Columbia Pictures
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is both fantastic and middle of the road at the same time. From the opening scene, the first thing you notice is how breathtakingly beautiful this film looks. The cinematography is nothing short of stunning — each frame feels like a living painting. That’s fitting, because one of the film’s main themes is art and how life itself can be viewed as a canvas.
Directed by Kogonada, the film stars Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie as two strangers who meet at a mutual friend’s wedding. Both are lost in their own ways — lonely, single, and struggling to believe in love again. After the wedding, they’re both sent to a rental car company to pick up a vehicle. But the car they drive away with isn’t just any car — it’s a fantastical one that sets them on an unexpected, magical journey.
As they drive, the car leads them through ‘doors’ into core memories from their pasts. For Farrell’s character, it might be a moment from his high school days. For Robbie’s, it’s a deeply emotional hospital scene tied to the loss of her mother. These memory sequences are the soul of the film. They show us who these characters really are, how they’ve been shaped, and why they’ve closed themselves off from love.
This is where A Big Bold Beautiful Journey shines: it’s a movie about love lost and rediscovered, about finding beauty in the highs and lows of life. It’s about realizing we all go through similar struggles, and even when things feel bleak, there’s always a chance for connection and hope.
But the film isn’t perfect. The chemistry between Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell is hit-or-miss. When it works, their scenes together are electric. But other times, it feels flat, which undercuts the emotional payoff. The film also has moments that take you out of its spell — like an early Burger King product placement scene that’s so obvious it breaks the immersion. These choices make parts of the movie feel less magical than the premise deserves.
Still, there’s no denying how unique and bold this film is. Its premise — a romance told through fantastical journeys into the past — is unlike anything else out there. And even if some scenes are more compelling than others, the overall experience is memorable.
I walked out of A Big Bold Beautiful Journey feeling both satisfied and wanting more. It’s a film of peaks and valleys — and maybe that’s the point. Life and love are messy, uneven, and unpredictable, and this film captures that truth even when it stumbles.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey has a run time of 1 hour 49 minutes, and is rated R for language.
Columbia Pictures