Top Gun: Maverick – Memphis Flyer

It may not have been the best of times at the box office, but 2022 produced a bumper crop of great films. But before we get to my annual, non-ranked list of the best the year had to offer, we need to talk about the worst.

Johnny Knoxville gleefully provokes bees into stinging Steve-O’s nether bits.

Worst Picture: Jackass Forever

If I wanted to watch 96 minutes of recreational genital torture, I’d go to the internet like Al Gore intended.

Austin Butler’s performance as Elvis is electrifying.

Best Memphis Film: Elvis

Okay, so it wasn’t filmed in Memphis, and we’re still a little sore about that. But Baz Luhrmann’s epic musical biopic was a certified crowd-pleaser. And despite the … questionable choices made by Tom Hanks as Col. Tom Parker, Austin Butler’s barn-burning turn as the King shed new light on the complicated psychology of the boy from Tupelo who became the most famous person the world has ever seen.

Best Performance by a Nonhuman: Marcel, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

Who would have thought that a film starring a YouTube sensation from 2010 would be one of the most emotionally complex experiences of the year? Jenny Slate’s profound voice performance and Mars Attacks! animator Eric Adkins bring Marcel to life so convincingly, you’ll be hanging on this little shell’s every word.

Best Cinematography: Top Gun: Maverick

Aerial photography has been an obsession of the movies since Wings won the first Best Picture Oscar in 1927. In Top Gun: Maverick, Claudio Miranda did it better than anyone ever has — and his work was rewarded with the top-grossing film of the year.

Best Performance: Daniel Radcliffe, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

In a year rife with good performances, no one committed to the bit like Daniel Radcliffe. Playing a well-known public figure like Weird Al Yankovic is hard enough, but Radcliffe went above and beyond in capturing the fabled accordionist’s unflappable manner and egalitarian worldview. He single-handedly carries this deeply strange biopic.

MVP: Mia Goth

In X, the neo-slasher about a group of filmmakers and their exploitative producer who rent a farmhouse in the Texas countryside to film a dirty movie, Mia Goth plays both the young, would-be porn star Maxine and the elderly serial killer Pearl. While they were on set, Goth came up with such a compelling backstory for Pearl that director Ti West started filming the prequel even before the first film hit theaters. Goth’s ferocious performance in Pearl includes a chilling soliloquy for the ages.

UFOs invade California in Jordan Peele’s *Nope*. (Courtesy Universal Pictures)

Best Horror/Sci-fi/Western: Nope

Granted, it’s a pretty specific category, but even if Nope didn’t have it all to itself, it would still be one of the best films of the year. From killer chimps to a monster reveal that is downright beautiful, Jordan Peele’s latest is original, funny, and above all, creepy as hell. You’ll never look at a wind dancer the same way again.

Best Documentary: Moonage Daydream

Over the course of his 50-year career, David Bowie had many collaborators who claimed he had a knack for bringing out the best in them. That’s what happened when director Brett Morgen got access to the Bowie estate archive and spent four years creating a phantasmagorical tribute to the artist. This powerful ode to the creative spirit is 2022’s most groundbreaking film.

Best Director(s): Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman, Neptune Frost

If it were only for the opening sequence, in which laborers sing a subversive work song in an actual Rwandan pit mine, Neptune Frost would still be one of the most stunning works of the decade. But it just gets better — and weirder — from there. This unique blend of Afrofuturism, cyberpunk, and Sondheim musical combines catchy tunes with revolutionary fervor. Most remarkably, it was made on a Kickstarter budget.

Michelle Yeoh in *Everything Everywhere All At Once*

Best Picture: Everything Everywhere All At Once

Every once in a while, a picture comes along that captures the zeitgeist so effortlessly it seems to have invented it from whole cloth. The elements of Everything Everywhere All At Once — multiverse stories, a renewed earnestness, a breezy visual style, and kung fu — were all floating in the ether, but it took Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert to wrangle them into one fantastic package. Anchored by Michelle Yeoh at the peak of her powers, a comeback turn by Ke Huy Quan, and a game-for-anything Jamie Lee Curtis, this is the rare film that features both eye-popping visuals and a deeply humane philosophy.

In February, as Russian forces drove towards Kyiv, the Ukrainian people found their first war hero: A young pilot who shot down six Russian planes on the first day of the invasion, becoming the first European fighter ace in 77 years. The Ghost of Kyiv’s name would live forever alongside Eddie Rickenbacker and Chuck Yeager.

The problem was, as a Ukrainian defense official later told the BBC, The Ghost of Kyiv didn’t exist. He was “a super-hero legend created by Ukrainians.” Yes, the Ukrainian Air Force has fought bravely. They were widely expected to be wiped out in hours, but three months into the invasion, they’re still flying, and the feared Russian air wings have been badly mauled. The Ghost of Kyiv, it turns out, was the first salvo in the information war.

Since the days of The Red Baron, governments have recognized the propaganda value of a brave fighter pilot. In World War II, the greatest air ace in American history, Major Dick Bong, was pulled from combat in the Pacific to sell war bonds. In the last days of the Cold War, Americans gained our own fictional hero: Naval Aviator Lt. Pete Mitchell, callsign “Maverick,” played by Tom Cruise in Top Gun. In the summer of 1986, when Top Gun soared at the box office, while Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” and Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone” topped the Billboard charts, the Navy saw a 500 percent increase in applications.

Top Gun established director Tony Scott’s reputation as a master visual stylist and made Cruise one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Rumors of a sequel circulated for years, but when Scott died in 2012, the project seemed to die with him. But Cruise, who was scouting locations with Scott two days before the director’s suicide, wouldn’t give up the ship. Now, after years of pandemic delays, Top Gun: Maverick is poised to rule Memorial Day weekend.

After a thoroughly ’80s-syle opening credits montage, which gives us doses of both Harold Faltermeyer’s chiming theme and “Danger Zone,” we catch up with Maverick, who has now been in the Navy for 30 years. By this time, he should either be an admiral, like his frenemy “Iceman” Kazansky (Val Kilmer), now the commander of the entire Pacific fleet, or helming the Memphis to Mumbai milk run for FedEx. Instead, Maverick is a test pilot tasked with taking the experimental Darkstar scramjet to Mach 10. When he hears his commanding officer “Hammer” Cain (Ed Harris) is coming to scrap the program so he can devote the test budget to drones, Maverick sets off on one more flight to prove what this puppy can do. He succeeds, but crashes the plane in the process.

Instead of getting court-martialed, he is summoned back to Top Gun school in San Diego. There’s a top secret mission on tap to destroy a nuclear lab in some never-named “enemy”country, and they need Maverick to train the Navy’s top pilots for the suicidally dangerous mission — which just happens to resemble the trench run from Star Wars: A New Hope, but whatever.

The order of the day for director Joseph Kosinski was to ask himself “What would Tony Scott do?” And the answer is almost always, “training montage set to pop music.” Let’s be honest, that’s what we’re here for, right? Top Gun had some classics, including one of the most homoerotic moments of ’80s cinema, the pilot’s beach volleyball game, set to Kenny Loggins “Playin’ With The Boys.” Maverick puts his charges — including Miles Teller as “Rooster” Bradshaw, the son of Maverick’s deceased partner Goose — through a similarly oiled-up team building exercise, but it’s made slightly less homoerotic with the inclusion of “Phoenix” (Monica Barbaro).

This new generation of pilots have the rock-hard abs necessary for success, but Maverick is still the hottest pilot in the sky. Air combat has been a favorite subject filmmakers since Howard Hughes spent a fortune staging dogfights for Hell’s Angels. Scott’s Top Gun aerial combat scenes are rightfully revered to this day. Armed with a squadron of F-18s, compact digital cameras, and a wild disregard for Tom Cruise’s personal safety, Maverick’s aerial sequences are the most spectacular ever filmed.

Despite mustard-smeared corndog dialog and gaping plot holes, Maverick is extremely entertaining. Cruise’s charisma is undeniable, and the whole enterprise never tries to be more than what it is: slick propaganda for the military industrial complex. It’s been a winning formula since 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, and if the $801 billion we spend each year on sick toys like aircraft carriers means we can’t have nice things like health care, at least we get to watch the cool jets go vroom.