There's no narrator, no contemporary footage and very little on its protagonist's personal life. Indeed, Asif Kapadia's Senna is one of the most sporting of sports documentaries – but no less gripping for it.
This is a Zidane-like portrait of the driver as an artist – following Senna from karting prodigy to his sparring with Alain Prost. Of course, the elephant in the film is Senna's fatal Imola crash in 1994 which punctuates almost every second leading up to the jaw-dropping sequence in which we follow Senna's final minutes via the in-car camera. The effect is that of being inside the head of a man with seconds to live. Breathtaking.
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