Williams

Markedly different from the run-of-the-mill motor-racing documentary, this is a fondly intimate profile of the Williams family and the Formula One team it has run since 1977. Making effective use of archival race footage, director Morgan Matthews keeps the sporting focus on Frank Williams and his rise from being a daring, but limited racer to becoming a pioneering team owner in conjunction with designer Patrick Head and such stalwart drivers as Alan Jones, Nelson Piquet and Nigel Mansell. But the discovery of the audio tapes that his wife Virginia had made while writing her 1991 marital memoir, A Different Kind of Life, also allows Matthews to examine an often difficult relationship that was transformed by the 1986 road accident that left Williams a tetraplegic. The soft-focus reconstructions of Ginny's cosy armchair chats with co-author Pamela Cockerill are a miscalculation, but Matthews laudably avoids glossing over the clan's personal and professional problems, right down to the ongoing feud between deputy team principal Claire Williams and her older brother, Jonathan.