Joseph Kosinski Archives - MovieManifesto

F1: Rogue Fun, a Car Wars Story

July 3, 2025August 7, 2025 Jeremy BeckReviews

Pay attention to the tennis balls. As a middle-of-the-road racing picture, F1 supplies the expected zoom-zoom accoutrements: checkered flags, roaring engines, heavy tires frantically drilled into mighty chassis. But the most symbolically meaningful piece of sports paraphernalia on display is the set of yellow-green spheres that the film’s hero routinely bounces against a wall in order to test his reaction time. His facility may be equipped with a fancy electronic dummy that measures responses down to the millisecond, but he has no need for such new-age flourishes. He’s old-school.

So, in some ways, is F1, even if its presentation is also robustly contemporary. As a piece of storytelling, the movie is painfully obvious and familiar—a clumsy grab-bag of buddy comedy, underdog melodrama, and other hoary templates. But despite its thinness and its predictability, F1 isn’t without its durable pleasures. It has been muscularly directed by Joseph Kosinski, and it affords the satisfaction of watching talented actors execute their assignments with warmth and precision. Read More

Top Gun: Maverick: Bruising Altitude

June 3, 2022September 20, 2022 Jeremy BeckReviews

Ah, the ’80s: that glorious decade of unvarnished patriotism, jubilant synth music, and pop-culture cheese. As artifacts of this ancient era go, Tony Scott’s Top Gun has aged more poorly than most; it now plays as a silly, occasionally diverting genre exercise that doubles as a military recruitment ad, and while it entertains as a tribute to the glistening machismo of Tom Cruise, it also suffers from thin characters and a profoundly stupid story. So when I tell you that Top Gun: Maverick, the 36-years-in-the-making follow-up directed by Joseph Kosinski (from a script credited to Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Christopher McQuarrie), improves on its predecessor in every conceivable way, what I really mean is, it’s not bad.

Honestly, that assessment is perhaps unfair to Kosinski and Cruise, who have approached this legacy assignment with a canny combination of reverence, intelligence, and playfulness. Not content with merely avoiding stupidity, Maverick is often genuinely smart. Its character dynamics are sharp, its plot makes structural (if not geopolitical) sense, and its action is mostly engaging and occasionally electrifying. It’s a pretty good movie that also wrestles with the obligation of being a Top Gun sequel. Read More

The Best Movies of 2013: Honorable Mention (Part I)

September 4, 2014March 4, 2021 Jeremy BeckFeatures

Amy Acker and Jillian Morgese in Much Ado About Nothing

And finally, we arrive at the best of the best. Well, almost. Over the past several years, the Manifesto has taken a rather flexible approach when setting the upper bound of its annual “best of” list. Back in 2010, 20 films made the cut. In 2011, a particularly fertile year at the movies, we expanded the field to 25. And for 2012, we narrowed things to a sweet 16. Essentially, the vintage of the particular cinematic year has influenced the length of the list. But this elastic methodology has also saved me from making agonizing choices, sparing me the sheer pain—the metaphysical agony one incurs from settling on a group of 10 titles to officially represent the year’s best—of such a hopeless, arbitrary task.

But that pain is really what list-making is all about. It’s supposed to be difficult, even if it’s also, as a ruthlessly quantitative exercise, rather stupid. Top 10 lists function as de-facto time capsules, a window into the author’s opinions of that particular moment, even if those opinions inevitably mutate with age. They also, if compiled properly, can inspire debate, which is always a healthy consequence of web-based discourse (even if such debates occasionally decay from robust argument to hateful mud-slinging). Perhaps my favorite part of publishing my own top 10 list—an undeniably personal exercise—is having people tell me precisely where I went wrong. And so, going forward, the Manifesto will only be featuring 10 titles on its official best-of list at year’s end.