Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

Director: Joseph Kosinski. Cast: Tom Cruise, Jennifer Connelly, Miles Teller, Val Kilmer, Jon Hamm. 130 min. War/Action.

• Pure, high-quality, flawless entertainment. This is why we went to the movies in the first place. The fact that to keep as entertained, a sequel four decades later has to copy the 80s movie formula and screenplay structure, scene-by-scene and point-by-point, from the opening titles introducing what "Top Gun" is, all the way down to the girl waiting by a Porsche at the end, ... tell us how having fun at the movies has been put on the back burner these days. Don't get me wrong: it's totally fine that this fun movie is an exact replica of an older fun movie, because they're doing it right. (As opposed to an idiotic piece like Star Wars - Episode IX, where the act of copying is done so awfully, it even ruins the older movie.)
• The unnamed country which is aim of the climactic attack, intentionally left blurry here, the "only other country that has F-14s", is likely Iran. I even felt the characters were pronouncing "uranium enrichment site" to the sound like "Iranian enrichment site". The mountainous terrain doesn't look like Iran, but how many rogue nations out there are secretly enriching uranium?
• Lovely near-tearjerking appearance by Val Kilmer, even though he's suffering from throat cancer (a true life fact cleverly incorporated into the story).
• Regardless of what we've heard of his personal life, you can't deny that Tom Cruise is still one of (or the) greatest action movie star out there.

MoGo's rating: 9/10

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Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Director(s): Dan Kwan, Daniel Scheinert. Cast: Stars Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jenny Slate. 139 min. Fantasy/Comedy.

• What a wonderful (and much needed) movie for our times. You think the world is going crazy? Sometimes find it difficult to breath? This film offers a possible reason. Consider it a tie-in with the recent Doctor Strange 2 movie: there's a multiverse going on, and we are constantly tapping into parallel universes. In the 70s, escapism from the world's madness was defined by space movies like Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind; in the 80s, it was playing around with time, like in Back to the Future; in the 90s, it was claiming that we're living in a virtual world, like The Matrix, The Thirteenth Floor, and eXistenZ; now ... it's imagining a multiverse, and "what if" I hadn't made that decision, 30 years ago? Would my life be any better? Escapism. 
• True to form, there are lovely references to 80s icons. One is obvious: Jamie Lee Curtis, once the most memorable slasher-movie heroine of all time, here as a crazy IRS auditor. The other one is more subtle, but exciting when you notice "him". Let's just say he was a major player in two 80s Spielberg-driven kids' movies ...
• Strong respect paid to some other iconic movie moods and moments: funny ones like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ratatouille, and more dramatic ones like In the Mood for Love and of course, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. 
• Kudos to the script, the editing, and costume design: the thousands of cuts, and the creativity implemented in displaying numerous parallel universes, have made this one of the greatest movies of the year (already seen it twice). 
• And believe it or not, the ending does offer a glimmer of hope, in all this madness and sadness.

MoGo's rating: 9/10

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