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.

At a time when many big budget movies are, to steal a phrase from Darth Vader, choking on their aspirations, it’s refreshing to sit in front of F1 and feel like everyone involved was simply trying to make the best movie they could. There are no misguided franchise ambitions, premature sequel teases, nostalgic callbacks to better movies from years ago, distracting metatextual conceits, or a sense that the movie is compromised by committee. It’s also not seeking to outsmart the genre it’s working with, something that’s plagued recent films like Glass Onion or Joker: Folie à Deux. F1 is about as classic a sports drama as you can get, just with outstanding execution. The combination of unpretentious script, charismatic cast, fantastic racing sequences, and Kosinski’s sharp storytelling instincts ensure that the movie always stays, well… on track.

If all the pieces work well, it doesn’t matter if you have no previous investment in Formula One (I didn’t!). F1 is incredibly engaging entertainment either way. In many ways it’s reminiscent of another Pitt film: 2011’s Moneyball, which turned work meetings about baseball statistics into riveting drama by sheer force of will and strong nuts and bolts craft. F1 conveys what newbies need to know about the sport without derailing the story at hand, and that’s a rarer feat than you’d think in today’s cinematic landscape.

F1 Ending Explained

If you guessed that F1 ends with a high stakes Formula One race, then give yourself a gold star. After being recruited to flailing F1 team APX GP by owner and old friend Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), Sonny Hayes finds that the team is a disaster behind the scenes. With only half a season, or nine races, to turn things around, Sonny butts heads with APX’s young superstar Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris) and team technical director Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon). After many ups and downs, including Sonny convincing Kate to change her car design to facilitate a more aggressive racing style and a near-fatal crash on Joshua’s part, all roads lead to the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, the final race and the team’s last chance for glory. No points for guessing that the team wins the race.

F1 is about as straightforward as big movies get nowadays, but that winds up being a significant asset. With so many of today’s blockbusters feeling half-formed or somehow embarrassed by their genre expectations, F1 sticking to convention proves that making these kinds of movies doesn’t have to be so complicated. Everything the movie needs to make the final race a cathartic moment for the audience is perfectly established: the high stakes for everyone involved, Sonny’s desire to recapture the feeling of “flying” that he describes to Kate after they start a romantic relationship, Joshua accepting that his ego is more at fault for his failures than his teammates, the audience wanting to see APX board member Peter Banning (Tobias Menzies) put in his place after sabotaging the team for personal gain, and some truly exceptional camerawork and editing.

That’s not to say that movies shouldn’t try to put their own spins on formulas or throw in twists on tired premises. Of course they should. But finding a new way to effectively engage the audience within the boundaries of genre expectation will always be more satisfying than trying to be clever and flouting those expectations with wild abandon. Understanding that principle has been Kosinski’s greatest strength across his career, from 2010’s cult favorite Tron: Legacy, to the underrated 2013 original sci-fi entry Oblivion, to the billion dollar success of 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick. His next best strength is getting out of his own way and making his name on reliable craft over flashy sensibilities. Not that we don’t love our idiosyncratic auteurs like M. Night Shyamalan or Guillermo del Toro, but solid journeyman work is just as respectable and difficult to actually pull off.

We’ll see how audiences take to Kosinski’s latest, but as we head into a summer movie season set to be dominated by dinosaurs and superheroes, F1 stands as one of the year’s best surprises so far. Hollywood’s struggles with production mismanagement, VFX quality control, and fatally flawed franchise attempts are well-documented, but movies like F1 show that you can still deliver quality entertainment within the system. You simply need a director who knows what their movie is and what it’s not, and takes that mindset all the way to the finish line.

Carlos Morales writes novels, articles and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Twitter.