malmevik77

F1

The summer blockbuster of 2025, F1 has the production values, showcasing great cinematography with the racing sequences and international setting. But let's not mistake this for a racing movie. This movie is not about F1 racing. It's about passion, learning from mistakes while taking risks, and also discovering that you need not be alone to do so. Any setting would have done to tell the story and it would have turned out the same.

I won't lie. I wasn't excited to see this because I'm not a fan of the sport. I'm happy that I'm not because I don't think that true fans would have appreciated it used as a prop, or as scenery. It just isn't believable and it is riddled with clichés.

But I did like it. Watching the racing was quite exciting and nail biting, yes, but I really connected with the theme of getting knocked down, going on a self discovery and then making a come back. When Brad Pitt describes the zen moment of really flying on the track as he drives, I got chills because I know how to reach that moment in my own life. I know what it's like to lose that ability, and then come back. I know what it's like to believe I can do it myself, but I couldn't.

Is this movie perfect? God, no. It was cringeworthy watching Kerry Condon's character become one dimensional. The whiplash treatment of APX by the board that owns them was so cartoonish in its villainy I thought that there would be mustache twirling. Plus, near the end, there's a subplot I won't spoil that was completely irrelevant, but appeared to be headed towards something. And finally, deus ex machina, pun somewhat intended, rears its ugly head.

I still would recommend it, though. You'll find enough, like me, to connect with. But if you're a hardcore racing fan, I think you'll pick this apart. That's why I say again, this is not a movie about F1.

The Life of Chuck

Why do we humans do what we do? As a collective of individuals, we are required to think and experience in solitude, building our own universe of knowledge, emotion, interaction and thought. But what if this universe truly has a finite ending? The Life of Chuck is a very existential, and cosmic, film which brings all these ideas together with such style, beauty and truth.

The film is told in reverse chronological order, which, after watching, was the only way the story could be told. I, the individual, when meeting someone for the first time, am only exposed to the version of that person at that period in time. I don't get a biography of what came first. Acknowledging something so simple, the film puts the audience into that position, learning through the storytelling, and not the witnessing, of events that shape Chuck.

A touch of science fiction is hinted at in the second half of the film leading to even more fundamental questions about the nature of our own consciousness. I won't spoil anything, but it does present to the audience a theme so profound that I would be devastated if it happened to me.

This is hands down the best film of 2025. It is thought provoking, joyful, sad, inspiring, with a display of unbridled love. Walt Whitman's poem, Song of Myself, is quoted throughout the film. I can't possibly think of a better way to speak of the individual, and one's self definition.

Go see the film, and enjoy the universe you've created.