The musk-heavy performances by Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer... the charm of Anthony Edwards and the film-savvy of director Tony Scott manage to make this traditionally minded film something more than just your average Neo-Patriotic thriller.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 27, 2024

Top Gun is a recruiting poster that isn’t concerned with recruiting but with being a poster.

| Sep 13, 2023

Top Gun is a star-studded and visually stimulating sensation that succeeds splendidly as a big-screen spectacle thanks to Tony Scott’s distinguished direction and the charisma of its charming cast (most notably the transcendent Tom Cruise).

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 1, 2022

Too bad the entire movie wasn’t airborne; whenever the story touches down, it falls apart in the hand like thousand-year-old parchment.

| Aug 9, 2022

Memorable soundtrack and an overall premise that still holds today. A film that works towards a general audience thanks to its action sequences.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 2, 2022

As the kids say, “it’s a vibe.”

| Jun 2, 2022

It feeds on nostalgia for something that never existed, a beautiful shell concealing profound and utter emptiness at its heart.

| Jun 2, 2022

Most critics will hate this film, but the public loved it and they are truly whose opinion counts.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 29, 2022

Stupid brilliance...

| May 27, 2022

An action classic in its own right, Top Gun not only entertains with its innovating aerial sequences, but also helped start Tom Cruise's ascent into stardom. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 27, 2022

Embraces masculine tropes to create a patchwork narrative that is almost laughably bad but whose fetishization of high-tech hardware makes the cheesiness of the story seem irrelevant.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 26, 2022

Far from some air combat sequences redolent of a recruitment commercial, its test flight crashes into the most predictable terrain of action clichés and not even Tom Cruise's pilot maneuvers can get it out of the routine. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 5/10 | May 23, 2022

At any moment, you expect someone will open a Pepsi, look at the camera, and announce some hollow slogan.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | May 22, 2022

Cold War propaganda that is weirdly apolitical. Sunny, breezy homoeroticism that is surely unintentional. What a hoot this is! Mostly not in a good way, but its impact on pop culture cannot be denied.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | May 20, 2022

I will always have a fondness for the original Top Gun. It’s what you want in a big bombastic cheesy blockbuster.

| Original Score: 7/10 | May 19, 2022

The dogfight scenes are brilliant, the earthbound flyboy shenanigans are lots of fun, and the romance is fairly abysmal. Which is sad, but doesn’t affect the movie in the slightest because “Top Gun” is a Warrior/Magician movie, not a Lover movie.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 17, 2022

If you like airplane movies, Top Gun is about one-third of a dazzler, and the rest is at least watchable.

| Nov 3, 2021

While it's still enjoyable to this day, Top Gun is very much a film of 1986 (35th anniversary)

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 16, 2021

It's a big, dumb movie that was probably bad for the world, and it's also totally awesome.

| May 17, 2021

When the film isn't having characters stew over personal dramas, complicated histories, or contrived camaraderie, Cruise and McGillis do a pretty good job of flirting.

| Original Score: 6/10 | Mar 24, 2021