Why F1 the Movie should win the best picture Oscar

It may not be in pole position, but Brad Pitt and director Joseph Kosinski’s sleek, technically inventive ode to motor racing definitely qualifies for the Academy podium Could, should, would F1 the Movie win the best picture Oscar? Well, we have to be realistic here: F1 is currently a massive outsider, at 200-1 along with The Secret Agent , which has no chance either but for very different reasons. It’s not hard to see why: this is a swaggeringly mainstream film, where tech and branding dwarf the human input, with the film itself acting as a front-end battering ram for a sports organisation desperate to break into the promised land of the US auto racing circuit. (I mean it’s right there in the title.) So even the most reactionary, conservative Academy voter is going to find it hard to mark F1 with their tick. So no, I don’t think it could win. That’s not to say F1 doesn’t have quite a bit going for it. The Oscars, as we know, have historically had a problem with so-called “popular” ...

Flight Risk review – Mel Gibson serves up white-knuckle fun in airplane suspense thriller

Game performances from Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Dockery and Topher Grace lift this silly but diverting action movie set almost entirely on a small aircraft

Irritating though it is to be conceding anything to the objectionable Mel Gibson (whose 2006 film Apocalypto is very good), his new film does serve up a fair bit of entertainment value. It is an action suspense thriller set almost entirely on board a rickety small-prop plane, flying in a desperately dangerous situation through the Alaska wilderness. First-time feature screenwriter Jared Rosenberg had his script on the Black List of unproduced screenplays for four years before Gibson picked it up.

Michelle Dockery plays Madelyn, a deputy US marshal who arrests a bespectacled mob accountant called Winston, played by Topher Grace; this white-collar malefactor had been hiding out in a squalid, remote Alaska hotel room. The cringing Winston is persuaded to turn state’s evidence against his capo paymaster and so Madelyn has to transport him to the nearest city for the trial, fully chained up as a flight risk. The only way of getting him there through this snowy wasteland is in an alarmingly tiny plane piloted by the cheerful Daryl Booth, a Texan good ol’ boy played by Mark Wahlberg.

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