🧂 F1: The Movie (2025)

Joseph Kosinski proves he can make going fast look like the only thing that matters, then builds a redemption arc you could set a pit-stop timer to.

Directed by Joseph Kosinski. Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. 2025.

🧂 Salt: 5 / 10. A film this confident about every turn, on the track and in the script, shouldn't need its supporting cast reduced to narrative furniture. and ⭐ Stars: 7 / 10. Gorgeously shot, superbly cast, and the most physically convincing racing movie in a generation.

Rome had gladiators. Formula One has a man in a helmet outrunning a decades-old mistake at two hundred miles an hour.

Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt) has spent thirty years driving everything with an engine except the one series that broke him. A spectacular rookie-season crash left him with scars he won't discuss and a reputation as the most talented driver who never finished what he started. When his old teammate Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), now the struggling owner of backmarker team APXGP, calls in a favor, Sonny trades a camper van and a career of one-off rides for a seat he swore he'd never sit in again. APXGP hasn't scored a point in three seasons, the board wants to sell the team out from under Ruben by year's end, and Sonny's new teammate is Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), a hotshot rookie with the talent to replace him and zero patience for a has-been with a number older than he is.

Brad Pitt plays Sonny like a man who's spent three decades outrunning a single afternoon, and the movie is smart enough to let the silence do the work. Rather than monologuing about the crash that ended his first F1 career, Pitt lets it show up in the hesitations before he commits to an overtake and in how carefully he dodges direct questions about it. It's the best "movie star playing a guy whose whole personality is a cover story" turn in years, and the film is built almost entirely around his face behind a visor.

Damson Idris's Pearce is written as a mirror for Sonny's younger self, and the film leans on that symmetry harder than it needs to. Pearce gets the arrogance, the sponsor-ready confidence, and exactly one scene of real vulnerability before the plot moves on; everything else about him exists to be contrasted against Sonny. Idris is charismatic enough to make the shorthand mostly work, but "the kid who needs to learn humility from the old pro" is a seat the script never lets him climb out of.

Kerry Condon's Kate McKenna, the team's technical director, gets the film's one real argument about whether instinct should outrank data, and then the plot drops it the moment a romance subplot shows up. McKenna spends her early scenes rightly furious that a decades-retired driver is overriding her strategy calls on gut feeling, and Condon plays that friction like someone used to being the only person in the room doing actual engineering. The film is far more interested once that tension gets reframed as a will-they-won't-they, which is a worse use of her than the character it started with.

The racing itself, shot with modified cars on real Grand Prix weekends, is the reason to see this on the biggest screen available, and it's not close. Kosinski, who ran the same playbook with jets in Top Gun: Maverick, keeps the camera low enough that every slipstream pass and wheel-to-wheel block carries actual physical stakes, and the sound design turns an ordinary midfield scrap into an event. It's the rare racing movie that understands speed only reads as thrilling when you can feel the car fighting back.

The late-season crash that finally forces Sonny to confront the one he walked away from decades earlier is telegraphed from the opening scene, and the film cashes that check exactly as predicted. It works in the moment, Pitt sells the fear underneath the calm, but a movie this disciplined about racing logistics shouldn't resolve its central emotional wound with a plot beat you could set your watch to.

The verdict: a gorgeously shot, immaculately cast underdog sports movie that knows precisely how good racing should feel on film and precisely how a redemption arc is supposed to be structured, which is also its biggest limitation. Pitt carries it, Bardem and Condon ground him, Idris holds his own against a movie star twice his age, and Kosinski proves he can sell speed like nobody else working today. It just never once surprises you about where any of it is headed.

So why only five shakers? Because sidelining Condon's one genuinely interesting idea, an engineer fighting to keep instinct from overruling data, in favor of a romance subplot is a real waste, not a nitpick, and a film this sure-footed on the track shouldn't be this predictable off it.

So is F1 the smartest movie ever made about racing, or just the best-looking one? Mostly the second, and for two and a half hours in IMAX, that's more than enough.

Pass the salt. 🧂