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In “Top Gun: Maverick,” the breathless, gravity and logic-defying “ Top Gun ” sequel that somehow makes all the sense in the world despite landing more than three decades after the late Tony Scott ’s original, an admiral refers to Tom Cruise ’s navy aviator Pete Mitchell—call sign “ Maverick ”—as “the fastest man alive.” It’s a chuckle-inducing scene that recalls one in “Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation,” when Alec Baldwin ’s high-ranking Alan Hunley deems Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, “the living manifestation of destiny.” In neither of these instances are Cruise’s co-stars exclusively referring to his make-believe screen personas. They are also (or rather, primarily) talking about the ongoing legacy of Cruise the actor himself. 

Truth be told, our fearless and ever-handsome action hero earns both appraisals with a generous side of applause, being one of the precious remnants of bona-fide movie superstardoms of yore, a slowly dwindling they-don’t-make-'em-like-they-used-to notion of immortality these days. Indeed, Cruise’s consistent commitment to Hollywood showmanship—along with the insane levels of physical craft he unfailingly puts on the table by insisting to do his own stunts—I would argue, deserves the same level of high-brow respect usually reserved for the fully-method sorts such as Daniel Day-Lewis . Even if you somehow overlook the fact that Cruise is one of our most gifted and versatile dramatic and comedic actors with the likes of “ Born on the Fourth of July ,” “ Magnolia ,” “ Tropic Thunder ,” and “ Collateral ” under his belt, you will never forget why you show up to a Tom Cruise movie, thanks in large part to his aforesaid enduring dedication. How many other household names and faces can claim to guarantee “a singular movie event” these days and deliver each time, without exceptions?

In that regard, you will be right at home with “Top Gun: Maverick,” director Joseph Kosinski ’s witty adrenaline booster that allows its leading producer to be exactly what he is—a star—while upping the emotional and dramatic stakes of its predecessor with a healthy (but not overdone) dose of nostalgia. After a title card that explains what “Top Gun” is—the identical one that introduced us to the world of crème-de-la-crème Navy pilots in 1986—we find Maverick in a role on the fringes of the US Navy, working as an undaunted test pilot against the familiar backdrop of Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone.” You won’t be surprised that soon enough, he gets called on a one-last-job type of mission as a teacher to a group of recent Top Gun graduates. Their assignment is just as obscure and politically cuckoo as it was in the first movie. There is an unnamed enemy—let’s called it Russia because it’s probably Russia—some targets that need to be destroyed, a flight plan that sounds nuts, and a scheme that will require all successful Top Gun recruits to fly at dangerously low altitudes. But can it be done?

It’s a long shot, if the details of the operation—explained to the aviator hopefuls in a rather “It can’t be done” style reminiscent of “ Mission: Impossible ”—are any indication. But you will be surprised that more appealing than the prospect of the bonkers mission here is the human drama that co-scribes Ehren Kruger , Eric Warren Singer , and Christopher McQuarrie spin from a story by Peter Craig and Justin Marks . For starters, the group of potential recruits include Lt. Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw ( Miles Teller , terrific), the son of the dearly departed “Goose,” whose accidental death still haunts Maverick as much as it does the rest of us. And if Rooster’s understandable distaste of him wasn’t enough (despite Maverick’s protective instincts towards him), there are skeptics of Maverick’s credentials— Jon Hamm ’s Cyclone, for instance, can’t understand why Maverick’s foe-turned-friend Iceman ( Val Kilmer , returning with a tearjerker of a part) insists on him as the teacher of the mission. Further complicating the matters is Maverick’s on-and-off romance with Penny Benjamin (a bewitching Jennifer Connelly ), a new character that was prominently name-checked in the original movie, as some will recall. What an entanglement through which one is tasked to defend their nation and celebrate a certain brand of American pride ...

In a different package, all the brouhaha jingoism and proud fist-shaking seen in “Top Gun: Maverick” could have been borderline insufferable. But fortunately Kosinski—whose underseen and underrated “Only The Brave” will hopefully find a second life now—seems to understand exactly what kind of movie he is asked to navigate. In his hands, the tone of “Maverick” strikes a fine balance between good-humored vanity and half-serious self-deprecation, complete with plenty of quotable zingers and emotional moments that catch one off-guard.

In some sense, what this movie takes most seriously are concepts like friendship, loyalty, romance, and okay, bromance. Everything else that surrounds those notions—like patriotic egotism—feels like playful winks and embellishments towards fashioning an old-school action movie. And because this mode is clearly shared by the entirety of the cast—from a memorable Ed Harris that begs for more screen time to the always great Glen Powell as the alluringly overconfident “ Hangman ,” Greg Tarzan Davis as “Coyote,” Jay Ellis as “ Payback ,” Danny Ramirez as “Fanboy,” Monica Barbaro as “ Phoenix ,” and Lewis Pullman as “Bob”—“Top Gun: Maverick” runs fully on its enthralling on-screen harmony at times. For evidence, look no further than the intense, fiery chemistry between Connelly and Cruise throughout—it’s genuinely sexy stuff—and (in a nostalgic nod to the original), a rather sensual beach football sequence, shot with crimson hues and suggestive shadows by Claudio Miranda . 

Still, the action sequences—all the low-altitude flights, airborne dogfights as well as Cruise on a motorcycle donned in his original Top Gun leather jacket—are likewise the breathtaking stars of “Maverick,” often accompanied by Harold Faltermeyer ’s celebratory original score (aided by cues from Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe ). Reportedly, all the flying scenes—a pair of which are pure hell-yes moments for Cruise—were shot in actual U.S. Navy F/A-18s, for which the cast had to be trained for during a mind-boggling process. The authentic work that went into every frame generously shows. As the jets cut through the atmosphere and brush their target soils in close-shave movements—all coherently edited by Eddie Hamilton —the sensation they generate feels miraculous and worthy of the biggest screen one can possibly find. Equally worthy of that big screen is the emotional strokes of “Maverick” that pack an unexpected punch. Sure, you might be prepared for a second sky-dance with “Maverick,” but perhaps not one that might require a tissue or two in its final stretch.

Available in theaters May 27th. 

Tomris Laffly

Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), she regularly contributes to  RogerEbert.com , Variety and Time Out New York, with bylines in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Journal International, Vulture, The Playlist and The Wrap, among other outlets.

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Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

Rated PG-13 for sequences of intense action, and some strong language.

131 minutes

Tom Cruise as Captain Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell

Miles Teller as Lt. Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw

Jennifer Connelly as Penny Benjamin

Jon Hamm as Vice Admiral Cyclone

Glen Powell as Hangman

Lewis Pullman as Bob

Charles Parnell as Warlock

Bashir Salahuddin as Coleman

Monica Barbaro as Phoenix

Jay Ellis as Payback

Danny Ramirez as Fanboy

Greg Tarzan Davis as Coyote

Ed Harris as Rear Admiral

Val Kilmer as Admiral Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky

Manny Jacinto as Fritz

• Joseph Kosinski

Writer (based on characters created by)

• Jack Epps Jr.

Writer (story by)

• Peter Craig
• Justin Marks
• Ehren Kruger
• Eric Warren Singer
• Christopher McQuarrie

Cinematographer

• Claudio Miranda
• Chris Lebenzon
• Eddie Hamilton
• Lorne Balfe
• Harold Faltermeyer
• Hans Zimmer

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Top Gun: Maverick

After thirty years, Maverick is still pushing the envelope as a top naval aviator, but must confront ghosts of his past when he leads TOP GUN's elite graduates on a mission that demands the ... Read all After thirty years, Maverick is still pushing the envelope as a top naval aviator, but must confront ghosts of his past when he leads TOP GUN's elite graduates on a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those chosen to fly it. After thirty years, Maverick is still pushing the envelope as a top naval aviator, but must confront ghosts of his past when he leads TOP GUN's elite graduates on a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from those chosen to fly it.

• Joseph Kosinski
• Jack Epps Jr.
• Peter Craig
• Jennifer Connelly
• Miles Teller
• 4.3K User reviews
• 437 Critic reviews
• 78 Metascore
• 107 wins & 234 nominations total

• Capt. Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell

• Penny Benjamin

• Lt. Bradley 'Rooster' Bradshaw

• Adm. Tom 'Iceman' Kazansky

• CWO4 Bernie 'Hondo' Coleman

• Adm. Beau 'Cyclone' Simpson

• Adm. Solomon 'Warlock' Bates

• Lt. Natasha 'Phoenix' Trace

• Lt. Robert 'Bob' Floyd

• Lt. Reuben 'Payback' Fitch

• Lt. Mickey 'Fanboy' Garcia

• Lt. Jake 'Hangman' Seresin

• Lt. Neil 'Omaha' Vikander

• Lt. Billy 'Fritz' Avalone

• Lt. Callie 'Halo' Bassett

• Lt. Javy 'Coyote' Machado

• Lt. Brigham 'Harvard' Lennox

• Lt. Logan 'Yale' Lee
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia According to Miles Teller , the cast got to choose their own call signs. He chose "Rooster" because it was in the same family as "Goose."
• Goofs At 1h12'10" Coyote is in G-LOC, releases the stick and his aircraft falls towards the ground. Super-hornet are equipped with auto GCAS (automatic Ground Collision Avoidance System), which would react to the situation and take control to climb and level at a safe altitude with no obstacles.

Rear Admiral : Maverick. Thirty-plus years of service. Combat medals. Citations. Only man to shoot down three enemy planes in the last 40 years.

[Cain looks through pages of Maverick's records]

Rear Admiral : 'Distinguished.' 'Distinguished.' 'Distinguished.' Yet you can't get a promotion, you won't retire, and, despite your best efforts, you refuse to die. You should be at least a two-star admiral by now, if not a senator. Yet here you are: Captain. Why is that?

Maverick : It's one of life's mysteries, sir.

Rear Admiral : This isn't a joke. I asked you a question.

Maverick : I'm where I belong, sir.

Rear Admiral : Well, the navy doesn't see it that way. Not anymore.

Rear Admiral : These planes you've been testing, Captain, one day, sooner or later, they won't need pilots at all. Pilots that need to sleep, eat, take a piss. Pilots that disobey orders. All you did was buy some time for those men out there. The future is coming, and you're not in it.

[Cain faces the officer by the door]

Rear Admiral : Escort this man off the base. Take him to his quarters. Wait with him while he packs his gear. I want him on the road to North Island within the hour.

[surprised look on Maverick's face]

Maverick : North Island, sir?

Rear Admiral : Call came in with impeccable timing, right as I was driving here to ground your ass once and for all. It galls me to say it, but... for reasons known only to the Almighty and your guardian angel, you've been called back to Top Gun.

Maverick : Sir?

Rear Admiral : You are dismissed, Captain.

[Maverick proceeds to leave Cain's office]

Rear Admiral : The end is inevitable, Maverick. Your kind is headed for extinction.

[Maverick turns around]

Maverick : Maybe so, sir. But not today.

• Crazy credits "Top Gun 001: Tom Cruise" is listed among the other pilots who worked on the film.
• Connections Featured in Conan: Tom Cruise (2019)
• Soundtracks Danger Zone From Top Gun (1986) Original Soundtrack Written by Giorgio Moroder & Tom Whitlock Performed by Kenny Loggins Courtesy of Columbia Records By arrangement with Sony Music Entertainment

User reviews 4.3K

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• May 26, 2022
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• What is the strange-looking black-colored aircraft Maverick is test-piloting at the start of the film?
• Is there a post-credits scene?
• Is it realistic that Maverick would still be in the Navy on active duty as a captain (O6) 36 years after the events of this first film?
• May 27, 2022 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
• Official site
• Phi Công Siêu Đẳng Maverick
• Eldorado National Forest, California, USA (Forested mountain aircraft staging area)
• Paramount Pictures
• Skydance Media
• Jerry Bruckheimer Films
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $170,000,000 (estimated)
• $718,732,821
• $126,707,459
• May 29, 2022
• $1,495,696,292

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 10 minutes
• Dolby Atmos
• IMAX 6-Track
• 12-Track Digital Sound

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‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Named Rotten Tomatoes' Best Film of the Year

'The Banshees of Inisherin', and 'Everything Everywhere All at Once' also made the top ten.

Rotten Tomatoes has named Top Gun: Maverick the Best Film Of 2022, Deadline reports. The Tom Cruise -led feature holds a special place in fans’ hearts for so many reasons. It brought back their favorite character thirty years after the first movie came out, it hits the right emotional note with its emotional core and chemistry between Maverick ( Tom Cruise ) and Goose’s son Rooster (played by Miles Teller ). The dogfights, assembling of the crew, and high stake action only add to the overall story.

The movie is also commended by the industry for bringing the audience back to the theaters after the pandemic ravaged the business. Top Gun: Maverick had an initial release date of July 12, 2019, but was delayed as the world shut down. Many streamers tried to purchase the streaming rights to the film, however, Paramount and Cruise held back and insisted the film will be released exclusively in theaters. And their decision was for good as upon its May 2022 release the movie dominated the box office with $1.489 billion worldwide gross.

The feature is directed by Joseph Kosinski with a screenplay by Ehren Kruger , Eric Warren Singer , and Christopher McQuarrie from stories by Peter Craig and Justin Marks . The movie has bagged six Oscar nominations at the 95th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and has been named one of the top ten films of 2022 by the American Film Institute. The movie has a 96 percent certified fresh grade from critics and a 99 percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes audience meter.

RELATED: 'Top Gun: Maverick' and 'House of the Dragon' Win Big at Golden Tomato Awards

The movie brings Maverick back to Top Gun 30 years after the events of the original feature. He’s tasked with training a detachment of graduates for a special assignment while he must confront the ghosts of his past and his deepest fears which culminates in a mission that demands the ultimate sacrifice from him and his students.

Along with Cruise and Teller, the movie casts Val Kilmer as Iceman, Jennifer Connelly as Penny, Jon Hamm as Vice Admiral Beau "Cyclone" Simpson, Glen Powell as LT Jake "Hangman" Seresin, Lewis Pullman as LT Robert "Bob" Floyd, Ed Harris as Rear Admiral Chester "Hammer" Cain, Monica Barbaro as LT Natasha "Phoenix" Trace, Jay Ellis as LT Reuben "Payback" Fitch and more. The feature is produced by Cruise, McQuarrie, Jerry Bruckheimer and David Ellison .

Other movies in Rotten Tomatoes' top ten include The Banshees of Inisherin , Everything Everywhere All at Once , Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio , Turning Red , Happening , The Batman , Fire of Love , Marcel the Shell With Shoes On and Till .

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Top Gun: Maverick review: A high-flying sequel gets it right

The need for speed comes with a fresh young cast, but the Cruise control remains.

In Top Gun: Maverick 's opening scene, someone makes the mistake of asking Tom Cruise to take his fighter jet to Mach 9. He pauses, then flashes that megawatt Cheshire grin. Never mind that it's a practice run; there is only one Mach he knows, and it is 10 (or maybe 10.2). That's because he's a maverick, the Maverick — Captain Pete Mitchell of the United States Navy, a rogue's rogue for whom clouds part and Hans Zimmer synths soar.

He's also 36 years older than the cocky young lieutenant he played on screen in the 1986 original , a bare fact that the sequel (in theaters May 27) both elides and celebrates in a movie whose bright stripes and broad strokes feel somehow bombastic and tenderheartedly nostalgic at the same time. Imagine a world where motorcyclists scoff at helmets, all bars burst into jukebox singalongs, and the U.S. military is simply an unblemished agent for good. A few decades ago you didn't have to, because you lived in it; Top Gun: Maverick can because it never left.

Inevitably, a few things have changed: Lady Gaga is on the soundtrack now , and there's a whole new class of lion-cub recruits. But that's still Kenny Loggins' " Danger Zone " chugging over the title credits, and Maverick is still the fastest man alive in an F-14, even if he's never managed to exceed the lowly rank of Captain. "You should be at least a two-star admiral by now, or a Senator," Ed Harris 's Rear Admiral grouses early on, before grudgingly sending him off to the Top Gun base in San Diego. Maverick's constant insubordination and looming obsolescence should have gotten him discharged years ago, he reminds him; instead, he's been saved by an old friend, Iceman ( Val Kilmer ), now an admiral himself.

There's a reason for that intervention: a uranium plant in a heavily guarded secret bunker that needs to be eliminated before it becomes operational for the enemy. (What enemy? Don't ask, don't tell.) And only jets can infiltrate it, if the Academy's ten best recruits can be taught to thread the needle and get out of there alive. Leading the team is Maverick's new job, though the bossman there (a scowling Jon Hamm) is not exactly overjoyed to welcome him — and a promising young pilot called Rooster ( Miles Teller , in a kicky little mustache) even less enthused. That's because Rooster's parents were Goose and Carole (Anthony Edwards and Meg Ryan, who appear only in misty flashbacks), and all he knows is that Pete had something to do with him getting pulled from the fast-track flight program years ago.

Otherwise, Rooster's main rival amongst the new hopefuls is Hangman ( Hidden Figures ' great Glen Powell), a fellow pilot whose smirky antagonism recalls the last movie's Iceman rivalry in everything except the frosted tips (Powell is a more natural kind of blonde, but the square-jawed swagger and resting smug face play the same). Director Joseph Kosinski ( TRON: Legacy ) revels in the sonic-boom rush of their many flight scenes, sending his jets swooping and spinning in impossible, equilibrium-rattling arcs. On the ground, too, his camera caresses every object in its view, almost as if he's making a rippling ad for America itself: The unfurling snap of a boat sail; the gleaming Formica in a desert rest-stop diner; golden bodies playing touch football in the California surf while a magic-hour sun goes down.

That nationalistic glow extends to Maverick's courting of a former paramour, Jennifer Connelly , but there's a bittersweet sentimentality in their reconnection, the kind of unhurried adult romance that doesn't make it on screen much anymore. (A brief interlude with Kilmer, who has largely lost his voice to cancer , is also surprisingly moving.) Kosinksi, of course, has to make his Maverick work with or without the context of the original, and the script, by Peter Craig ( The Batman ) and Justin Marks ( The Jungle Book ) toggles deftly between winking callbacks and standard big-beat action stuff meant to stand on its own. Teller and Powell are breezily appealing, actors at the apex of their youth and beauty, though the movie still belongs in almost every scene to Cruise. At this point in his career, he's not really playing characters so much as variations on a theme — the theme being, perhaps, The Last Movie Star. And in the air up there, he stands alone. Grade: B+

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Review: Tom Cruise flies high — again — in the exhilarating ‘Top Gun: Maverick’

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“If you think, you’re dead.” That’s one of Tom Cruise’s more memorable lines from “Top Gun,” a cautionary reminder that when your engine flames out or an enemy pilot locks you in their sights, hesitation means death. Inadvertently, the line also suggests the best way to enjoy Tony Scott’s immortal 1986 blockbuster: Best not to think too long or hard about the dumb plot, the threadbare romance, the fetishization of U.S. military might or the de rigueur plausibility issues. The key is to succumb, like Cruise’s high-flying Maverick himself, to a world of unchecked instinct and pure sensation, to savor the movie’s symphony of screaming jets and booming Giorgio Moroder, not to mention all those lovingly photographed torsos and tighty-whities.

Jets still scream and muscles still gleam in the ridiculous and often ridiculously entertaining “Top Gun: Maverick,” though in several respects, the movie evinces — and rewards — an unusual investment of brainpower. I’d go further and say that it offers its own decisive reversal of Maverick’s dubious logic: It has plenty on its mind, and it’s gloriously alive.

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The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the CDC and local health officials .

A lot of consideration and calculation have clearly gone into this long-aborning blockbuster sequel, insofar as Cruise (one of the producers) and his collaborators have taken such clear pains to maintain continuity with the events, if not the style, of the first film. That’s no small thing, more than 30 years after the fiery young Maverick lost Goose, made peace with Iceman and rode off into the annals of fictional U.S. Navy history. And rather than let bygones be bygones, the director Joseph Kosinski and a trio of screenwriters (Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer and Cruise’s favorite auteur-wingman, Christopher McQuarrie) have resurrected those threads of rivalry, tragedy and triumph and spun them into uncharted realms of male-weepie grandiosity.

Some of this continuity is a matter of basic story sense, rooted in a shrewd understanding of franchise mechanics and an equally savvy appeal to ’80s nostalgia. But it also has something to do with the 59-year-old Cruise’s close stewardship of his own superhuman image, a commitment that speaks to his talent as well as his monomania. And with the arguable exception of “Mission: Impossible’s” Ethan Hunt, few Cruise characters have felt as aligned with that monomania as Maverick. From the moment he entered the frame in ’86, sporting flippant aviator shades and riding a Kawasaki motorcycle, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell announced himself as a signature Cruise creation — a precision-tooled amalgam of underwear-dancing sex symbol (just three years after “Risky Business”) and the envelope-pushing, heights-scaling action star he would become.

These days, the need for speed still persists for both Cruise and Maverick, even if the latter does more flying than running. But for all the barriers he’s broken and all the miles he’s logged in his career as a Navy test pilot, Maverick occupies a state of self-willed professional stasis. Unwilling to be promoted into desk-job irrelevancy, he is a captain by rank and a rebel by nature. The opening sequence finds him playing Icarus with one of the Navy’s shiny new toys, thumbing his nose in the process at the first of the movie’s two glowering authoritarians. (They’re played by Ed Harris and Jon Hamm.) Old habits die hard, but so do the ghosts of the past, and Maverick, for all his reckless abandon in the cockpit, will soon find himself breaking his own rules by thinking more carefully, and tactically, than he’s ever had to do before.

Called back to the elite Navy training school where he flew planes, defied orders and irritated his peers with distinction, Maverick is charged with preparing the program’s best and brightest for a stealth attack on a far-flung uranium enrichment plant owned by some conveniently unidentified NATO-threatening entity. As impossible missions go, it makes the Death Star trench attack look like a grocery run — a tough assignment for Maverick’s 12 brilliant but still-untested pilots, played by actors including Lewis Pullman, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez and a terrific Glen Powell as a smug, know-it-all Iceman type. And then there’s the hotheaded Rooster (Miles Teller, sullen as only he can be), whose candidacy is complicated by the fact that his late father was Maverick’s wingman and best friend, Goose (the great Anthony Edwards, seen here in brief shards of footage from the first “Top Gun”). Talk about chickens coming home to roost.

Rooster’s background is a ludicrous contrivance. It’s also the perfect setup for the kind of rich, thorny cross-generational soap opera that — as much as its aspect-ratio-fluctuating flight sequences and its climactic surge of Lady Gaga — is this movie’s reason for being. Those planes may be powered by fuel, but “Top Gun: Maverick” runs on pure, unfiltered dad energy. Try not to smile whenever Cruise’s Maverick flashes a mischievous avuncular grin beneath his helmet and chases his young charges in F/A-18s all over the Mojave Desert, teaching them new moves while wasting no chance to reassert his own superiority. Back on the ground, Maverick and Rooster’s surrogate daddy-son tensions flare into the open, exacerbated by guilt, resentment and their recognition of their shared stubbornness.

The drama might have taken on an intriguingly Oedipal edge if the filmmakers had thought to bring back, say, Meg Ryan as Carole, Goose’s wife and Rooster’s mother. But here, with the exception of Monica Barbaro as one of Maverick’s most gifted proteges, women are few and far between, and even the more prominent ones get mostly perfunctory treatment. With no sign of Kelly McGillis as the Navy instructor who once took Maverick’s breath away, it falls to another flame, Penny (a lovely, underused Jennifer Connelly), to mix a few drinks, provide a flicker of romantic distraction and snuff out the first film’s lingering homoerotic vibes. Not that there are many such whiffs here, and more’s the pity: Kosinski, who previously directed Cruise in the shiny, empty science-fiction drama “Oblivion,” is a skilled craftsman with none of Scott’s horned-up filmmaking energy. (He does salute the original with an opening blast of “Danger Zone” and a rousing game of football in the surf, though the latter is more team-building than steam-building exercise.)

Scott’s admirers may miss that disreputable edge, the unrepentantly vulgar sensibility that made the original “Top Gun” a dreamy, voluptuous hoot. There’s some compensation in Kosinski’s fight and flight sequences, full of face-melting ascents, whiplash-inducing loop-de-loops and other airborne stunts that prove considerably more transporting and immersive than what the first “Top Gun” was able to accomplish. That’s only to be expected, given the more sophisticated hardware involved. Like any proper commercial for the military-industrial complex, “Top Gun: Maverick” teases the latest cutting-edge advances in aeronautics and defense technology, a field that has evolved roughly in step with an ever more digitally subsumed movie industry.

At the same time, thanks to Cruise and Kosinski’s unfashionable insistence on practical filmmaking and their refusal to lean too heavily on computer-generated visual effects, their sequel plays like a throwback in more than one sense. But the era that produced the first film has shifted, and “Top Gun: Maverick” is especially poignant in the ways, both subtle and overt, that it acknowledges the passage of time, the fading of youth and the shifting of its own status as a pop cultural phenomenon. The original was a risky, relatively low-budget underdog that somehow became a perfectly imperfect movie for its moment, soaring on the wings of its dreamy eroticism and recruitment-commercial aesthetics, a mega-hit soundtrack and an incandescent star. It ushered in a new era of decadence for its producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, and for the many gung-ho American blockbusters they would keep cranking out.

“Top Gun: Maverick” is a longer, costlier and appreciably weightier affair, and its expanded emotional scope and heightened production values (including a score by the original film’s composer, Harold Faltermeyer) give it a classy, elegiac sheen; it’s like a hot summer diversion in prestige-dinosaur drag, or vice versa. As a rare big-budget Hollywood movie about men and women who fly without capes, it has a lot riding on it. Once set for a summer 2020 release but delayed almost two years by the pandemic, it arrives bearing the hopes and dreams of a tentatively resurgent industry that could use a non-Marvel theatrical hit. And as such, everything about its story — from the intergenerational conflict to the high stakes of Maverick’s mission to the rusted-out F-14s collecting dust at the periphery of the action — carries an unmistakable subtext. Is this movie one of the last gasps of a dying Hollywood empire? Or is its emotionally stirring, viscerally gripping and proudly old-fashioned storytelling the latest adrenaline shot that the industry so desperately needs?

It’s hard to consider any of this apart from Cruise, whose attention-grabbing actions during an earlier phase of the pandemic — shooting a video of himself going to see “Tenet” in a packed London theater , verbally lashing members of his “Mission: Impossible” crew for flouting COVID-19 protocols — suggest a man who’s placed the weight of an entire troubled industry on his own shoulders. His endless search for the perfect action vehicle has sometimes felt like a quest for some elusive fountain of Hollywood youth, and it’s led to gratifying highs ( “Edge of Tomorrow” ) and inexplicable lows ( “The Mummy” ). Like Maverick, to whom someone wise once said, “Son, your ego is writing checks that your body can’t cash,” Cruise just won’t quit, won’t give up, won’t listen to anyone who tells him no. As a sometime fan of Cruise’s egomania, at least when he’s dangling from a helicopter or literally running to catch a plane, I’m not really complaining.

And so there’s some irony and maybe even a hint of self-awareness in the fact that while Cruise owns just about every moment of this movie, another star winds up stealing it. As Iceman, Maverick’s old adversary turned wingman, mentor and ally, Val Kilmer haunts “Top Gun: Maverick” from its earliest moments but enters it surprisingly late, anchoring a perfectly timed, beautifully played scene that kicks the movie into emotional overdrive. Watching Ice as he greets and counsels Maverick, you may find yourself thinking about the actor playing him, about the recent toll on his health and the rickety trajectory of his own post-’80s and ’90s career, subjects that were illuminated by the recent documentary “Val.” In one fictional moment, he gives us something unmistakably, irreducibly real, partly by puncturing the fantasy of human invincibility that his co-star has never stopped trying to sell.

‘Top Gun: Maverick’

Rated: PG-13, for sequences of intense action, and some strong language Running time: 2 hours, 17 minutes Playing: Starts May 27 in general release

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Review: Tom Cruise Takes to the Skies, Literally, in Barrier-Breaking Sequel

Reteaming with 'Oblivion' director Joseph Kosinski, the perfectionist producer-star insists on flying his own planes in this stunning follow-up.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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The world is not the same place it was in 1986, when “Top Gun” ruled the box office. In Ronald Reagan, America had a movie star for a president, and producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson as its honorary ministers of propaganda. The same year that “Platoon” challenged the United States’ militaristic track record, “Top Gun” sold a thrilling if narrow-minded fantasy of American exceptionalism — of boys and their toys, of macho-man bromance and what it means to be the best. Three years after Tom Cruise flipped the bird to a Russian MiG fighter plane, the Berlin Wall fell. Two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed.

One could argue that our new, post-Cold War world didn’t need a “Top Gun” sequel. (Tom Cruise himself once insisted as much.) But one would be wrong to do so. Building on the three-parts-steel-to-one-part-corn equation that director Tony Scott so effectively set 36 years earlier, the new film more than merits its existence, mirroring Cruise’s character, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, in pushing the limits of what the machine could do — the machine in this case being cinema, which takes to the skies as no blockbuster has before.

Hardly anything in “ Top Gun: Maverick ” will surprise you, except how well it does nearly all the things audiences want and expect it to do. Orchestrated by Joseph Kosinski — the dynamo who collaborated with Cruise on “Oblivion” and first worked with Miles Teller on 2017’s terrific, underseen firefighter drama “Only the Brave” — to appeal to veterans and neophytes alike, this high-performance follow-up sends Maverick back to the Topgun program, where he won the heart of Charlie (Kelly McGillis) and lost best friend Goose (Anthony Edwards).

Popular on Variety

Flashbacks notwithstanding, neither of those actors is in this movie, though the screenplay — a tag-team effort between Christopher McQuarrie (Cruise’s guy), Eric Warren Singer (Kosinski’s guy) and Ehren Kruger (yikes) — just about resurrects Goose via his now-adult son, Bradley Bradshaw (Teller), call sign “Rooster.” (“Phoenix” would be more apt, but that tag goes to Monica Barbaro, playing the lone woman in this testosterone pool.) The resemblance between Rooster and his late dad is uncanny, courtesy of a goofy moustache, some hair gel and a scene in which the young pilot pounds out “Great Balls of Fire” on the Hard Deck piano, the way Goose once did.

The Hard Deck is now operated by a character from Maverick’s past, Penny Benjamin ( Jennifer Connelly ), although she was only referenced in passing before: In “Top Gun,” Maverick is chewed out by his superior officer for having “a history of high-speed passes over five air control towers — and one admiral’s daughter!” Penny is that daughter: strong, independent and responsible for a daughter of her own (not Maverick’s, and too young to be his love interest). Cruise’s character has matured on the womanizing front, and the movie provides a shallow yet satisfying romantic subplot between him and Penny, which gives him something to come home for, since his daredevil tendencies otherwise give off strong kamikaze vibes.

In theory, Maverick should have graduated Topgun and gone back to teach what he’d learned to other Navy pilots. But after losing his flying partner, the character wound up being more of a loner — or so we learn, catching up with him all these years later, working as a test pilot and stuck at the rank of captain. Following a nostalgia-baiting aircraft carrier landing montage, wherein “Top Gun” theme “Danger Zone” blazes once again, Kosinski tracks Maverick to the Mojave Desert, still living up to his nickname when he takes a multimillion-dollar piece of government equipment — a supersonic, SR-71 Blackbird-style (fictional) Darkstar jet — out for a speed test.

Showing up as none-too-amused Navy brass, Ed Harris arrives just in time to eat a face full of sand as Maverick takes off at rocket speed, gently pushing the plane to Mach 10. (As a point of reference, the F-14s seen in “Top Gun” top out around Mach 2.) It’s a glorious scene, and one that melds everything Maverick once represented with Cruise’s own off-screen personality — which also explains all the self-driven motorcycle rides. The stunt nearly gets Maverick kicked out of the Navy. His only option: Go back to the training academy, where Tom “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer) is now filling Tom Skerritt/Viper’s shoes.

The script incorporates Kilmer’s throat cancer, such that Iceman has just one scene, communicating mostly by keyboard — but it’s a smart one, paying off the way the dynamic between these two ex-rivals has evolved. Considering the importance Goose and Rooster play in this next mission, which involves a near-impossible airstrike on a uranium plant, it would’ve been nice to see Meg Ryan return as the widow/mom, but the rules are cruel when it comes to aging female actors. Meanwhile, we can talk about all the cosmetic ways Cruise and Kilmer’s faces have evolved, although there’s only one change that matters: Cruise has perfected that little jaw-clenching trick that signifies “This is a really tough call.”

He won’t get an Oscar for pantomiming such swallow-your-pride stoicism, though Cruise deserves one for everything else the role demanded of him: If the flying scenes here blow your mind, it’s because a great many of them are the real deal, putting audiences right there in the cockpit alongside a cast who learned to pilot for their parts. The idea here is that Maverick has been grounded, relegated to coaching a dozen top-of-their-class hotshots, though he takes to the skies right away, trumping all of these aces in a series of adrenaline-fueled drills. Not a one of these students is convincing as a Navy pilot, though their personalities win us over all the same (even Glen Powell’s alpha-male “Hangman,” who serves as this movie’s Iceman equivalent), and once can imagine future spinoffs involving any of these characters.

“Top Gun” has always been “The Tom Cruise Show,” and no one believes for a second that Maverick won’t maneuver his way into flying the climactic mission. But he can’t do it alone: The operation calls for perfectly coordinated teamwork among six pilots, recalling the group air battle that bonded Iceman and Maverick in the original movie.

These days, videogame-styled blockbusters rely so heavily on CGI that it’s thrilling to see the impact of gravity on actual human beings, pancaked to their chairs by multiple G-forces. Sophisticated movie magic makes their performances seamless with the exterior airborne shots, while the commitment to filming practically everything practically feels like the cutting-edge equivalent of Howard Hughes’ history-making “Hell’s Angels.” The result is the most immersive flight simulator audiences will have ever experienced, right down to the great Dolby roar of engines vibrating through their seats (while the score teases cues for Lady Gaga’s end-credits anthem “Hold My Hand”).

Early on, Ed Harris’ character warns Maverick and his team that “one day, they won’t need pilots at all,” by which he means, drone technology is not far from allowing the Navy to do all of its flying by remote control. Cinema seems to be moving in that same direction, replacing actors with digital puppets and real locations with greenscreen plates — but not if Tom Cruise has anything to do with it. Engineered to hit so many of the same pleasure points as the original, “Top Gun: Maverick” fulfills our desire to go really fast, really far above ground — what the earlier film unforgettably referred to as “the need for speed.”

Still, this buckle-up follow-up also demonstrates why we feel the need for movie stars. It goes well beyond Cruise’s rah-rah involvement in what amounts to a glorified U.S. military recruitment commercial (the 1986 film might have been as perfectly calibrated as a Swiss watch, but it wasn’t subtle about its GI Joe agenda). It’s the way we identify with the guy when he’s doing what most of us thought impossible. Turns out we need Maverick now more than ever.

Reviewed at AMC Century City 15 (Imax), May 10, 2022. In Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition). MPA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 130 MIN.

• Production: A Paramount Pictures release of a Paramount Pictures, Skydance, Jerry Bruckheimer Films presentation of a Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer production. Producers: Jerry Bruckheimer, Tom Cruise, Christopher McQuarrie, David Ellison. Executive producers: Tommy Harper, Dana Goldberg, Don Granger, Chad Oman, Mike Stenson.
• Crew: Director: Joseph Kosinski. Screenplay: Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, Christopher McQuarrie; story: Peter Craig, Justin Marks, based on characters created by Jim Cash & Jack Epps Jr. Camera: Claudio Miranda. Editor: Eddie Hamilton. Music: Lorne Balfe, Harold Faltermeyer, Hans Zimmer.
• With: Tom Cruise, Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Charles Parnell, Bashir Salahuddin, Monica Barbaro, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Greg Tarzan Davis, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer.

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‘top gun: maverick’ ties as the all-time best reviewed tom cruise film.

‘Top Gun 2’ ties with ‘Mission: Impossible — Fallout’ to rank as the highest-scoring Cruise movie on Rotten Tomatoes.

By Pamela McClintock

Pamela McClintock

Senior Film Writer

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Hollywood summer tentpoles aren’t necessarily known for being critical darlings. There are always exceptions, of course. One of those is Top Gun: Maverick , which is finally hitting theaters today after being grounded for two years because of the pandemic.

From Paramount and Skydance, the pic ranks as the best-reviewed movie of Tom Cruise ‘s prolific career, alongside the most recent installment in the Mission: Impossible series.

The movie presently sports a stellar 97 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, the same score as Mission: Impossible — Fallout (2018) . It’s possible the score for Top Gun 2 could move a point or two in either direction as final reviews are tallied.

The first Top Gun (1986) may have been a huge commercial success, but it didn’t garner the same respect of reviewers. Top Gun’ s score is 58 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Cruise’s lowest score on Rotten Tomatoes is 1988’s Cocktail (7 percent).

From Paramount and Skydance, Top Gun: Maverick   earned $19.3 million in previews this week , the highest preview number in Paramount’s history and the best preview for a Memorial Day release.

Directed by Joseph Kosinski , the long-awaited sequel to the iconic film returns Cruise as the ultra-gifted and confident Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell.

The film co-stars Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell and Ed Harris, while Val Kilmer also makes a brief appearance as “Iceman,” Maverick’s onetime nemesis turned pal. The film also features Lady Gaga’s ballad “Hold My Hand,” while the producing team includes Jerry Bruckheimer, who guided the original film.

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Top Gun: Maverick review – irresistible Tom Cruise soars in a blockbuster sequel

Cinema’s favourite ageless fighter pilot returns with all the nail-biting aeronautics and emotional sucker punches that made the original an 80s-defining hit

A nd we’re back. A full 36 years (including some Covid-related runway delays) after Tony Scott’s big-screen recruitment advert for US naval aviators became an epoch-defining cinema hit, Tom Cruise is back doing what he does best – flashing his cute/crazy superstar smile and flexing his bizarrely ageless body in an eye-popping blockbuster that, for all its daft macho contrivances, still manages to take your breath away, dammit.

From the burnished opening shots of planes waltzing off an aircraft carrier to the strains of Kenny Loggins’s Danger Zone , little has changed in the world of Top Gun – least of all Cruise. Maverick may be testing jets out in the Mojave desert, but he’s still got the jacket, the bike(s), the aviator shades and (most importantly) the “need for speed” that made him a hit back in 1986. He also has the machine-tooled rebellious streak that has prevented him rising above the level of captain – showcased in an opening Mach 10 sequence that doesn’t so much tip its hat to Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff as fly straight past it with a super-smug popcorn-eating grin. See ya, serious movie suckers!

“Your kind is headed for extinction,” growls Ed Harris’s forward-looking rear admiral (nicknamed the “Drone Ranger”) before admitting through gritted teeth that Maverick has in fact been called back to the Top Gun programme – not to fly, but to teach the “best of the best” how to blow up a uranium enrichment plant at face-melting velocity, a mission that will require not one but “ two consecutive miracles”. “I’m not a teacher,” Maverick insists, “I’m a fighter pilot.” But, of course, he can be both.

True to form, Maverick promptly throws the rulebook in the bin ( literally – the metaphors are not subtle) and tells his team of fresh-faced hopefuls that the only thing that matters is “your limits; I intend to find them, and test them”. Cue dog-fight training sequences played out to classic jukebox cuts, while thrusting young guns do 200 push-ups on the runway. In the local bar, an underused Jennifer Connelly serves up drinks and love-interest sass (Kelly McGillis was apparently not invited to this party) while Miles Teller ’s Rooster bangs out Great Balls of Fire on the piano, prompting a flashback to Maverick cradling Anthony Edwards’s Goose, who got famously cooked in the first film.

And therein lies what passes for the heart of the piece; because Rooster is Goose’s son, and Maverick (who still blames himself) doesn’t want to be responsible for history repeating itself. “If I send him on this mission,” Cruise emotes, “he might not come back; if I don’t send him, he’ll never forgive me. Either way I could lose him for ever.” Tough call, bro.

Cruise has described making a Top Gun sequel as being like trying to hit a bullet with a bullet – which is exactly the kind of thing that Maverick would say. Yet working with director Joseph Kosinski (with whom Cruise made Oblivion ) and scriptwriters including regular collaborator Christopher McQuarrie, he has done just that. For all its nostalgic, Miller Time sequences of shirtless beach sports and oddly touching character callbacks (a cameo from Val Kilmer ’s Iceman proves unexpectedly affecting), Top Gun: Maverick offers exactly the kind of air-punching spectacle that reminds people why a trip to the cinema beats staying at home and watching Netflix.

The plot trajectory may be predictable to the point of ridicule (like Richard Gere in An Officer and a Gentleman , Tom is going up where he belongs) but the emotional beats are as finely choreographed as the stunts. As for the “don’t think, just do” mantra (a cheeky rehash of Star Wars ’s “Use the force, Luke”), it’s as much an instruction to the audience as to the pilots.

Personally, I found myself powerless to resist; overawed by the ‘“real flight” aeronautics and nail-biting sky dances, bludgeoned by the sugar-frosted glow of Cruise’s mercilessly engaging facial muscles, and shamefully brought to tears by moments of hate-yourself-for-going-with-it manipulation. In the immortal words of Abba’s Waterloo, “I was defeated, you won the war”. I give up.

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Top Gun: Maverick Got the Most Positive Reviews on Rotten Tomatoes in 2022; All We Know

The tom cruise-starrer wins the best movie of 2022 title at the golden tomato awards..

Top Gun: Maverick has won the top spot on the best movies of 2022 list from Rotten Tomatoes. The film stars Tom Cruise, reprising his role as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell from the 1986 film Top Gun. It released on May 27, 2022, and was a hit with critics and audiences alike.

The film has a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 459 critic reviews. It has become the most positive-rated film from 2022 on the review aggregator website. And it’s not just critics. Top Gun: Maverick has received 99% from over 50,000 votes on Rotten Tomatoes' fan score. The film was, of course, one of the biggest hits of 2022 as it made a worldwide total of $1.488 billion at the box office.

The film, of course, has a nostalgia factor, and it contained a lot of action which filmgoers might have missed seeing on the big screen. Cruise is known for doing dangerous stunts, and many action film lovers were likely pleased to see him pulling off dangerous stunts in Top Gun: Maverick.

In IGN India's review of the film, we awarded it a score of 9 out of 10 and called it a “perfect sequel to an iconic series that set the stage to a lot of movies that followed.” You can check out the full review here .

The film even headed back to the big screen again for a limited time in December . This was after it had already returned to IMAX in June .

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Top Gun: Maverick’s Glen Powell stars in trailer for Netflix movie with near-perfect Rotten Tomatoes score, and it’s now become one of my most-anticipated 2024 films

School of Rock’s Richard Linklater directs

The first full trailer for the Netflix action comedy Hit Man is here, and it’s hilarious. The new movie from School of Rock director Richard Linklater stars Top Gun: Maverick’ s Glen Powell as an undercover agent posing as a hitman.

We see "fake hitman" Gary Johnson playing several versions of a stereotypical gun for hire in the new look. As he explains in a voiceover: "I realized not everyone fantasized about the same hitman, every sting operation was a performance." However, it seems he gets more than he bargained for when he’s hired by Adria Arjona’s Maddy Masters to kill her husband, and soon finds himself very charmed by her. 

It’s a great trailer, showcasing Powell’s chameleon-like performance in a variety of hitman disguises, and even more hilariously the comparison to his normal life watering his plants. Given it’s from the brains behind Dazed and Confused, the Before trilogy, and School of Rock, Linklater, we’re all but sold on this new Netflix caper.

It seems we’re not the only ones either, as early reviews from the movie’s debut at film festivals have been glowing too. Total Film gave it four stars, saying that it’s "fizzy, funny, heightened". Our reviewer Jane Crowther writes in our Hit Man review : "Hit Man is a damn good time at the movies that will leave you buzzing. It won’t win awards, but it will increase thirst for Powell." 

The film is currently sitting at 96% on Rotten Tomatoes too, with other reviewers calling it Linklater's "best movie since Boyhood ".  Time Out  writes: "Hit Man stands alongside School of Rock for big laughs and good vibes." Meanwhile,  The Hollywood Reporter  simply calls it: "Smart and steamy screwball fun."

Hit Man hits Netflix on June 7. For more, check out our guide to the best Netflix movies and our round-up of the best romantic action movie couples . 

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I’m the Deputy Entertainment Editor here at GamesRadar+, covering TV and film for the Total Film and SFX sections online. I previously worked as a Senior Showbiz Reporter and SEO TV reporter at Express Online for three years. I've also written for The Resident magazines and Amateur Photographer, before specializing in entertainment.

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'Titanic'? 'The Godfather'? 'Psycho'? The Best Film of All Time revealed by Rotten Tomatoes

• Oops! Something went wrong. Please try again later. More content below

The review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes has revealed its list of the highest-rated movies of all time.

The list of 300 titles is based on reviews from critics, as Rotten Tomatoes collects online reviews from writers who are certified members of various writing guilds or film critic-associations. These are all ‘Certified Fresh’ (100–75%) and ranked using a combination of a movie’s Tomatometer rating and its Audience Score.

So, is it Titanic ?

Nope, not even in the Top 10.

The Godfather ?

Close, but Francis Ford Coppola ’s epic crime drama got second place on the podium.

The misunderstood masterpiece that is Les Mayfield’s 1997 comedy gem Flubber , starring the one and only Robin Williams?

Too much to hope for.

The top spot goes to another 1997 film – Curtis Hanson’s neo noir gem L.A. Confidential , based on James Ellroy’s 1990 novel of the same name.

And we’re not unhappy about this. The film, starring Russell Crowe, Guy Pearce, James Cromwell, Kim Basinger , Kevin Spacey and David Strathairn is nothing short of a tense atmospheric miracle that exudes a unique pull. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards at the time, including Best Picture. It only won two: Best Supporting Actress for Basinger and Best Adapted Screenplay. Titanic won in every other category L.A. Confidential was nominated for.

But again, it didn’t make the Top 10 – or the Top 300 even. Delayed justice, granted, but a bit harsh.

We won’t list the Top 300 – you can find that  here – but here’s the Top 20:

L.A. Confidential (1997)

The Godfather (1972)

Casablanca (1942)

Seven Samurai (1954)

Parasite (2019)

Schindler’s List (1993)

Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

Toy Story 2 (1999)

Chinatown (1974)

On The Waterfront (1954)

The Battle of Algiers (1966)

Toy Story (1995)

Rear Window (1954)

Modern Times (1936)

How To Train Your Dragon (2010)

All About Eve (1950)

Spirited Away (2001)

The Third Man (1949)

Spotlight (2015)

Not a bad list, all in all, despite a noticeable absence of female filmmakers in the top spots; the fact that Sunset Boulevard (in at 27) should have been in the Top 5 easily; Spotlight is overrated; and that Top Gun: Maverick is alarmingly high.

Additionally, what Ratatouille is doing as low as 119 is something of a travesty. And where, pray tell, is The Exorcist ? Not in the Top 300, that’s where. Scandalous.

And just in case you were wondering, the most recent film in the list – here in the Top 100 – is last year’s The Holdovers , ranked at number 36. It was one of our favourites from last year , but we would’ve liked to have seen Past Lives creep in there somewhere.

What do you make of Rotten Tomatoes Top 300 Best Movies of All Time? And which films do you think deserved to make the cut?

While you ponder, here's the trailer for the official Top Film of All Time:

Definitely worth rewatching.

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This is the best film of all time, according to Rotten Tomatoes

'The Godfather' and 'Toy Story 2' are among the top 10

Rotten Tomatoes has revealed its list of the highest-rated movies of all time, based on reviews from critics.

• READ MORE: ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ review: an engaging if brainless return to the danger zone

The review aggregator has published a list of 300 films, all of which are ‘Certified Fresh’ by reviewers.

The films are ranked using a combination of a movie’s Tomatometer rating (i.e. its performance according to critics) and its Audience Score.

Among the top 10 list, which spans eight decades of filmmaking, are five Academy Award Best Picture wins including Schindler’s List and Parasite , which NME gave five stars in its review .

However, first place on the list is taken by L.A. Confidential (1997), which missed out on the prestigious award, losing to James Cameron ’s Titanic . The epic disaster film won 11 Oscars, but hasn’t been featured in Rotten Tomatoes’ top 300.

You can check out the top 10 list below.

• L.A. Confidential
• The Godfather
• Seven Samurai
• Schindler’s List
• Top Gun: Maverick
• Toy Story 2
• On The Waterfront

Recommended

Several animated movies including the Toy Story franchise, Finding Nemo and How To Train Your Dragon have made it into the top 20, with Studio Ghibli’s Spirited Away being ranked in 17th place.

Marvel Studios has also made it into the top 30 list, with 2018’s animated movie Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse coming in at 21st place.

The most recent film in the top 100 list is Best Picture nominee The Holdovers , which was released late last year. Starring Paul Giamatti and Oscar winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph, the film is currently ranked at number 36.

You can find the full list of 300 movies here .

• Related Topics
• James Cameron
• Paul Giamatti

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Screen Rant

Russell crowe celebrates his 1997 oscar winner being named best movie ever by rotten tomatoes.

Actor Russell Crowe reacts to his 1997 Oscar-winning film L.A. Confidential being named the best movie of all time by Rotten Tomatoes.

• Russell Crowe celebrates L.A. Confidential being named the best movie of all time by Rotten Tomatoes.
• Crowe is touched by the news and references the Rotten Tomatoes list.
• L.A. Confidential beats iconic films like The Godfather in the list.

Russell Crowe celebrates L.A. Confidential being named the best movie of all time by Rotten Tomatoes. The 1997 film is set in 1950s Los Angeles and revolves around the story of three policemen who investigate a series of murders. L.A. Confidential is directed by Curtis Hanson and features a leading cast of Crowe, Kevin Spacey, Guy Pearce, Kim Basinger, James Cromwell, David Strathairn, and Danny DeVito.

Recently, on X (formerly Twitter), Crowe reacted to L.A. Confidential ’s nomination for the best movie ever by Rotten Tomatoes . The Oscar-winning actor posted the list along with a statement that indicated he was touched by the news. He said “ One heart at a time, ” likely in reaction to the news.

He made it clear that he was referring to the Rotten Tomatoes list by saying “‘ Titanic'? 'The Godfather'? 'Psycho'? The Best Film of All Time revealed by Rotten Tomatoes ” in the caption and posting the list.

What Else Was On The Top Of The Rotten Tomatoes List

L.a. confidential beat out movies like the godfather & casablanca ..

Both The Godfather films and L.A. Confidential deal with fascinating ensembles and themes of corruption, but according to Rotten Tomatoes, L.A. Confidential did it better.

Given its relative recency in film history, it is somewhat surprising that L.A. Confidential is ranked as the greatest film of all time by Rotten Tomatoes. Unlike other films on the list, the 1997 crime thriller was not helmed by a major auteur director, but the reception has always been positive. In addition to scoring a near-perfect 99% on Rotten Tomatoes , the film was nominated for nine Oscars and won two. Since then, the movie has been considered one of the finest movies in history, although rarely at the top position.

L.A. Confidential won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (Basinger) and Best Adapted Screenplay, and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Sound, Best Film Editing, and Best Music.

Perhaps the most surprising film that L.A. Confidential beat out for the top spot was 1972’s The Godfather . By visionary director Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather is widely considered one of the most vital cinematic achievements of all time. It spawned two sequels, the first of which ( The Godfather: Part II ) is similarly well-reviewed. Both The Godfather films and L.A. Confidential deal with fascinating ensembles and themes of corruption, but according to Rotten Tomatoes, the latter did it better.

LA Confidential Ending Explained

The Rotten Tomatoes list included films from other major directors, such as Alfred Hitchcock ( Rear Window ), Steven Spielberg ( Schindler’s List ), and Akira Kurosawa ( Seven Samurai ). It also added classics like 1942’s Casablanca and the 1936 film Modern Times . Predictably, several 21st-century titles include the stellar 2019 film Parasite alongside a more surprising pick in 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick . Three Pixar films made the list, including Up and the first two Toy Story movies. In an eclectic mix like this, L.A. Confidential ’ s no. 1 slot is less surprising.

Source: Russell Crowe /X (formerly Twitter)

Watch L.A. Confidential On Netflix

LA Confidential

• Tickets & Showtimes
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Rotten Tomatoes’ 300 Best Movies of All Time

The highest-rated movies of all time, as reviewed and selected by Tomatometer-approved critics and Rotten Tomatoes users.

How did we select and rank the movies? First, every movie here is Certified Fresh.

Then we applied our recommendation formula, which considers a movie’s Tomatometer rating with assistance from its Audience Score, illuminating beloved sentiment from both sides. Critics-certified, audience-approved!

Other factors weighing into the recommendation formula: a movie’s number of critics reviews, the number of Audience Score votes, and its year of release. An editorial pass is reserved to finesse the final list, which included minimum thresholds for each of these data points.

After this guide’s launch period, we’ll visit movies released in 2024, with frequent updates and refreshes from there.

L.A. Confidential (1997) 99%

The Godfather (1972) 97%

Casablanca (1942) 99%

Seven Samurai (1954) 100%

Parasite (2019) 99%

Schindler's List (1993) 98%

Top Gun: Maverick (2022) 96%

Toy Story 2 (1999) 100%

Chinatown (1974) 98%

On the Waterfront (1954) 99%

The Battle of Algiers (1966) 99%

Toy Story (1995) 100%

Rear Window (1954) 98%

Modern Times (1936) 98%

How to Train Your Dragon (2010) 99%

All About Eve (1950) 99%

Spirited Away (2001) 96%

Up (2009) 98%

The Third Man (1949) 99%

Spotlight (2015) 97%

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) 97%

The Philadelphia Story (1940) 100%

Finding Nemo (2003) 99%

Singin' in the Rain (1952) 100%

12 Angry Men (1957) 100%

Toy Story 3 (2010) 98%

Sunset Boulevard (1950) 98%

Coco (2017) 97%

The Godfather, Part II (1974) 96%

Three Colors: Red (1994) 100%

Selma (2014) 99%

Zootopia (2016) 98%

Citizen Kane (1941) 99%

Annie Hall (1977) 97%

Cool Hand Luke (1967) 100%

The Holdovers (2023) 97%

Inside Out (2015) 98%

Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) 98%

Let the Right One In (2008) 98%

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) 95%

Knives Out (2019) 97%

M (1931) 100%

Toy Story 4 (2019) 97%

The Wrestler (2008) 98%

Goodfellas (1990) 95%

The Wizard of Oz (1939) 98%

Double Indemnity (1944) 97%

Psycho (1960) 97%

Paddington 2 (2017) 99%

Before Sunrise (1995) 100%

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Small movies, big profits: sydney sweeney and glen powell’s rom-com, horror hits among overachievers in deadline’s 2023 most valuable blockbuster tournament, disney detonates four bombs in deadline’s 2023 most valuable blockbuster tournament.

By Anthony D'Alessandro

Anthony D'Alessandro

Editorial Director/Box Office Editor

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Everyone likes a trend in the movie business, but this one perhaps not so much. Disney for the first time in Deadline’s Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament history dominates the annual bombs section, claiming four of the five (top? bottom?) spots on our 2023 list. Typically, the studio owns a majority of the year’s top 10 most profitable films thanks to Marvel movies, but not this year. A lot of this stems from feeding the beast of streaming service Disney+; the studio’s initial plan during Covid was to shell out $14 billion-$16 billion annually on content by this year. With Bob Iger taking the CEO reins from Bob Chapek, he’s trying to right the ship with a less-is-more strategy, zeroing in on quality so that the No. 1 motion picture studio can come back to form.

Some of you might ask: Where is Apple Original Films on this list? Wouldn’t Killers of the Flower Moon and Napoleon rank? Several film-finance sources tell us that Apple movies and Disney movies shouldn’t go in the same bucket. The former is a tech company, of which content is a fraction of their revenues. Essentially, any prestige losses made by Apple on movies are seen as advertising expenses to drive eyeballs to its OTT service. Meanwhile, content is king for Disney and drives all other ancillaries, extending to theme parks and cruise ships. Quite often we get the phone call from the studio saying, “You’re not taking into account other merchandise and theme park revenues on these films.” Make no mistake: Films that fall down at the box office don’t have afterlives.

When Marvel fanboys and fangirls smell it’s going to be good, they crowd the theater. But when it’s a dud, they stay away. One would think a sequel to a $1.1 billion-grossing female superhero movie would be logical, and asked for. However, The Marvels ‘ predecessor, Captain Marvel, benefited at the box office from being a bridge between the Avengers finales Infinity War and Endgame. Yes, the actors strike did pour a lot of cold water on promoting this film, with the thespian standoff ending just days before this sequel’s opening November 10, and star Brie Larson rushing around to late-night shows to tubthump the pic. But there was more. The movie was trying to thread storylines from Disney+ shows like Ms. Marvel , which was part of a grand master plan by Marvel to connect the series with the movies. That strategy showed its holes here as Ms. Marvel wasn’t embraced in a big way by MCU fans ala series like Loki and WandaVision were. Lastly, Marvel has prided itself on hiring indie directors, plugging them into their system and turning them into blockbuster filmmakers (e.g., Jon Watts, Taika Waititi). It’s a recipe that doesn’t always work, evident in this movie (directed by Nia DaCosta) and Marvel’s The Eternals from Nomadland Oscar winner Chloé Zhao. The MCU in its zenith wins over both critics and audiences, and that didn’t happen here, with a 62% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes and B CinemaScore.

THE BOX SCORE

The Flash Warner Bros/DC Studios Net Loss: -$155M

Released well before the actors strike, it doesn’t help when your leading star is making lots of tabloid headlines, the person here being Ezra Miller. Miller was kept at bay in regards to promoting the DC movie, and the pic’s stars, which included Michael Keaton returning as Batman, were either available in limited doses or shied away from doing press (no one wanted to field questions about Miller). Still, props to the new Warner Bros administration of Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, as well as DC bosses James Gunn and Peter Safran. Although they inherited this movie, they believed in it and propped it all they could as the ultimate DC time-warp movie with cameos from previous superheroes. They even previewed the film early for exhibitors at CinemaCon. Unfortunately, masses didn’t buy the Spider-Man: No Way Home -like stunt here.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny Disney Net Loss: -$143M

Wish Disney Net Loss: -$131M

Disney always needs to plant an animated family film in the Thanksgiving corridor; the only problem is that the studio hasn’t seen glory since before Covid with Frozen 2. Wish followed the 2022 bomb Strange World. While original animation is always an uphill battle to launch at the box office, audiences have seen this plug-and-play princess and silly sidekicks (in this case a talking goat and puffy star) movie before, and waited this one out for Disney+ (another potential catalyst for dwindling Disney moviegoing). Audiences and critics smelled that the movie reeked of corporate product rather than magical event. Essentially, a studio is in trouble when its movie’s narrative is more about a celebration of the company’s birthday than a riveting piece of content.

Haunted Mansion Disney Net Loss: -$117M

This movie, which opened July 28, was the first big casualty of the strike with its cast unable to show up at the pic’s Disneyland premiere, which the studio billed as a fan event. Above all, Haunted Mansion burned down because of its release date, opening in the wake of Barbie and ahead of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem , thus losing out on the younger-skewing audience it wanted. At the end of the day, the 2003 Eddie Murphy version, unadjusted for inflation, made more money with its domestic take of $75.8M and global of $182.2M.

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