Even if, like me, you hate F1, you'll enjoy this

I want to tell you, up front, that I despise Formula 1 motor-car racing. It strikes me as both insanely boring, and also far too closely aligned to the requirements of its (often evil) sponsors.

So I wouldn't normally have expected to enjoy a film like Senna, telling the story of the eponymous Brazilian F1 racing driver.

For those of you who, like me, are utterly indifferent to this so-called "sport", Senna burst onto the scene in 1984. His beauty only added to his allure.

He came from a middle-class Brazilian family at a time when there weren't so many of those, and he began his career in go-kart racing (something that later on he declared to be his greatest love, a "sport" unassailed by F1's politics and big money).

The PR story of his short ten year career was the intense rivalry between him and the then-current champion, the sophisticated Frenchman Alain Prost:

For a while they were team-mates, but they were both so far ahead of the rest of the pack that their battle between New World and Old World became almost Classical. It transcended the grubby world of F1 to engage even snobby people like me.

Asif Kapadia has made a film telling Senna's life story, consisting almost entirely of archive footage cut into a wonderful, engrossing montage. It includes some rather lovely home movies shot at the beach where Ayrton disports himself in very tight-fitting Speedos for our perving pleasure -- he was an extraordinarily sexy man.

Senna had already started using his fame and popularity to change the lives of impoverished children in his native country, work that continues today. But on the racing track he couldn't stop pushing himself and, perhaps inevitably, the three-times World Champion was killed in a crash in 1994, aged just 34.

So: Senna is set in a world I despise, about a subject I thought I would hate. That this film is both deeply affecting and utterly gripping is a tribute to Kapadia and, indeed, to Senna himself.

Highly recommended.