Monthly Archives: June 2025

F1: The Movie

Pure entertainment!

Brad Pitt’s new film F1: The Movie is a thrill ride filled with drivers-view shots from inside the cabs of these sleek race cars. Which are moving fast. The practice runs and the races look great in F1: The Movie. But is there a story here along with the adrenaline-triggering visuals?

Oh, yes!  A redemption story. A narrative with lots of sports movie clichés but a tale that’s enjoyable and fun nonetheless. 

There’s the grizzled old-timer Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt). Or should I say “chiseled” old-timer? A few shots of Brad with his shirt off. Rather fit for a 61-year-old. Sonny was a promising driver on the F1 circuit decades ago until a crash took him out of the driver’s seat. He has aches and pains and scars but he’s been working out lately and racing whenever he gets a shot.

Old friend Reuben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), now managing a slumping F1 team, recruits Sonny to come back to Formula One racing, halfway through the current season. Reuben’s team has a talented but raw rookie driver, Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris). There’s instant friction between the two drivers and their conflict is a key element of the movie.

Joshua’s mom Bernadette (Sarah Niles) counsels her son about his career and at a key moment steps into the rivalry between the two teammate drivers.

In F1: The Movie, the racing action moves from the UK to Hungary to Italy to Japan to Vegas to Dubai. Director Joseph Kosinski and crew have done a nice job of integrating Sonny and Joshua and their cars into actual race footage. For blood-thirsty race fans who love crashes, F1: The Movie has plenty.

The film is loud with revving engines, excited crowds, media and track announcers and a killer soundtrack from Hans Zimmer.

F1: The Movie is, like most of auto racing, heavy on testosterone. Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon) is the attractive but seriously savvy technical director for the team. And although she tells Sonny there’ll be no hooking up, well… 

F1: The Movie feels big. Like many such action films, it will be better appreciated on a big screen in a movie house with good sound. At this point it shouldn’t be necessary to say that but consider this a gentle nudge. Sure it’ll be streaming on Apple TV in a few weeks but it’s good to get out of the house when you can.

Worth a mention here also is this: you don’t have to be an Formula One racing fan, nor a fan of any form of auto racing, to enjoy this movie. Also worth mentioning is the full title of the film is F1: The Movie so as not to be confused with F1 racing in general. Another movie that might’ve befitted from a better title for marketing and online search purposes.

F1: The Movie is rated PG-13. It runs 2:35.

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Materialists

Tell me what you’re looking for in a ROM-COM. Let’s see if we can find a match! Romance? Comedy? Yes, of course. Those are non-negotiables!

Attractive stars playing cool characters? How about Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pescal and Chris Evans? (As Lucy, a professional matchmaker;  Harry, a financier; and John, a struggling actor, respectively.)

A “meet cute”? For sure. At a wedding reception, no less!

A reunion with a lost love? Yep! At that same wedding reception.

A damsel in distress? Well, one of Lucy’s clients, Sophie (Zoe Winters.)

A clever script with memorable declarations and observations about love and dating and marriage and money? We may have a match here!

Are you willing to overlook a horrible title and occasionally slow pacing? Materialists? Really? Couldn’t writer/director Celine Song have come up with a catchier title for her movie than that? Hey, you can’t have everything!

Surprises? Shhhhh! No spoilers!

Sexual content? A smidge. No nudity. Mostly post-coital chat and some F-bombs. Ergo, an R rating.

Seriously, Materialists is several notches above the average ROM-COM. 

The film has fun presenting a few of the candidates for matchmaking and their very specific qualifications about whom they’d consider for dating. 

Dakota Johnson is excellent as a 30-something woman who is smart and successful in her work matching up couples but has low self esteem regarding her own value as a mate.

The characters that Pascal and Evans portray are both honorable, likable men. Neither is the “bad guy” or the less-than-adequate guy who often appears in ROM-COMs to add to the tension.

Would Materialists be a good date film? I say yes. It would likely generate conversation for couples who are either casually dating or getting serious. 

The final shot of Materialists is pure genius. It comes as the end credits roll and the new Japanese Breakfast theme song My Baby (Got Nothing At All) plays. Followed by the hilarious John Prine and Iris DeMent duet In Spite of Ourselves.

Materialists runs just under two hours.

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From the World of John Wick: Ballerina

From the World of John Wick: Ballerina is NOT a John Wick movie. Although John Wick (Keanu Reeves) makes his presence known at a key moment of the movie. And while there’s a bit of ballet dancing, there’s not much.

FTWOJW:B is the story of Eve Macarro (Ana de Armas) who, as a young girl, sees her father killed by an assassin. She vows revenge. Under the tutelage of The Director (Angelica Houston), Eve learns to dance and to battle.

As observed with John Wick films, the face-to-face, often hand-to-hand, combat is staged at times much like a ballet. The film’s pace is relentless and so is the cracking of skulls and other body parts. Eve’s battles involve strong physical skills and a variety of weapons including firearms and knives. Even a flamethrower! 

Eve’s goal of avenging her father’s death runs counter to the sort of detente between the Roma Ruska sect and the group led by the Chancellor (Gabriel Byrne). The Director (that is, Houston’s character, not Len Wiseman, the film’s director) tells her to cool it but she does not relent. She takes her revenge mission to a lovely European village where she encounters a knife wielding barista. And has a tense confrontation with The Chancellor.

Armas may be the most beautiful woman to be involved in the nasty business of violence and killing. She employs her skills well and appears to take as much, maybe even more, physical abuse than does Wick himself in his four films. And she knows how to handle a flame thrower!

Also appearing in FTWOJW:B are Wick regulars Ian McShane as Winston and, in his final film appearance, Lance Riddick as Charon. Norman Reedus of Walking Dead fame is introduced as Daniel Pine, a man who, like Eve’s father, hopes to keep his young daughter away from all the nastiness. Could he appear in any future Ballerina films? 

From The World of John Wick: Ballerina is rated R and runs just over two hours but it seems shorter because it moves so quickly. If you could use a good action movie, don’t miss it!

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The Phoenician Scheme

Director Wes Anderson dazzles with his zany new movie The Phoenician Scheme. A gaggle of wacky characters zigzag through episodes that are not always laugh-out-loud funny but are consistently bizarre, surprising, compelling and reassuring.

Reassuring, that is, that Anderson can still make a fun film. After his recent lackluster efforts, concern that he may have lost his touch can be put aside for at least one hour and forty-five minutes as Anderson pulls out some of his trademark tricks—overhead shots, tracking shots, maps, oddly titled books etc.—and introduces a few new ones. 

As is his habit, the director employs a large cast of his favorites including Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Jeffrey Wright, Scarlett Johansson, Benedict Cumberbatch, Willem Dafoe and, in a brief appearance in a dream sequence as God, Bill Murray.

This time Anderson puts most of his eggs into one cinematic basket by making Benicio Del Toro the main star who does much of the film’s heavy lifting. He plays Zsa-Zsa Korda, a businessman who has many enemies, some of whom, he claims, are trying to assassinate him. Del Toro’s voice sounds, to my ear, almost exactly like Clark Gable’s.

Korda keeps his business matters in shoeboxes. (Hey, the film is set in the middle of the last century when people DID keep important papers and stuff in shoeboxes. And cigar boxes. Etc.) 

Also receiving an abundance of screen time is Mia Threapleton. Who? She’s the daughter of Kate Winslet and filmmaker Jim Threapleton. She plays Korda’s daughter, Liesl, who is a nun but who also wears red lipstick and heavy eye shadow.  

Korda also has nine sons who mostly stay out of sight and occasionally launch arrows down at Korda from the balcony above his table. What? Silly stuff, that’s what.

Bjorn (Michael Cera) is Korda’s assistant, who is charged with keeping control of a red satchel containing all of Korda’s liquid funds, but who frequently misplaces it.

The plot involves Korda’s lining up an assortment of individuals to get them to buy into his scheme, um, plan to fund a large infrastructure project in Phoenicia. The script is by Anderson from a story he concocted with frequent collaborator Roman Coppola.

Any recommendation of The Phoenician Scheme must be prefaced with the words “if you like Wes Anderson movies.” He has made some good and clever ones such as The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel. If you have enjoyed either or both of those, you may find The Phoenician Scheme to your liking. 

This is a film I would’ve enthusiastically embraced when I was in high school and college. Because I still maintain a certain level of immaturity, The Phoenician Scheme is goofy enough and silly enough to tap into that part of me that goes for the nonsensical. 

I also appreciate the fact that the film’s credits include the names of the housekeeping staff at the hotel where the cast and crew stayed during its production last year in Germany.

The Phoenician Scheme runs an hour and forty-five minutes. Rated PG-13.

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