Warning: This piece contains spoilers for F1.

Well here’s something I wasn’t expecting to say before this weekend: the Formula One movie is one of the best films released so far this year. 2025 has had some solid hits, such as Sinners, The Assessment, 28 Years Later, and Final Destination Bloodlines (really!), and now we can add F1 to the list. Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski is back with yet another meat and potatoes studio crowd-pleaser starring an aging movie star who proves he’s Still Got It™ via a fast-moving vehicle as metaphor for masculine self-actualization, this time replacing fighter jets with, you guessed it, Formula One race cars. It’s the kind of movie that knows exactly what it wants to be and executes it with care and precision.

Let’s delve into the film’s spoilery details and how F1 proves that Kosinski is one of the best blockbuster directors currently working.

A Fine-Tuned Machine

What makes F1 being as good as it is something of a surprise is that it’s essentially one giant advertisement. Yes, it’s telling a story about Brad Pitt as Sonny Hayes, a has-been Formula One racer who gets a second shot at glory decades later as part of a failing F1 team, but given how involved the real-life FIA is in the film (Ferrari F1 racer Lewis Hamilton even has a producing credit on it), it’s hard to argue that trying to widen the appeal of the Formula One World Championship isn’t one of the primary motives for the film getting made in the first place. In the same way that Top Gun: Maverick is a piece of slickly-produced Air Force propaganda, F1 is a $200 million dollar branding exercise for the world’s premiere racing league.

That said, one of my cardinal beliefs is that you can make a good movie out of anything, and F1 proves that and then some. In the same way that similarly corporate productions like Lord and Miller’s The LEGO Movie or Greta Gerwig’s Barbie transcended their cynical origins as glorified toy commercials by hiring smart creatives to lead the charge (hell, this is the Transformers brand’s entire thing), F1 sees Kosinski and Maverick screenwriter Ehren Kruger jumping back into the mode that brought them so much success on their previous effort: the proverbial “dad movie,” with a disciplined directorial style and one of the few remaining bankable stars serving as a signal to the audience that they’re in for the kind of old school movie-making sensibility we used to take for granted.

F1: The Movie Gallery