Top Gun

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.