CHASING IT THE LAST GREAT CAR-CHASE FILM ISN'T FAST OR FURIOUS. IT'S RADICAL NINETIES NORMCORE.

JOHN FRANKENHEIMER WAS A HERO. An amateur racer in his twenties, the director crossed a Kurtzian line of sanity with his 1966 racing film, Grand Prix, placing art above safety.

- MIKE GUY

Frankenheimer shot Graham Hill and other drivers at racing speeds, and several near-fatal wrecks made it into the film. This kind of all-in dedication would have today's movie audience cringing.

But Grand Prix is not what solely makes Frankenheimer a hero to car-movie obsessives. There's also 1998's Ronin, an astonishing feat of action filmmaking that stands as the last of the great old-school, no-damned-CGI car-chase movies. Starring Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Sean Bean, and Stellan Skarsgård, Ronin openly embraces all the common tropes of el teatro de acción: spies, heists, a MacGuffin (Google it), the destruction of fruit stands, long-legged honey traps, and a lengthy obituary sheet of faceless bad guys who are by turns shot, mashed, mangled, and launched through guardrails into the bottomless seaside canyons of Côte d'Azur. A few innocent bystanders are offed too.

Before getting to Ronin's two landmark chase scenes, which reset the bar for all chase scenes to follow in cinema (even Fast & Furious fans know their franchise has never touched Ronin's refined insanity), a word about subtlety: Part of what makes this film a masterpiece is that the cars are, well, pretty basic. Think of the Nineties, and think of what your mom might have driven.