ANYONE BUT YOU might have been titled Shakespeare for Dummies, Starring Sydney Sweeney's Decolletage. Earlier this year, a couple of studio comedies (Joyride and No Hard Feelings) threatened to revivify the genre with new perspectives and insightful, pointed writing in service of jokes that are actually funny; it felt like a moment. This, on the other hand, seems distinctly regressive. It reads like a reaction to a reaction that, despite its gossamer attempts at self-awareness and topicality, is woefully out of step and out of touch. Worse yet, it offers precious few laughs.

The missteps start right out of the gate, with the script misguidedly presuming that a meet-cute can become the sum-total of a story. When Bea (Sweeney), confronted with a bathroom emergency and confounded by a churlish barista, is rescued by the gallant Ben (Glen Powell), romance, in inevitable screwball fashion, seems imminent. That promise continues to loom as they spend a charmed evening getting to know each and falling asleep in each other's arms. But then a preemptive escape leads to some needlessly harsh words and the idyll is rather precipitously ruptured. The movie then insists on a couple of unimaginative exchanges between the two to belabor the idea that they've come to hate each other.

She, an aimless law student pressured by helicopter parents, leans rather gracelessly into her struggle to establish her sense of self. He embraces his inner dirtbag stockbroker.

Some time — years? — later, the two of them are surprised by entirely unsurprising invitations to a destination wedding in Sydney (a little on the nose). Both are further shocked to reencounter former paramours, for whom they may or may not still harbor feelings. Meanwhile, their friends and family hatch an idiotic and even more poorly executed plan to bring Bea and Ben back together (that's the Shakespeare part). This rather impressive cast is capable of better work than this, Sweeney and Powell not least among them. But any sense of true attraction or antipathy between the two of them is notably, almost cruelly absent. The movie's sense of sexiness is weirdly abstruse, couched in sophomoric leering to such an extent that its one sex scene, for all its misplaced earnestness, is neither erotic nor romantic. And the whole notion of the elites at play smacks of an attempted throwback that only comes off as tone deaf. R. 103M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.

FERRARI. If asked to draw an automotive analog for the work of grandmaster Michael Mann, I would have likely have leaned more Teutonic than Romantic. Mann, a more detail oriented American filmmaker than perhaps any other, has spent the last half century building a body of work defined by study and precision, seemingly of form following function. His movies, so often defined by an exquisite, industrial brutalism, are studies of masters at work, usually thieves and warriors. They are beautiful to look at, certainly. But not in the lusty, fiery way one might gaze at a curvaceous, blood-red race car; or so I thought.

With Ferrari, adapted from Brock Yates' biography Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine by Troy Kennedy Martin, Mann has created another masterpiece and, at 80, again advanced the language of cinematic storytelling. And he has done so by also engaging with complex emotional themes in a way that feels new and timeless.

Set in 1957, with Ferrari's (Adam Driver) company and marriage to business partner Laura (Penelope Cruz) in similarly dire straits, the movie succeeds equally as a domestic drama suffused with inescapable grief and a thrilling depiction of automobile racing in perhaps its most lethal period. All but estranged by the death of their son the year before, Enzo and Laura struggle to find common ground in the salvation of their company. Meanwhile, he carries on a long-term affair with Lina Lardi (Shailene Woodley), a union that has produced a son who doesn't share his father's name. It's a messy, distinctly mid-20th century bit of Italian business, but Mann and director of photography Erik Messerschmidt find a visual way into the narrative that grounds it in its place and time while transcending nostalgia.

There are techniques on display here, as is Mann's trademark, that belie the granular attention to detail required to create their effect. The interiors and dialog sequences achieve an ultramodern intensity of focus set against Renaissance chiaroscuro, while the racing (and crashing) is staged and shot to truly, viscerally represent the breathless, telescopic feeling of a machine hurtling through space. It's all humanity on the ragged edge and it has never looked so good. Which would all seem like a neat trick, if not for the depth of performance by the cast. Driver has established himself as one of the most devoted and versatile, if unlikely leading men of a generation, largely because he adroitly dispenses with any notion of self-aggrandizement in his selection of roles and execution thereof. He depicts Ferrari as a man very much in possession of himself, but fully aware of the greater forces and emotions that have compelled such a level of composure and resolve. And Cruz, giving one of the best, most startling performances of the year (century?), makes Laura every bit his equal and his foil. R. 124M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK.

John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase

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Fortuna Theatre is temporarily closed. For showtimes call: Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456; Mill Creek Cinema 839-3456; Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.