Review Roundup: Joseph Kosinski’s F1
Back in 2022, director Joseph Kosinski had a massive hit on his hand with Top Gun: Maverick. His latest film, F1, finds him pairing with another one of Hollywood’s biggest names — Brad Pitt — but this time around, the action is considerably more grounded in the world of Formula One racing.
Pitt plays an older racer whose glory days are well and behind him, but he’s given a second chance when an old friend asks him to mentor an up-and-coming driver, played by Damson Idris. F1 also stars Javier Bardem, Kerry Condon, and Shea Whigham along with a slew of Formula One drivers from the world’s top teams, including Red Bull Racing, Ferrari, and Mercedes.
Produced in conjunction with Apple Studios, who’ve seen past success with films like 2023’s Killers of the Flower Moon, F1 certainly looks flashy in all the right ways, but does it go the distance and cross the finish line? Read on to see what critics are saying.
While Top Gun: Maverick was a masterpiece that pulled viewers into events in and out of the cockpit, F1 is simply a competently assembled collection of underdog sports-drama clichés. It never convinces you that its protagonists are human beings… I was more invested in the podrace in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace than any of the races here.
It’s another slickly photographed, self-portentous parade of macho preening in which a rebellious veteran shows everyone else in the industry how to do their jobs, how to think and, in this case, how to wear their damn socks. Brad Pitt can do no wrong, even when he’s wrong. Thank God he’s here to make us all better people. That’s not annoying in the slightest.
I’m curious how F1 The Movie does in this cinematic climate; it’s the kind of crowd-pleaser that Hollywood made a ton of in previous decades but seems to have difficulty making these days, and while it’s not exactly IP-based, it’s familiar enough that audiences will likely come away feeling like they got their money’s worth. It could almost be considered critic-proof — its flaws are overcome by the skill of the filmmakers and the budget.
The director’s most salient credit is Top Gun: Maverick (2022), which did for Tom Cruise what F1 seeks to do for Pitt: assemble a grand Hollywood throwback, rife with high-stakes mischief and mentorship, that will affirm the mojo, but also the beneficence, of a gracefully aging star. For all that, it’s when the film slows down to allow Sonny a moment of misty-eyed career introspection that the proceedings slacken, leaving you suddenly impatient to get back to the track.
Your whole body will vibrate for the better part of this film’s speedy 156-minute running time, and few other blockbusters this summer will be more fun to experience at a level of volume that you can’t get at home, but loudness is a sad consolation prize for a movie whose own trailer didn’t need any sound at all to better capture the flow state that its protagonist lives to chase.
What sets F1 apart from those other offerings is how impressively Kosinki threads the realities of Formula 1 into his fictional narrative. Collaborating again with his Top Gun: Maverick screenwriter Ehren Kruger and DP Claudio Miranda, the director shapes a high-octane adventure about the late-career return of a once promising premier motorsport driver.
For a film both produced by and starring (in a brief but pivotal role) Lewis Hamilton, and otherwise happily populated by a real who’s who of the current F1 scene, Ehren Kruger’s script sidelines much of the real skill involved here, all those split-second decisions of when to pit and when to overtake. Instead, we’re called on to root for Brad Pitt’s washed-up veteran Sonny Hayes, an obnoxiously skewed take on Tom Cruise’s Maverick who treats the track like his own personal Ben-Hur chariot race.
A big-budget celebration of Formula 1, with an aim to be the definitive Formula 1 movie, F1 certainly captures the adrenaline of being in the driver’s seat on a visceral level, as well as the danger that lurks in every turn of the track.
If you’re matching it to [Top Gun: Maverick], F1 cannot compete; it certainly doesn’t have the same personal, life-or-death stakes for its characters or the increasing, relentless, seemingly impossible obstacles thrown at the protagonist the way a writer like McQuarrie is so good at creating. Yet, still, on its own merits, F1 is another stripe of muscular, exhilarating thrill ride that will connect with audiences.
F1 snaps to life whenever Pitt and Idris are in the thick of a race. It’s also a sweet spot for Kosinski: His camera moves with a zippy, voyeuristic quality that makes us feel like flies on the wall… or bugs on the windshield. We’re squished into the cockpit alongside Sonny and Joshua as they grapple with a split-second decision; we’re rigged to the side of their cars as their competitors jockey alongside them. It’s a dogfight to the finish, and F1 crafts vehicular combat to convey that sense of urgency, that unique thrill.
Rewatching it, I thought often of the joke people make during the Olympics, that each event should include a civilian for scale. We are so used to the way sports are presented to us on screen that we forget just how unnatural, and — in the case of racing — dangerous they can be. Occasionally throughout F1, usually at race tracks but not when the racers are being filmed in their cars, Kosinski abandons his IMAX bombast for something like Mann’s voyeurism. Violence, even death, hangs over these scenes to the point where you expect to see ghosts in the corner of the frame.
As expected given Kosinski’s track record as a generationally gifted visual stylist, the racing sequences employ every possible camera angle inside and outside the cars, over one shoulder or another, following the cars or dancing inches away from the drivers’s faces. Kosinski interweaves larger, widescreen shots of the cars in action, aggressively jostling for position, turning corners as sharply as humanly and technically possible, all while the specter of losing control and crashing hovers over the drivers.
F1 arrives in theaters on June 27, 2025. Watch the trailer below.
