F1® The Movie (in theaters) 

If you’ve ever wanted to feel like an F1 driver, this is your movie.

“F1® The Movie” does a fantastic job of putting audiences right on the track, creating an immersive experience that feels more thrilling than just watching a movie. If you’ve ever dreamed of living a racing life, you’re definitely going to want to watch this one on IMAX. If you’ve ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes of F1 racing, you’re going to want to watch it however you can get it.

Even if you just like sports movies, there’s still plenty here to appreciate. The plot is textbook standard, grizzled vet vs hotshot rookie, but Brad Pitt and Damson Idris do an excellent job with their respective halves of the equation. Idris is just as cocky and frustrating as the hotshot is supposed to be, but with a core of intelligence and sweetness that keeps you rooting for him. Pitt has played this character before, possibly in real life, but he’s learned to add vulnerability to the standard package and it works well.

The ending is frustrating, smashing Pitt’s character arc for the sake of more cool cars. But if you’re here for racing, or for the usual sports movie beats, “F1® The Movie” is an experience you won’t want to miss.

Grade: Three stars

28 Years Later (in theaters)

“28 Years Later” may be the first zombie movie that doesn’t want you to be afraid of death.

The latest from Danny Boyle and Alex Garland, the duo behind the genre-changing “28 Days Later,” this new movie has a more philosophical feel than their 2002 original. There’s still plenty of blood and guts, along with the violence it takes to make them, but the savagery of all that is far from the point. What the movie really cares about is survival, both of the body and the soul, and what that means in a world where everything has been thrown out of balance.

The movie focuses on a United Kingdom that has been cut off from the rest of the world by a quarantine line. The virus runs rampant, the infected have evolved into new species, and the non-infected live in isolated communities. One of those communities includes Spike (Alfie Williams), a young man going to the main island for the first time to hunt the infected with his father (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). His ill, mentally fragile mother (Jodi Comer), rarely gets out of bed because there are no doctors in their village to treat her. When Spike gets his first glimpse of the main island, however, he realizes there is more going on than he’s been told.

The first half is a traditional physical coming-of-age story, the second half more of an emotional coming of age. The divide leaves the movie feeling structurally odd, but it’s anchored by fantastic performances from Williams, Comer, and Ralph Fiennes. The ending is divisively odd, more concerned with setting up next year’s sequel than anything that came before it, but until then “28 Years Later” has a strange beauty that can’t be ignored.

Grade: Three stars

Jenniffer Wardell is an award-winning movie critic and member of the Utah Film Critics Association. Drop her a line at [email protected].