Top Gun: Maverick

In Slate's annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2022, Bilge Ebiri, Beatrice Loayza, and David Sims—about the year in ...

(More on Athena in a bit.) So maybe, as we proceed, you folks can tell me about the smallest, least-seen titles on your lists (or hovering just outside your lists), and make a case for why they deserve to be seen by more of us. [Athena](https://www.vulture.com/article/movie-review-netflix-athena-romain-gavras.html), Romain Gavras’ riveting, enthralling tale of a French banlieue uprising. I am, after all, [a Joe Wright dead-ender](https://www.vulture.com/2022/03/the-woman-in-the-window-is-not-the-film-joe-wright-made.html). His epic treatment of the event—complete with slow-motion invading armies, cascades of fire, gonzo stunts, and battles against medieval parapets, often shot in [bravura long takes](https://www.vulture.com/2022/09/how-romain-gavras-made-the-opening-shot-of-athena.html) that careen through the devastated corridors and courtyards of this huge housing complex—lends the proceedings a mythic grandeur that makes it about more than just this one incident, suggesting an entire civilization on the brink of collapse. [Joe Wright’s Cyrano](https://www.vulture.com/article/movie-review-joe-wrights-cyrano-starring-peter-dinklage.html) was Number 16. I think [I even talked about it a bit last year](https://slate.com/culture/2021/12/best-movies-2021-musicals-west-side-story-annette-musicals.html) on this here Movie Club. And honestly, they weren’t even much of an enemy, because it wasn’t much of a war movie; the first Top Gun was more a sports movie, a college bonding movie, a hot-for-teacher movie. (Yes, even Blonde, a film I thoroughly adore.) In fact, one of them did migrate over the course of the past 12 months: Last year, The first half of the 1980s saw a lot of slick aerial combat flicks, like Firefox and Blue Thunder and Iron Eagle (a movie that feels like a cynical Top Gun rip-off but somehow came out months before Top Gun). [Movie Club](https://slate.com/tag/movie-club-2022), film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2022, Bilge Ebiri, Beatrice Loayza, and David Sims—about the year in cinema. So, here is what I consider to be my real list, my top 25 films of the year.