A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY (2025)

Genre: Romance/Drama
Director: Kogonada
Cast: Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Kevin Kline, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Sarah Gadon, Billy Magnussen, Jodie Turner-Smith
Runtime: 1 hr 49 mins
Rating: PG13 (Coarse Language)
Released By: Sony Pictures
Official Website: 

Opening Day: 18 September 2025

Synopsis: Some doors bring you to your past. Some doors lead you to your future. And some doors change everything. Sarah (Margot Robbie) and David (Colin Farrell) are single strangers who meet at a mutual friend’s wedding and soon, through a surprising twist of fate, find themselves on A Big Bold Beautiful Journey – a funny, fantastical, sweeping adventure together where they get to re-live important moments from their respective pasts, illuminating how they got to where they are in the present…and possibly getting a chance to alter their futures. 

Movie Review:

Do you want to embark on this big, bold, and beautiful journey?

Trust us, you’ll probably regret it after spending 109 minutes with Colin Farrell’s David and Margot Robbie’s Sarah.

Two strangers, David and Sarah, first meet at a mutual friend’s wedding and then again at a cheeseburger joint, where Sarah’s car won’t start in the parking lot. David offers her a ride, and their chance encounter evolves into a surreal journey. Guided by a GPS robot (Jodie Turner-Smith), they stumble upon a series of mysterious doors that transport them to pivotal moments in their past. David is taken back to his high school play, where he’s rejected by his crush while Sarah finds herself revisiting her favorite art museum.

At first, A Big, Bold and Beautiful Journey seems like it might be a whimsical, time-traveling adventure something akin to a live-action Studio Ghibli film. The quirky visual effects, stylized vignettes, and production design certainly set the stage. Even the perpetual rainfall against mismatched bursts of sunshine feels like a bold, fantastical flourish.

But the script, written by Seth Reiss, quickly falters. Both David and Sarah are broken individuals clearly destined for each other yet paralyzed by fear of intimacy. Their odyssey is less a grand adventure and more a meandering therapy session, dragging the audience through their unresolved regrets in order to justify their future together.

Sarah carries guilt for not being at her dying mother’s bedside and for abandoning a loving boyfriend. David wrestles with the fallout of breaking off an engagement. These could have been poignant explorations of grief and loss but the narrative keeps us emotionally distant. Scenes, like David comforting his own father at a hospital over the premature birth of his son, feel oddly disconnected and unnecessary.

The film also squanders its strongest moments. An early sequence at a quirky car rental agency run by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Kevin Kline is hilarious and sets up expectations for an eccentric, genre-bending adventure. Instead, the movie serves up no less than five repetitive, talk-heavy “healing” sessions between David and Sarah, robbing the story of momentum and charm.

Kogonada, a filmmaker celebrated for his meditative indie style, struggles with the demands of his first studio feature. While the visuals are undeniably striking, they can’t rescue the sluggish pacing or emotionally flat script. Even Colin Farrell, usually magnetic, seems adrift while Margot Robbie’s attempt at a post-Barbie dramatic turn lands with a thud. Not even Ghibli’s frequent collaborator Joe Hisaishi’s score manages to stir the imagination.

In the end, A Big, Bold and Beautiful Journey lives up to only two of its promises: it’s big and bold. Beautiful? Hardly. Moving? Not at all.

Movie Rating:

(We doubt you’ll want to embark on this big, bold and ultimately boring journey)

Review by Linus Tee