A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
Sony Pictures Releasing | Release Date: September 19, 2025 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
43
METASCORE
Mixed or average reviews based on 45 Critic Reviews
Positive:
8
Mixed:
27
Negative:
10

Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
80
Little White LiesIana MurraySep 23, 2025
Operating on a grander scale, Kogonada still retains his singular, warm sensibility – and if you can succumb to the film’s heart-on-its-sleeve sentimentality, it’s a journey worth taking. Read full review
75
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenOct 2, 2025
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey won’t work for everyone, but hearts of a certain shape may treasure it. Read full review
75
Boston GlobeMark FeeneySep 17, 2025
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey — which sounds like a Boy Scout jamboree presided over by Donald Trump — is a very traditional movie masquerading as a very odd movie. What helps make it a good movie is how well it (mostly) maintains a balance between tradition and oddity. Read full review
75
The Film StageConor O'DonnellSep 16, 2025
Kogonada delightfully exploits the simple joy of beautiful people falling in love on screen. He deploys his trademark empathy as a means of encouragement: Go with it, be open, and maybe this will make you feel something lovely if you let it. Read full review
65
Paste MagazineTara Bennett Sep 18, 2025
Although the premise teeters on being twee, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey mostly works because its self-awareness keeps it from devolving into cliche … until it doesn’t. Read full review
63
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliSep 22, 2025
Kogonada's direction crafts a variety of visually arresting—though not ostentatious—set pieces. Yet somehow, it doesn’t all come together. The whimsical magic evident early on grows stale. The movie’s tone is herky-jerky and never settles. And the ending feels undercooked and unearned. Read full review
63
RogerEbert.comMatt Zoller SeitzSep 19, 2025
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey illustrates a principle endorsed by many legendary directors: Casting the right leads will get you ninety percent of the way to success. Read full review
63
The Seattle TimesGemma WilsonSep 17, 2025
When everything’s clicking, there are moments of real beauty and introspection to be found here. Read full review
60
TimeStephanie ZacharekSep 22, 2025
Kogonada’s spiky-sweet romantic fantasy A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a case in point: perched halfway between crowd-pleasing Hallmark romance—not a pejorative, by the way—and loo-loo surrealist experiment, it’s not quite enough of either, a movie reaching for something beyond its grasp. Read full review
60
Time OutDan JolinSep 17, 2025
Despite an occasional burst of self-mocking glibness (mostly via Robbie, who skirts but never quite tilts into the manic-dream-pixie playground), this is a movie that isn’t afraid of sincerity, and it brings a bit of silver-lining energy to our overcast world. Read full review
60
The IndependentClarisse LoughreySep 16, 2025
Kogonada neither wrote nor edited A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, and so we’re largely lacking in the sophistication department, or the soft musicality he’s been able to construct in his earlier films. Read full review
60
ColliderRoss BonaimeSep 16, 2025
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey tries to be too big and too bold, when it’s the smaller moments in which this film becomes a beautiful journey. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawSep 16, 2025
The unreality of the film never quite equates to dishonesty about what exactly happens when two people not in the first flush of youth decide to be in love, but it takes an effort of will to suspend disbelief and submit to a well-intentioned fantasy. Read full review
58
The A.V. ClubJesse HassengerSep 16, 2025
Is A Big Bold Beautiful Journey a piece of wannabe creativity with a yawning hollowness at its center, or an A-list romance with some welcome aesthetic sensitivity? Like the outcome of a first date, it will ultimately be determined by chemistry. Read full review
50
The RevealKeith PhippsOct 2, 2025
As a love story, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey doesn’t really work. And given that much of the movie—scripted by Seth Reiss (The Menu) and directed by Kogonada (Columbus, After Yang)—is concerned with telling a love story, that's a pretty big problem. Read full review
50
Washington PostTy BurrSep 18, 2025
Kogonada gives us a bighearted sentimental “Journey,” and there will be audiences who will be there for it. But I hope for his next movie, he remembers he’s better at smaller favors. Read full review
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Radheyan SimonpillaiSep 18, 2025
Kogonada fills the vacuousness in the script with knowing nods to all the performance and illusion we commit to when taking the leap – whether in love or (in its meta way) at the movies. Read full review
50
Chicago TribuneKatie WalshSep 18, 2025
There are some affecting inner child healing moments here, but without details and specifics, this is a big, bold swing, but a beautiful miss. Read full review
50
The PlaylistRodrigo PerezSep 16, 2025
The film rests squarely on Farrell and Robbie. They have chemistry and a guiding hand in Kogonada, but ultimately A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is undone by a syrupy, over-romanticized screenplay untempered by the director’s usual delicacy and restraint. Read full review
50
USA TodayBrian TruittSep 16, 2025
It’s the kind of thing you’d bet would be emotionally manipulative – if only, because that'd be welcome compared to this emotionally disconnecting, sporadically nuanced narrative. Read full review
45
The Daily BeastNick SchagerSep 16, 2025
This wannabe winsome fairy tale about confronting fears, atoning for sins, and forgiving oneself is a pile-up of preciousness. Read full review
45
SlashfilmWitney SeiboldSep 16, 2025
It's not that big, it's hardly bold, and it's only beautiful on its surface. It could have been a journey. Read full review
45
TheWrapWilliam BibbianiSep 16, 2025
I admire you for trying to make it work, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, but I think we should both see other films. Read full review
42
Original-CinChris KnightSep 18, 2025
Neither big nor bold nor beautiful. Though I suppose it does count as a journey. Well, one out of four ain’t — no, wait, one out of four is terrible! Read full review
40
Los Angeles TimesAmy NicholsonSep 23, 2025
Like Kogonada, I believe that artifice is a useful tool to dig up honesty. But a script with this much contrivance only works if it’s delivered with snap and confidence. “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” is sticky sweet and sludgy and so cloyingly aesthetic that the roadkill bleeds ropes of twee entrails. Read full review
40
iFrancesca SteeleSep 19, 2025
The script for unconventional romantic comedy A Big Bold Beautiful Journey spent some time on Hollywood’s Black List, where well-liked but not yet picked up screenplays sometimes linger for years. It’s a shame it didn’t just stay there. Read full review
40
NMENick LevineSep 19, 2025
Despite stellar efforts from Farrell and Robbie, it all adds up to something not quite charming, not quite moving and not quite compelling. This film is less a big bold beautiful journey; more a mildly diverting pitstop. Read full review
40
The Irish TimesTara BradySep 18, 2025
This messy romantic phantasmagoria is a hinterland for no one: a musical without musical numbers, a romcom without comedy. Sincerity saves it from collapse. Read full review
40
Austin ChronicleKimberley JonesSep 18, 2025
The questions being probed here about how to be vulnerable, what it takes to connect – y’know, the big stuff – aren’t exclusive to romance, after all. And I so admired the movie for having the daring and openheartedness to try to tackle the big stuff. I just wish I liked it more. Read full review
40
EmpireLou ThomasSep 16, 2025
Though occasionally inventive and affecting, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a tonal mess. Romantic and other emotional struggles depicted may ring true, but that and strong lead performances can’t save the uneven whole. Read full review
40
Screen DailyNikki BaughanSep 16, 2025
This high-concept feature tries so hard to charm that it becomes an exercise in wading through sickly sweet treacle. Read full review
40
New York Magazine (Vulture)Alison WillmoreSep 16, 2025
To give A Big Bold Beautiful Journey credit, it is a democratically even-handed waste of talent. Read full review
40
VarietyTomris LafflySep 16, 2025
The film’s tonal inconsistencies hurt its impossibly talented co-leads considerably. Read full review
40
Next Best PictureGiovanni LagoSep 16, 2025
Kogonada channels something, often in the replication of the works of Jacques Demy and Hayao Miyazaki. Yet, it isn’t enough when the central dynamic at its core fails to elicit the yearning spirit that makes any viewer hopelessly head over heels. Read full review
40
Screen RantMae AbdulbakiSep 16, 2025
A rousing story about finding someone and falling in love this is not — nor does it truly contend with the need for human connection very well. Read full review
38
Movie NationRoger MooreSep 19, 2025
Pairing up Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell for a big screen fantasy romance doesn’t pay off in “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey,” a film that has one or two big moments on its road-trip-romantic “journey,” a little digitally augmented “beauty” along the way, but little that measures up to anybody’s idea of “bold.” Read full review
38
Slant MagazineAnzhe ZhangSep 17, 2025
The film cloyingly asks us to embrace the sincerity of its impersonal romance. Read full review
33
IndieWireRyan LattanzioSep 16, 2025
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is miscalculated as a romance and a fantasy, and while I’m loath to blame a craftsman as intelligent as Kogonada entirely for the outcome, he did, after all, agree to direct this lousy script. A big, bold, beautiful bore indeed. Read full review
30
Wall Street JournalKyle SmithSep 19, 2025
It ought to be a treat to see such charismatic talents falling in love, but the only overwhelming and unstoppable force in the movie is its love for cutesy and cloying gimmicks. It’s a cinematic crime to waste these two stars: I charge “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” with unconscionably aggravated whimsy in the third degree. Read full review
30
Rolling StoneDavid FearSep 18, 2025
There are many reasons that 1999 is considered a banner year for American cinema. This attempt to revisit the type of fanciful, footloose and fancy-twee storytelling that helped characterize that cultural moment is a big swing, and an even bigger miss. Read full review
30
The New YorkerRichard BrodySep 18, 2025
The result is a movie thinned out almost to the point of total insubstantiality—as close to a non-experience as I’ve had at the movies in a while. Read full review
30
The New York TimesBrandon YuSep 18, 2025
Instead of an auteur upgrading his sensibilities with a studio paycheck, “Beautiful Journey” mostly reads as a for-hire job doomed with jumbled writing. Read full review
30
The Hollywood ReporterRichard LawsonSep 16, 2025
For all I know, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey actually takes place on the Holodeck of the Starship Enterprise, so phony is everything contained within it. Read full review
25
The Film VerdictAlonso DuraldeSep 16, 2025
Spending its entire running time between quotation marks, this tedious exercise represents one of the most egregious wastes of talent in recent memory, from a talented cast (led by Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell) to legendary composer Joe Hisaishi to director Kogonada, whose previous films After Yang and Columbus conveyed emotional truths that exist beyond the understanding of this cutesy waste of energy. Read full review
0
New York PostJohnny OleksinskiSep 18, 2025
In the pantheon of films about magical cars, this one is not big, bold or beautiful. Read full review
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