Review of Top Gun: Maverick (2022) by Justin Chang for Los Angeles Times — 12 May 2022

Thanks to Cruise and Kosinski’s unfashionable insistence on practical filmmaking and their refusal to lean too heavily on computer-generated visual effects, their sequel plays like a throwback in more than one sense.

But the era that produced the first film has shifted, and “Top Gun: Maverick” is especially poignant in the ways, both subtle and overt, that it acknowledges the passage of time, the fading of youth and the shifting of its own status as a pop cultural phenomenon.