Brad Pitt’s effortless charm and charisma saves F1 from totally corny and ridiculous

Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinksi revs up Brad Pitt’s old-school movie-star charm as the driving force behind his adrenalised motorsports movie, F1.

With a high-octane sports movie, the return of a horror classic and a quality Beatles-adjacent doco, moviegoers are spoiled for choice this week.

Brad Pitt is a safe pair of hand in F1.

F1 (M)

Director: Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick)

Starring: Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem.

****

Plenty of vroom for a perfect Pitt stop

If F1 lands a podium finish in the 2025 box-office race, then it will be all due to Brad Pitt.

The veteran actor is the real reason this adrenalised motor sports flick continues to engage, excite and entertain the viewer from start to finish.

Pitt’s effortless charm and considerable presence keeps F1’s gears shifting impressively without losing any significant revs. With anyone else at the wheel, the movie would often be running on fumes.

Safe in the knowledge Pitt’s sure hands won’t be leaving the wheel, F1’s tech-savvy filmmaking team are free to focus on capturing a tarmac-tearing trackside authenticity never before seen on the big screen.

It does not matter whether you’re a Formula One newbie who might have been recently detoured into this world by the hit streaming series Drive to Survive. Or the type of Grand Prix tragic who knows the Drivers Championship standings from top to bottom.

All that truly counts is feeling those rushes, whooshes, swerves and swoops that push a Formula One car to its absolute limit. In terms of pure audiovisual authenticity, F1 (which was partially shot at several actual Grand Prix events) nails the brief with a killer combo of daring and precision.

If F1’s storyline doesn’t exactly keep it real, well, it is worth remembering this is a Hollywood movie, and not a warts-and-all doco.

Irish actor Kerry Condon plays a racing Chief Engineer and Brad Pitt’s love interest in F1.

The ‘as-if’ factor remains high from the start, particularly when it comes to Pitt’s role as the mercurial driving ace Sonny Hayes.

This fella hasn’t driven in a Grand Prix for 30 years when he gets the surprise call-up to join the severely failing APX team. Without a single Championship point to their name, APX need to string a few results together fast, or they will be kicked out of Formula One by season’s end.

Despite Sonny’s finesse-free driving style and a highly unconventional understanding of racing rules, he does bring an X-factor to his struggling team that just might buy them a few more laps of the Grand Prix circuit.

In doing so, Sonny will be butting heads with APX’s number one driver, the young and impulsive Joshua (Damson Idris), busting the chops of embattled team leader Ruben (Javier Bardem), and breaking down the romantic resistance of the outfit’s Chief Engineer Kate (Kerry Condon).

Yes, it is all a bit corny and totally ridiculous at times. However, when it comes to feeding an audience’s collective need for speed, F1 zooms past the chequered flag with fast and furious panache.

F1 is in cinemas June 26.

Alfie Williams, Jodie Comer and Ralph Fiennes in 28 Years Later. Picture: Miya Mizuno/Sony Pictures via AP

28 YEARS LATER (MA15+)

****

General release.

Released in 2002, 28 Days Later was the first great horror movie of this century. From those iconic early scenes of Cillian Murphy wandering about an eerily empty London through to repeated sightings of fleet-footed zombies sprinting to their next meal, 28 Days was all chiller, no filler. 2007’s 28 Months kept the infectious misery coming, albeit a little less memorably. Now, courtesy of the Later franchise’s founders, director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland, the brilliantly bleak sequel 28 Years issues an icky date on what has become of the poor old United Kingdom. Spoiler alert: it remains no fit place for a human to live. While the rest of the world has purged the infamous vicious “rage virus”, the British mainland remains sectioned off from the rest of the planet. And for good reason: the mutant beings roaming the nation have not just multiplied in number. They now vary wildly in terms of species, appetite and physical prowess. All of this and more must be learned the hard way by Spike (Alfie Williams), a wide-eyed 12-year-old living in a ‘safe community’ off the Scottish coast with an ill mother (Jodie Comer) and demanding father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). The time has come for young Spike to be trained in the multi-tasking ways of a hunter-gather-warrior who can journey regularly to zombie country to procure supplies for his people. Intended as a reboot of the franchise that will spawn a new instalment as soon as 2026, 28 Years packs a palpable punch that will leave a new generation of viewers truly reeling.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono in New York during the 70s

ONE TO ONE: JOHN & YOKO (M)

****

Selected cinemas.

The next Beatles-themed documentary to come along after Peter Jackson’s acclaimed and exhaustive Get Back project was always going to have its work cut out getting noticed. Remarkably, One to One justifies its existence with ease, tracking the unforeseen route taken by John Lennon to establish a new life after The Beatles. With access to a deep archive of phone recordings, home movies and photos, this classy doco places the viewer right beside Lennon and his artist wife Yoko Ono as they put down roots in a not-so-welcoming New York City of the early 1970s. The couple’s fusing of political activism, experimental lifestyle choices and abrasive music releases made them a lightning rod for controversy and scorn. In fact, such is the intensity of the negativity, it finally becomes clear why Lennon retreated from the public eye shortly thereafter. A major bonus for lifelong fans of the man is plenty of footage from Lennon’s 1972 One to One show at Madison Square Garden, the last time in his career he would play a full concert.

Originally published as Brad Pitt’s effortless charm and charisma saves F1 from totally corny and ridiculous