The Last Race (2018, Michael Dweck) (Patreon)

Like The Challenge, explores a subculture about which I couldn't care less—Qatari falconry there, American stock-car racing here—and enthralls me by making it strange and beautiful. Dweck doesn't push as hard into WTF abstraction; he's got a clear thesis (also reflected in his still photography, apparently), celebrating the last vestige of a once-thriving community and lamenting its inevitable engulfment by corporate ooze. Yet this never feels like an issue doc, much less like a tract. Interview subjects are framed in arresting compositions, and sometimes sound slightly rehearsed—possible remnants of what was originally intended as more of a fiction-doc hybrid. Fascinating, Errol Morris-style digressions into drivers' day jobs and hobbies abound. Anger repeatedly erupts and then subsides, just part of the landscape; so, too, are quiet pride and infectious elation. (This is a more richly human film than The Challenge, I should note, lacking the latter's almost entomological remove. Give it a chance even if that one didn't send you.) And Dweck finds ways to make the races themselves uniquely thrilling, whether by placing the camera in an unorthodox spot on the vehicle (creating whatever you'd call the horizontal equivalent of a vertiginous effect, in which we move closer and closer to the racetrack's logo on the outer wall with each very fast revolution around the track) or by tweaking the sound mix to isolate a driver's heavy breathing. (Use of Mozart's Requiem in D minor is also effective, though Spike Lee got there first with Copland.) This is why I try to watch at least the first 10 minutes of pretty much every film that anyone I trust enjoys, no matter how unappealing it seems to me on the surface. You never know when sheer artistry will suck you in.