---
name: "Josh Trank"
canonical: "https://film.one/person/josh-trank"
roles: ["Director","Screenwriter"]
born: "19 February 1984"
reviewed_on_fi1m: 1
updated: "2026-09-16T15:15:11.933349+00:00"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# Josh Trank

Director and screenwriter. Born 19 February 1984 in Los Angeles, California, USA.

## Details

- **Work:** Director, Screenwriter
- **Born:** 19 February 1984, Los Angeles, California, USA
- **Also known as:** Joshua Benjamin Trank, Joshua Trank

## Fi1m on Josh Trank

> Josh Trank is interested in what power does to vulnerable people. That is a useful starting point for a genre director, but *Fantastic Four* leaves us frustrated by how readily he abandons his characters for scientific explanations.

In the quieter early scenes of *Fantastic Four* (2015), Josh Trank allows ambition and awkwardness to occupy time another superhero film might spend on action. His young people have something to prove, while the older generation would prefer to keep control. We can see the appeal of staying with those tensions rather than hurrying towards a fight. But Trank keeps finding reasons for the characters to explain the science and too few opportunities for them to know one another. It is a poor film, though taking young characters seriously was a reasonable place to begin.

That concern with people under pressure was already present in his breakthrough, *Chronicle* (2012), a found-footage film about teenagers gaining powers. Keeping close to its characters gave him a way to examine what those powers did to them. The move to *Fantastic Four* did not require him to abandon that interest. His darker approach to a superhero origin story made sense; the failure was in carrying it through.

Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara and Jamie Bell give him a cast worth spending time with, and the small emotional exchanges are welcome whenever they arrive. The screenplay, credited to Trank, Jeremy Slater and Simon Kinberg, repeatedly interrupts that work with technical information. We were bored by the scientific explanations, then irritated because the quartet had been given so little to say to one another. Taking these characters seriously ought to mean being curious about what makes them stay together.

*Fantastic Four* underwent reshoots and studio changes, and Trank publicly distanced himself from the released cut. That history limits how confidently we can assign each failure to him, but it cannot make the film less tedious. He returned after a period of limited work to write and direct *Capone* (2020), an intimate, unconventional account of Al Capone's final years. Moving away from superheroes did not mean giving up his interest in the vulnerable side of familiar figures. Start with *Chronicle*; the promising early scenes of *Fantastic Four* are not enough to recommend an evening with it.

## Biography

Josh Trank is an American film director, screenwriter and editor. Born in Los Angeles on 19 February 1984, he began working in television as a writer, director and editor on the series The Kill Point (2007). He later edited the independent film Big Fan (2009).

Trank made his feature directorial debut with the found-footage science-fiction film Chronicle (2012). He subsequently directed and wrote the superhero film Fantastic Four (2015) and the biographical drama Capone (2020).

*Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com.*

## On Fi1m (1)

- *Fantastic Four* (2015), Fi1m 38, Director, Screenplay — [page](https://film.one/film/fantastic-four.md)

## Also known for

- *Chronicle* (2012), Director, Story
- *Capone* (2020), Director, Writer
- *Big Fan* (2009), Second Unit Director

---
© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/josh-trank