F1 (2025)

What I know about Formula One racing, AKA F1, could be written on the back of a matchbox, and you would still have room to add what I know about NASCAR, the Isle Of Man TT, and the prestigious 24-hour races held at Le Mans. Despite my ignorance, I knew I wanted to see F1 as soon as the first trailer for it dropped. It looked slick, it looked predictable and cheesy, and it looked like the kind of big blockbuster that knows viewers will be happy to overlook a number of weaknesses as long as the star power shines brightly enough and the car sequences are shot well. Let me say right now that F1 more than delivers on those two main fronts.

Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a broken older man who loves to race cars, and is very good at racing cars. He doesn't have any celebrated career though, having (literally) crashed out of F1 years ago in an accident that changed his entire life. He's invited back by an old friend though, and that old friend (Ruben Cervantes, played by Javier Bardem) needs his racing team to score some points. Even just one point. It's halfway through the third season, and if no points are won then Cervantes will lose his team, and he's sunk far too much money into it to survive that embarrassment. The car isn't good enough to win races, but Hayes knows how they can gain some tactical advantages. He just has to convince young Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) that he knows what he's talking about. And he needs the rest of the team to back him up, whether they end up working to tweak the design of the car or co-operating on some unusual tyre tactics.

Written by Ehren Kruger, with input from director Joseph Kosinski, F1 is just about as by-the-numbers as you can get. It's what you should expect when you hear that a Brad Pitt movie about F1 is being guided to completion by the steady hand of producer Jerry Bruckheimer. Many people have referred to this as simply a F1 riff on some previous Bruckheimer productions, but I think that's being a bit unfair. It's also not entirely untrue, but the entire world of F1, and the tactics we see used here to desperately grab for just some of the points available, is enough of a new landscape, cinematically speaking, to make this feel a bit more fresh than it otherwise would. Okay, we've also recently had Gran Turismo (also fun), but there are still enough differences to make this feel like a far superior film.

Everything is as good as can be on the audio and visual front. The soundtrack has a pulsating energy running throughout, whether in many of the songs used or in the score from Hans Zimmer, and the camerawork that puts viewers as close as possible to the driving action is absolutely incredible. Remember how you felt when watching actors in fast planes in Top Gun: Maverick? Kosinski repeats that sensation here, and it's somehow just as thrilling, despite our leads all being much closer to ground level. 

It's okay to view the car as the star here, and anyone who loves racing cars will enjoy the footage displayed here, but it's hard to deny that there's also a handful of people cast perfectly in roles that absolutely lift the whole movie. Pitt is a great damaged hero, and still allowed to learn a lesson or two during his onscreen journey (although that journey is more literal, this is not a film looking to take him on some astonishing character arc). Bardem hovers around the edges of every scene just enough to maintain the required extra suave quotient, something he does effortlessly. Idris has to portray talented and cocky, which he does, until he finally starts to learn from those who have more experience under their belts, which he also does. Kerry Condon and Kim Bodnia are equally good as two very different, but invaluable, members of the team, with the former actually turning out to be the real hope for a team needing to claw at every opportunity to gain a fraction more speed on every lap. Tobias Menzies is a smug exec, Sarah Niles is the concerned mother of the character played by Idris, and Simon Kunz is enjoyably irritating as the reporter/pundit who keeps underlining just how bad things look for any team relying on Sonny Hayes to help them find some consistent winning form.

You will see better movies this year. There are better movies starring Brad Pitt. And Javier Bardem. AND Kerry Condon. But you won't be thinking of any of those movies when this film starts to work its magic. You'll be enjoying the roar of the engines, the thrill of the race, and the fun interplay between all of the main characters. I was enjoying myself so much that it was only after the credits rolled that I made a long-overdue pun about the races being won by . . . Pitt stops.

8/10

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Netflix And Chill: In The Land Of Saints And Sinners (2023)

I'm not one to usually worry about films being offensive. Nothing much bothers me, I'm in the main demographic for characters who aren't used as punchlines, and I've watched far too many Troma movies to be bothered by tastelessness or mishandling of potentially sensitive issues. So I hope you understand how much thought I gave it before I decided that In The Land Of Saints And Sinners feels offensively bad in the way it uses the Troubles in Ireland as a backdrop for what becomes yet another standard Liam Neeson thriller. It didn't personally bother me, but I have a lot of friends over the water I can imagine may be a bit irked by this, to put it mildly.

Neeson plays Finbar Murphy, a man who lives in County Donegal, working as a contract killer for a local crime boss (played by the superb Colm Meaney). Murphy starts off a violent chain of events when he voluntarily helps an abusive prick shuffle off this mortal coil. Unfortunately, that abusive prick was the brother of a strong-willed terrorist (Doireann, played by Kerry Condon), which leads to her, and her accomplices, working to find the killer, no matter who else gets caught up in the crossfire.

While this feels like an accomplished debut from director Robert Lorenz, it isn't. He may not have too many credits to his name, but Lorenz has been around long enough to hone his skills. The same can be said of writer Terry Loane. It's co-writer Mark Michael McNally who is the first-timer, which makes me wonder if he was the person who came up with the sorely-misjudged main premise (although maybe I am just viewing it that way because it feels a bit closer to home than other films that have used similar backgrounds for some kind of redemption story arc).

The cast all do good work, with both Condon and Neeson on top form, and emanating an undeniably powerful energy in the scenes that have them facing one another. Meaney is always a great presence onscreen, Jack Gleeson does a great job in the role of a young man who doesn't consider how he might end up one day regretting his actions, and Ciarán Hinds is a friendly local Garda officer. There are also good performances from Desmond Eastwood, Niamh Cusack, Michelle Gleeson, Sarah Greene, and everyone else filling out the cast of supporting characters.

I'd be very interested to hear from others who watched this, and especially any of my pals over on the Emerald Isle. Am I wrong for wanting this to have been better, for wanting it to justify the use of the events used as the background to the story? It could have been tweaked so easily, and I don't think there would have been anything lost (especially if Neeson had the same background to his character). In fact, it could have possibly even been improved by setting it in the here and now, showing people who refused to let go of some old tactics while the older and wiser heads remembered how many lives were shattered and destroyed by their actions.

Competent, technically-speaking, but fairly incompetent when you consider the decisions made at the writing stage, this is somehow more egregious than the dozen or more Neeson movies that simply try to replicate the success of the Taken series. Or maybe it's just me thinking that way.

4/10

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Night Swim (2024)

Let’s be brutally honest here. Night Swim isn’t just a bad horror movie. It is already an early contender for the worst horror movie of the year (certainly when it comes to those released into cinemas). It gives me no pleasure to write those words, especially considering how much I tend to enjoy Wyatt Russell in everything he does, but it’s sadly true. I would have probably preferred to see this concept hammered into shape by some low-budget film-makers who would then be forced to market it under the name Amityville Swimming Pool.

The basic plot concerns a family who move into a new home. There’s Ray Waller (Russell), a baseball player who has had his career curtailed by a debilitating illness, Eve Waller (Kerry Condon), and two children, Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren). Anyway, the new home has a swimming pool, which definitely doesn’t house some evil force that can sometimes help you feel physically better while threatening to endanger the lives of your loved ones. I think you get the idea.

The feature directorial debut of Bryce McGuire, adapting the short co-written with Rod Blackhurst, this is a laughable horror movie so consistently weak that even the jump scares fail to get a reaction. It’s a silly premise, but good entertainment has been made from lesser material. 

Russell, Condon, Hoeferle, and Warren are certainly not to blame, even if Russell has to spend a couple of scenes being snarly and obviously affected by the watery evil, but they are saddled with a poor script that simply doesn’t give them enough development, or all that much to do, in between the infrequent attempts to (unsuccessfully) deliver scares.

On the plus side, this is easy to forget as soon as the end credits begin. It is also easy to review, mainly because there aren’t any elements I had to single out for praise. I am sure many people behind the scenes were trying their best, but the end result, the film that is shown onscreen, is absolutely dire. The audio may be fine, and the camerawork is okay, but the actual beats of the plot are all either laughably bad or painfully derivative, and if you care about how things turn out in the very final scenes then you have obviously appreciated something that I didn’t.

Don’t waste your time. Certainly don’t waste your money. McGuire really needs to do much better with his next feature, although I am not holding out much hope.

3/10

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The Banshees Of Inisherin (2022)

If writer-director Martin McDonagh could do every one of his movies with lead roles for Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson then I would be a very happy camper. Seriously, one a year, one every few years, whatever the schedule allows, just have the words and direction from McDonagh and the main performances from Farrell and Gleeson. While The Banshees Of Inisherin may not be quite as good as the mighty In Bruges, it's a very close call. So close that I wouldn't waste energy arguing with anyone who wanted to rank McDonagh's movies in alphabetical order: [The] Banshees Of Inisherin, In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. I will keep arguing with you if you decide to put "Three Billboards" at the top of the tree though, but different strokes for different folks.

What you get here is the tale of two friends who stop being friends. Farrell is the pleasant, but maybe a bit boring, Pádraic. Gleeson is a folk musician named Colm. Pádraic and Colm have been firm friends for a long time, keeping one another company as the time idly ticks away on the small Irish isle that they call home. The Irish Civil War is still going on, but the isle of Inisherin often feels as if it could be on another planet. Nothing much seems to change there, which is why it's such a strange upheaval to see Pádraic and Colm stop being friends, especially when Pádraic can't figure out why he's suddenly persona non grata with Colm. He wants to make everything right again, but that just ends up escalating the situation, leading to painful repercussions and a very tense atmosphere in the local pub. While Colm seems happy in his own company, Pádraic struggles, spending some more of his time with the empty-headed, but sweet, Dominic (Barry Keoghan), and trying to convince his sister, Siobhán (Kerry Condon), that she doesn't need to leave the island to have a good life.

A film so densely packed that it makes you worry slightly about discussing it in-depth with others, for fear of mixing up what is intended by McDonagh with what may be the result of viewer baggage projected on to the screen, The Banshees Of Inisherin is about the history of Ireland, about the need to have open communication with those close to you, and about the damage caused by trying to close down and ignore mental health issues. It's also about the avoidable damage that can be self-inflicted, and it's, most obviously, about the end of a relationship. Although we're seeing the end of a friendship in the movie, it could be any relationship ending, and it's a stranger and more painful experience for the person who doesn't want it to end.

Picking a best performance is a near-impossible task, with both Farrell and Gleeson on absolutely top form, and Keoghan giving a performance so great that I finally agree with people who have been praising him highly for the past few years. Condon is just as good as any of her male co-stars, standing out as the one islander recognising how far from idyllic island life is, and I have to praise Gary Lydon for his role as Peadar Kearney, the local policeman who is also the abusive father of Keoghan's character. Last, but by no means least, everyone should love Jenny, a donkey played by . . . Jenny the donkey. 

Equal parts hilarious and devastating, and as ultimately split between light and dark as a settled pint of Guinness, The Banshees Of Inisherin is smart, timelessly relevant, heartbreaking, and a contender for the best film of the year. One or two decisions hold it back from perfection, especially when things become even darker in the third act, but, like any solid and enduring relationship, dealing with the bad times helps you to appreciate all of the good.

9/10

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