman and towing/impounding impresario H.B. Halicki, is one of the strangest films of all time, a series of stitched-together car scenes and stunts held together with dialogue that attempts to relay an elaborate story of a group of thieves robbing a whole crapload of cars; it’s borderline unwatchable. The remake is pretty much the exact opposite: an impossibly slick, Jerry Bruckheimer–produced, star-studded heist flick that goes down smooth and easy. Nicolas Cage is the master thief who has to steal 50 cars in 96 minutes. His teammates include Robert Duvall and Angelina Jolie. The car set pieces are ludicrous, and ludicrously enjoyable.
31. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (2006)
At his best, Will Ferrell can effortlessly shred the delusional, almost psychotic machismo of the American male — and he can do it with a smile. In NASCAR, he found the perfect target. One of Ferrell’s biggest and best movies was this hilarious racing spoof, which followed the rise and fall and rise of a smug champion racer, his complicated friendship with best pal and fellow racer John C. Reilly, and his rivalry with an effete, snotty Frenchman played by Sacha Baron Cohen. The movie moves between cock-of-the-walk triumph and utter humiliation with such quicksilver ease that you might get carsick.
30. Smokey and the Bandit
Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham’s outlaw classic was the proverbial cinematic underdog: It was released initially in Southern states, bypassing big media markets and critics, and only gradually made its way to the rest of the country; this grassroots theatrical release (which Steven Soderbergh tried to replicate years later, with Logan Lucky) wound up making Smokey the second biggest hit of the year, behind only Star Wars. Reynolds plays the Bandit, who with his Trans-Am serves as a high-flying decoy for his pal Snowman (Jerry Reed), who is driving a truck full of outlawed Coors Beer across state lines. Sally Field is the runaway bride who hitches a ride with them, which in turn results in local sheriff (and her would-be-father-in-law) Smokey Bear (Jackie Gleason!) pursuing them. Director Needham was a legend in the world of stunts (Brad Pitt’s character in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is partly based on him) and he fills the movie with speeding, flipping, spinning cars. But what makes it special is the way that Bandit’s journey, especially as it plays out over CB radio, brings entire communities together, gradually turning him into a folk hero as the picture proceeds.
29. Autostop (1991)
In 1990, the Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov (who would later win an Oscar for Burnt by the Sun) was enlisted to make a short promotional film for Fiat, but wound up creating this magical short feature instead. In this evocative, melancholy tale, an Italian champion racer is tasked with driving a car from Italy into Russia. Along the way, as the clean roads of Europe give way to the snowy, forbidding desolation of Russia, the film becomes a haunting meditation on belonging: This lonely man with no family and seemingly no life goes from having meaningless, fly-by-night interactions to unwittingly putting together a weird, dysfunctional surrogate family for himself. And like the best car movies, what seemed like a mundane tale of man and machine becomes a metaphor for how we live our lives.
28. The Last American Hero (1973)
Jeff Bridges found one of his great early roles with this drama about Junior Jackson, a brilliant young moonshine runner who turns to the stock-car-racing circuit after his dad winds up behind bars. Based on a true story, this is as much a coming-of-age tale as it is a car-racing flick — from down-home demolition derbies to the big-time NASCAR circuit, Junior’s journey is one of ambition, temptation, and growing self-awareness. The car scenes are rough, authentic, and often deeply compelling — mainly because the fresh-faced Bridges is so damned charismatic.
27. Locke (2013)
Tom Hardy sits in a car, juggling a variety of duties: A woman he had an affair with is about to give birth, and he’s trying to make it to the hospital; he has to remotely oversee an immense “concrete pour†for a new construction (this is a way bigger deal than it sounds, trust us); and he has to explain to his family why he won’t be home to watch a big soccer match with his son. The film’s tension comes not from anything to do with the car, but with the increasing urgency of all these things bearing down on our hero. And Hardy, giving one of his greatest performances, is the very picture of cool, calm competence. As his confidence begins to fray, and as his smoothly speeding vehicle starts to seem like more and more of a prison, the film becomes almost heart-stoppingly suspenseful.
26. Grand Prix
This 1966 John Frankenheimer effort and 1971’s Le Mans (see next entry) initially started off as competing studio racing epics about the European circuit, and in some cases the movies wound up terribly similar: Ridiculous authenticity and impressive racing sequences tempered by Hollywood pablum. Grand Prix is arguably the more “studio†of the two: Frankenheimer was working at the height of his powers, and the racing sequences he put together with the legendary Saul Bass are eye-popping-ly intense and gorgeous, while the paint-by-numbers melodrama, about a variety of drivers engaging in a dangerous sport and the women who love and occasionally betray them, is elevated by some fine performances. (James Garner! Yves Montand! Toshiro Mifune! Eva Marie Saint! Jessica Walter!) It’s honestly the kind of movie for which the studio system existed. How amazing would it have been to see this in 70mm on the biggest screen imaginable?
25. Le Mans
Even more than Grand Prix, this feels like two movies: One is basically a documentary about the 1970 24 Hours of Le Mans race, featuring footage of the actual cars and drivers, combined with impressive behind-the-scenes footage. (The filmmakers reportedly shot an ungodly amount of film, much of which was apparently lost.) The other is a weirdly underdeveloped drama about Steve McQueen romancing the widow of the fellow driver whose fiery death he fears he caused. Of course, McQueen was probably distracted: He was a racing nut himself, and wanted the film to have as much authenticity as it could. In some ways, the impoverished narrative serves to highlight the strikingly authentic racing scenes: Everything falls away so that we can focus on the cars, which is clearly what the filmmakers themselves did.
24. Taxi (2015)
The Iranian director Jafar Panahi has been banned from filmmaking by his government, though it has somehow not stopped him from making some really personal, shape-shifting, documentary-style investigations of his own life. This film is set entirely inside a taxi cab that Panahi is driving around Tehran, as different people drift in and out of his car with their own strange and very personal dramas. It’s not all quite as nonfiction as it might first appear: Many of these interactions seem scripted and pointed — subtly exposing troubling aspects of Iranian society, as well as of Panahi’s own role in that world. It’s a revealing, gripping movie. And it’s also a great existential take on interiority: In Panahi’s view, the cocoon created by an automobile between the driver and the outside appears to be not dissimilar to the one between an artist and the world.
23. Thelma & Louise (1991)
Few people ever think of this Ridley Scott–directed, Callie Khouri–written classic as a “car movie,†but it totally fits when you think about it. Fleeing from their oppressive lives, our heroes, played by Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, take the standard trajectory of liberation embodied by the macho road movie and give it a feminist kick. In doing so, they also assume and transform some of the typical elements of such movies — the gun, the one-night stand, and, yes, the car. And the film’s much-discussed, controversial finale — with its nods to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, as well as the climaxes of such gearhead classics as Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry — takes on a new hue when you start to think of the whole thing as a car movie.
22. Christine (1983)
John Carpenter’s adaptation of Stephen King’s classic novel is pretty much the last word in possessed automobiles. Nerdy, shy teen Keith Gordon becomes obsessed with his new 1958 Plymouth Fury and starts to become more aggressive, ruthless … different. Is it the car? (It’s totally the car.) King’s wacky premise was gripping on the page, but Carpenter’s coolly efficient direction — along with ace acting from young stars Gordon and John Stockwell, both of whom would go on to become acclaimed filmmakers themselves — turns it into something more: a nasty nightmare of teenage self-actualization.
21. The Driver (1978)
Walter Hill’s tense thriller about a stoic stuntman (Ryan O’Neal) working as a getaway driver was a key influence on later films such as Drive, but it itself is essentially an Americanized, automotive remake of Jean-Pierre Melville’s seminal hit-man drama Le Samourai. As in Melville’s film, a level-headed professional who makes sure not to have any attachments or emotional baggage finds himself drawn to a fellow human. And little by little, his isolation (in this case, represented by his car) starts to dissolve, and he finds himself more vulnerable than ever before.
20. The Hitchhiker (1953)
“This is the true story of a man and a gun and a car. The gun belonged to the man. The car might have been yours …†One of the all-time great film noirs, this 1953 thriller was directed by the great Ida Lupino. Two men on their way to Mexico for a fishing trip pick up a hitchhiker, who turns out to be a psychotic killer. The man holds them hostage and makes them drive him to California. Oh, and he tells the two men he’ll kill them when the trip is over. The film is remarkable not just for its claustrophobic, white-knuckle tension, but also for the way it subtly toys with the freedom of America’s burgeoning car culture and the open road. The killer is a man who, for all his delusions, pokes at the other men’s complacency and domesticity — making this thriller a forerunner of everything from Easy Rider to The Hitcher to Collateral.
19. Vanishing Point (1971)
Richard Sarafian’s surreal cult road movie has a mysterious speed freak (in all senses of the word) leading police in multiple Western states on an epic chase as he runs into a cross section of post-’60s washouts and recalls the various events of his life (including a spectacular racetrack crash). Meanwhile, a blind small-town radio DJ narrates, encourages, and mythologizes the journey. Equal parts art-house whatsit and car-fetish classic, the film works so well thanks to director Sarafian’s ability to shoot a chase, as well as his feel for the landscape.
18. Rush (2013)
Ron Howard’s biopic about the ’70s rivalry between Formula One racers Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) and James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) is over the top in all the right ways. The director has always dealt in broad strokes, and here he pits these two men against one another as elemental opposites: the Nerdy Scrivener versus the Easygoing Hedonist. The two leads are excellent, and they keep the somewhat predictable tale of obsessive competition grounded. As their rivalry develops — and with it, of course, their friendship — the film also gives us big, bold, crazy sequences that capture the danger and allure of racing. We wince in terror and keep asking for more. It’s a wonderful film that for whatever reason got ignored by audiences.
17. Baby Driver (2017)
Edgar Wright’s ambitious crime comedy-romance-musical-action epic — about a brilliant young iPod-obsessed getaway driver (Ansel Elgort) trying to break free of the mob boss (Kevin Spacey) for whom he’s been working — features some of the most surreally insane car chases of all time, perfectly choreographed to the coolest rock soundtrack in forever. That crucial connection between cars and music has certainly been explored by other filmmakers over the years, but Wright takes things further: He finds in the protagonist’s primal connection to cars and music a poignant symbol for his emotional isolation, his need to hold the world at bay.
16. Tucker: The Man and His Dream (1988)
Director Francis Ford Coppola and producer George Lucas teamed up for this glitzy, beautiful, and surprisingly personal biopic about postwar inventor Preston Tucker (Jeff Bridges), who took on the big car companies as an independent automaker and effectively got crushed. But in Coppola and Lucas’s telling, Tucker won a victory of sorts. Many of his inventions and innovations, such as seat belts, are commonplace today, and the film only somewhat ironically treats his story as one of triumph. It’s easy to see how these two powerful, independent filmmakers — especially Coppola, for whom this was a longterm dream project — might recognize themselves in this story of a stubborn, brilliant man who attempted to play on the same stage with his more powerful, ruthless competitors.Â
15. Two for the Road (1967)
Stanley Donen’s classic romantic drama features Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn as a bitter, affluent married couple driving their Mercedes through France as they flash back over key events in their life together — many of which also involve them driving somewhere. Written by Frederic Raphael (who had written Darling and would later write Eyes Wide Shut), the film is a mesmerizing portrait of how love decays. And in its constant movement, with its almost frantic tempo, it suggests that time, much like that Mercedes, is kind of a prison when it comes to love. The film’s odd tone — propulsive yet melancholy, cutting yet reflective — seems to embody the fact that nothing ever stays the same.
14. Ford v. Ferrari
In director James Mangold’s epic dramatization of Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Ken Miles’s (Christian Bale) early-’60s attempts to build an American race car that could beat Ferrari at the 24-hour race at Le Mans, expertly written gearhead technospeak coexists with intense, you-are-there driving sequences. Bale gives one of his best performances as a mouthy, brilliant, no-bullshit engineer and driver, and Tracy Letts’s turn as Henry Ford II alternates breathtakingly between macho bluster and weak-kneed awe, but the real stars of the show are the cars, often shot from the inside to create an incredibly immersive work. While other car movies have headed in more surreal and self-consciously artificial directions, this one stays grounded, with marvelous results: It’s the classic car movie as modern-day blockbuster.
13. Death Proof (2007)
Quentin Tarantino’s homage to Z-grade exploitation flicks and cult car movies — initially presented as one half of the omnibus film Grindhouse — is an excellent horror movie, the ultimate car-stunt flick, and a bizarre hangout movie, full of the director’s patented longueurs and extended scenes of seemingly irrelevant dialogue. Tarantino gives us a stunt driver (Kurt Russell) who gets off on killing carloads of unsuspecting females. In the first half of the film, we see him stalk and consume his prey; in the second half, we watch a group of victims as they fight back. The film is touching, alluring, and thrilling in equal measure — but like many of Tarantino’s greatest films, it also has the playful, experimental quality of a narrative puzzle.
12. Taste of Cherry (1997)
The late Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami made so many films set in and around cars that I sometimes wish he’d gotten a Fast and Furious installment, just so to see what lunacy he might have come up with. In this Palme d’Or–winning drama, a middle-aged Iranian man drives around searching for someone who will bury him after he commits suicide. That’s a depressing setup, but the film is a lot gentler. Kiarostami uses the car both as a psychological and sociological tool — it represents our character’s isolation, but it also represents a way that individuals can have private interactions in this heavily policed religious state. As Kiarostami treats us to extended scenes of his protagonist driving around, the landscape gliding past his windows, something mesmerizing and even kind of exciting emerges. In its own way, this is as great a car movie as something more iconic, like Vanishing Point or Two-Lane Blacktop.
11. Joy Ride (2001)
In one of the great, underrated thrillers of the last two decades, brothers Paul Walker and Steve Zahn (the former’s a fresh-faced romantic, the latter’s a loose cannon ex-con) compete over co-ed Leelee Sobieski as they run afoul of a faceless, psycho trucker they toyed with over the CB. Sex and cars: Director John Dahl brings out the unsettling undertones even as he orchestrates some fantastically terrifying set pieces. Playing a likable but selfish loser, Zahn has never been better; and the boyish, charming Walker freaks out like nobody’s business; the film’s greatest asset is the fraternal chemistry between these two.
10. Fast Five (2011)
It wasn’t so much that the earlier Fast and the Furious films were realistic. But in their own crazy way, they had adhered to some semblance of plausibility. With their focus on the street-racing subculture, and on the specific capabilities of the cars themselves, they were amped-up carsploitation movies. With the fifth entry in the franchise, however, the series went Bond — becoming an international fantasia of increasingly fantastical set pieces, each one more ludicrous than the last. There was no reason for it to work, but director Justin Lin (who has now shepherded five of these movies, in the process turning this franchise from a box-office also-ran to an international phenomenon) captured just the right lighthearted, cartoonish tone to make it all sing. Furious 7 came close to topping it — and who knows, maybe it will with the passing of time — but for now, Fast Five remains the pinnacle of this series.
9. Speed Racer
How to even describe Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s adaptation of the popular 1960s anime series? To call this “live-action†wouldn’t really do justice to its swirling kineticism, its eye-popping colors and intricate, wildly emotional narrative and speed-demon pacing; it’s like being trapped inside a kaleidoscope for two hours, in the best possible way. Emile Hirsch’s Speed Racer is all drive as he attempts to redeem his supposedly dead brother Rex’s legacy — John Goodman and Susan Sarandon play his parents, and Christina Ricci his girlfriend, Trixie — and the Wachowskis film the family stuff with the same candy-colored freneticism they bring to the racing sequences. The directors understand that the appeal of the original had nothing to do with cars and everything to do with cartoon spectacle and extreme emotion. As a result, they don’t try to make it realistic in any way — if anything, their Speed Racer looks even faker than the series did. But the groundbreaking effects practically create an alternate level of being: something beyond mere animation, or mere live-action. You’ve never seen anything like this. And it was a flop, so you probably never will see anything else like it again.
8. Duel (1971)
Though it was made for TV, most folks consider this to be Steven Spielberg’s first real feature. It’s certainly the first time that we got a full view of his awesome talent. Dennis Weaver is the mild-mannered commuter stuck behind the wheel of a car that’s being terrorized by a mysterious tractor trailer for no discernible reason. What starts off as a tight little thriller becomes a fascinating study in masculinity. Weaver is the Eternal Pushover, the guy who is always getting stepped on and pushed aside. His massive, beastly, seemingly indestructible pursuer is everything that he’s not. The back and forth between these two figures — between, essentially, man and fate — has a delicious, delirious existential kick. Plus, this movie, written by Richard Matheson, is just plain exciting as hell.
7. Holy Motors (2012)
In Leos Carax’s masterpiece, the enigmatic Monsieur Oscar (Denis Lavant) rides through Paris in a limo, inhabiting wildly different characters along the way — each scene seemingly resulting in a big, emotionally cathartic moment … before Oscar just casually moves on to the next thing. What in God’s name is this? A religious allegory? A metaphor about acting and/or filmmaking? A meditation on the constantly shifting nature of the modern world? A vision of a soul adrift? One thing’s for sure: In that recurring image of Oscar being driven through town in his limo, Carax captures a perfect visual metaphor for the character’s episodic, slightly distanced journey through this bizarre, patchwork existence.
6. Repo Man (1984)
Alex Cox’s cult classic is an unclassifiable comedy about a suburban punk kid (Emilio Estevez) who falls in with a veteran repo man (Harry Dean Stanton) and learns “the repo code,†while a story line involving stolen aliens, punk criminals, government agents, televangelists, and ex-hippies swirls around him. Director Cox tackles consumerism, commodification, capitalism, and conformism, but he’s not a scold. He has that unique ability to create barbed satire while also conjuring up ridiculously memorable characters, never letting his righteous anger get in the way of his humanism. The result is a movie that defined the punk ethos for an entire generation of viewers.
5. Collateral (2004)
Michael Mann’s thriller about a Los Angeles cabbie (Jamie Foxx) and his hit-man passenger (Tom Cruise) absolutely is a car movie, in case you’re wondering: It’s all about how Foxx’s cab represents a safe cocoon through which he experiences the world, and which keeps him from seizing the life that he could be living. When Cruise’s white-haired assassin enters that cocoon, he begins to poke at Foxx’s careful, controlled sense of self; the cab ride from hell turns out to be a rite of passage. How appropriate, then, that Foxx’s most important assertion of his identity comes when he totals the cab with both of them in it. Meanwhile, Mann’s beloved Los Angeles cityscapes have never been more vivid or beautiful.
4. Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)
Monte Hellman’s classic (and classically quiet) road movie about a Driver (James Taylor), a Mechanic (Dennis Wilson), and a Girl (Laurie Bird) racing a man in a GTO (Warren Oates) cross-country is the kind of moody, beguiling movie you want to see over and over again — and which reveals a little more upon each viewing. Co-written by Rudy Wurlitzer, the film is not exactly a metaphor, not exactly a drama. Instead, in the occasionally perplexing interactions between these characters, it creates a strange little ecosystem of competition, codependence, resentment, and alienation. But most unforgettable are the fantastic driving sequences and the almost casually riveting performances — with James Taylor making for a perfectly intense (and surprisingly charismatic) lead, an ideal foil for the garrulous, slightly helpless Oates.
3. Ferrari (2023)
Oh, look, it’s Michael Mann again — this time in a totally different car-movie mode. The director actually bears some responsibility for making Ferraris a Thing. The white Testarossa in the first two seasons of Miami Vice was probably the first time a lot of Generation X heard the name “Ferrari.†But Mann’s biopic about Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) is less about cars and more about racing and one’s self-destructive drive to be the best. Focusing on just a few crucial months in the year 1957, Ferrari alternates between composed, intimate scenes of domestic adoration and strife on one side — as Enzo juggles life with his long-suffering wife (Penelope Cruz) and the woman with whom he’s started another family (Shailene Woodley) — and totally unhinged, deafening, and breathtaking racing sequences on the other. That it all ends in unspeakable and gruesome tragedy is historically accurate, sure, but it’s also perhaps a suggestion that you can’t outrace your demons.
2. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
The Mad Max series has always been the greatest of car movie franchises — mixing director George Miller’s pitch-black dystopian visions with highly stylized filmmaking and mind-blowing, real-life car stunts. Debate will probably range for eternity as to whether Fury Road (the fourth entry) tops The Road Warrior (the second), but it’s hard to deny that this most recent installment turbocharges every one of those aforementioned elements: The dystopia is even darker, the filmmaking more stylized, and the stunts nuttier. Even the lead is grimmer than before, with Tom Hardy easily out-brooding his predecessor Mel Gibson. And, of course, this picture is the one that gives us such indelible characters as the Imperator Furiosa and Immortan Joe. Still, what’s truly incredible about Fury Road is how, amid its relentless, propulsive action sequences — and this really is a film that almost never settles down — we learn so much about these characters and the terrifying world they inhabit. It’s a waking nightmare, a breathtaking thrill ride, and a bewildering work of art.
1. Taxi Driver (1976)
No complaining. It totally is a car movie. Sure, Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece is not a gearhead classic; you won’t find car nuts fetishizing it or anything like that. But this study of loneliness, madness, and violence is all about the way cabbie Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) drifts through the city — the dank, smoky streets forming a vision of Hell as they glide past his windshield. In the way it creates a seemingly impermeable border between Travis and the world, and in the way that the figures who step into his cab, each in their own way, penetrate his sense of identity, this is not just a car movie; it’s the ultimate car movie.