Jackson Bragman, Staff Writer
Cinema is the ultimate artform because it’s an amalgamation of all the arts. It accounts for literature, music, photography, acting, color, lighting, and the composition of each of these elements. The medium has been around for around 130 years, which is like… six and a half “me”s. I love movies, but often feel overwhelmed by the century-plus of great films that came before me.
Since my freshman year of high school–when I got a job at an arthouse theater in my town and fell deeply in love with film–I’ve made a conscious effort to see as many “canonical” or “great” movies that history has to offer, but I know it’ll take a long time until I feel caught up on all the “essential” cinema I’m missing out on. As I continue my quest to see all of the essential movies, I think the best thing I can do is fully immerse myself in all of the new films coming out today. That way I can be fully adept on the 2020s while I go back and catch up on everything I missed!
With the 98th annual Academy Awards coming up in a few short weeks, this feels like the final opportunity to reflect on the year in movies that was 2025–a year in which I saw exponentially more new releases than any year prior. So, I decided to compose a list–and write a series of articles to accompany it–of my top 5 favorite movies of the past year, starting today with Joseph Kosinski’s F1.
Trigger Warning (Insert flashing red lights here): These are my top 5 favorite cinematic releases of 2025, not necessarily the films I viewed as the best. 2025 was a great year for cinema, and while movies like Train Dreams, Sinners, and One Battle After Another blew me away for their innovation and craft, they didn’t resonate with me on a personal level in the same way as the five I chose for this project.
F1 is Kosinski’s follow-up to the wildly commercially successful and critically acclaimed Top Gun: Maverick, and in another mega summer blockbuster, he does not disappoint. The film follows Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), a has-been motor-sportsman recruited by an old teammate and friend Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem) to drive for his floundering Formula 1 team, APXGP. There, Hayes teams up with rookie driver Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), who’s talented, but egocentric to say the least. What follows is the age-old tale of the conceited hotshot youngster butting heads with the seasoned veteran chasing one final moment of glory.
F1 is certainly not one of the five most original films I saw this year. It’s also probably not one of the five “best” films I saw this year. However, it makes my list because this summer, desperately craving a Top Gun: Maverick-esque mega-blockbuster, I found my butt parked in an AMC recliner watching Kosinski’s latest project on the big screen on three separate occasions in a two week span.
From the dynamic and immersive racing scenes, to the electrifying Hans Zimmer score, to the star-studded cast, F1 is a spectacle top to bottom and has all the makings of a major blockbuster done right.
At 62, Pitt (who, in this film, is Brad Pitting like only Brad Pitt can) delivers a consummate movie star performance featuring the sharpest lines of dialogue and the sexiest of smolders. Bardem and Idris also hold their own in critically celebrated supporting roles, as do Kerry Condon, as APXGP’s technical director, and Tobias Menzies (who is so deliciously hateable in this movie), as the head of the team’s board.
Unlike the film’s distinguished cast, Kosinski seems to have flown under the radar since F1’s theatrical release; the same was true after Top Gun: Maverick in 2022. In both cases, he was working with larger-than-life movie megastars who understandably acted as the centerpieces for the press and promotion of each film, but it’s Kosinski who brings the films to life.
The way you feel like you’re in the car driving 200 miles per hour, the way the film feels larger than life without losing its throughline, and the way it’s two and a half hours, but feels like 90 minutes: that’s thanks to great direction. Big blockbusters with so many moving parts can be easy to screw up, but in his last two projects, Kosinski has delivered the goods, and I can’t wait to see what hundred million dollar journey he takes us on next.
Jackson Bragman ‘27 is a journalism and cinema double major from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.