Tom Cruise wears the t-shirts, sunglasses and jackets of the time; he runs in motion, chases planes in flight, exits windows and is willing to challenge any speed limit. Thirty-six years after the record summer he made Top Gun by Tony Scott a box office success and iconic film for an entire generation, the star is fine, very well indeed.
Top Gun Maverick, which took over 30 years of work and has been postponed several times due to the pandemic, is a great Hollywood action blockbuster. But above all it is a tribute to Cruise and friendship. With the soundtrack, Hold my hand, now signed by Lady Gaga. This is the plot: thirty years later Pete “Maverick” Mitchell is still a captain in the United States Navy, and works as a test pilot. Soon, however, he is recalled by the legendary Top Gun aviation school in San Diego, where he has the task of training the best pilots of the course to complete a tactically impossible mission: fly over and destroy a uranium enrichment plant in enemy territory. Maverick agrees, but quickly makes it clear that his first goal is to get the drivers out of there alive.
The team of pilots is made up of an excellent group of young actors: Danny Ramirez, Jay Ellis, Lewis Pullman, Greg Tarzan Davis, Monica Barbaro. And there’s also the son of Maverick’s best friend and flightmate, the beloved Goose, who passed away in the first film. Cruise, in fact, is still dealing with feelings of guilt. Playing the young pilot is Miles Teller, and his battle nickname is Rooster.
Meanwhile, the mythical Hard Deck is run now by a love from Maverick’s past, Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connelly). In the Top Gun original Penny appeared only in passing, but now it’s the romantic side of the film, she’s the one who gives him that something to come home to. She is independent, she has a daughter, she sails fast on a sailboat, she is the one who keeps the keys in hand even with Maverick. Will it be enough? We don’t tell you.
Love is fine, but what excites most of all is Val Kilmer, who has been ill for some time, but he wanted to be present on the set to protect and guide his friend and former rival Tom Cruise. Their embrace marks halfway through the film. And then there are the (non) special effects. Director Joseph Kosinski and cinematographer Claudio Miranda spent nearly two years figuring out how to bring well into the cockpit of an aircraft. six high-quality cameras. The rest is done by Tom Cruise who owns it the acrobatic pilot license even in real life and really climbs into the cockpit. After all Top Gun it’s always been The Tom Cruise Show and it is also this time.
(Stefania Saltalamacchia)
THE memories resurface in waves in the noisy streets of Health district of Naples. There is a middle-aged man, Felice Lasco, played by the always very talented Pierfrancesco Favinowhich returns after forty years of absence, arrives from Cairo to find his elderly mother. The call of the past with which she finds herself to deal sinks him in the feeling that gives the title to the film of Mario Martone: Nostalgia. Presented in competition at the festival of Cannes and now in theaters, is based on the novel by Ermanno Rea.
The meeting with the mother elderly, gracefully interpreted by Aurora Quattrocchi, is the highest point of the first part. There is a moving scene in which the son who picks up his mother, deposits her in the bathtub and washes her. Felice no longer remembers even his mother tongue well, his words escape him, he has even forgotten the face of a dear family friend, but slowly he regains possession of his rootsand is convinced that he can fix the past in which a secret is hidden, the one that led him to escape from Naples: the involuntary complicity in a crime committed by his childhood friend Oreste. Today though Oreste (Tommaso Ragno) is Malommo, the boss of the neighborhood, a leading exponent of the Camorra della Sanità , a man capable of blind violence. Malommo wants Felice to go abroad with his secrets, but the protagonist, in the name of his old friendship, decides to stay and also makes friends with the combative street priest Don Luigi (Francesco Di Leva).
Thus begins a mouse hunt and the film takes the step of thriller. Who will win between the two? What dangers does the call of the past bring? And what is the sense of feeling nostalgic for a neighborhood-place of the soul that is always the same as itself? The tension builds in a crescendo until the final scene.
The third protagonist of the film is Naples, or rather the Sanità district, with its load of ambivalence, unpleasantness And attraction mixed together. Certain faces, certain extras, certain glimpses (one could also say certain flavors and smells if it were not just a film) that give back the soul of a unique place in the world.
(Valentina Colosimo)
Source: Vanity Fair
