Top Gun: Maverick

July 6, 2022July 13, 2022 Kevin Fentress Movie Reviews action, airplane, drama, ed harris, glen powell, jennifer connelly, jon hamm, joseph kosinski, lewis pullman, miles teller, monica barbaro, tom cruise, val kilmer

High as You Can Go

The original Top Gun is not a great movie, but it is an iconic one. Despite its several risible elements, it’s outlasted conventionally better films in American pop culture by sheer virtue of being so damn memorable. It’s a factory of classic movie moments, from the orange-soaked, “Danger Zone”-scored opening to the impromptu bar serenade to, yes, the beach volleyball scene. That these highlights never add up to a fully-formed movie is beside the point; the fact that Top Gun has managed to spawn a sequel thirty-six years later is proof of its unique staying power.

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Flight (2012)

September 27, 2020July 1, 2022 Kevin Fentress Movie Reviews 2010s, 2012, airplane, Bruce Greenwood, Denzel Washington, don cheadle, drama, John Goodman, Kelly Reilly, Robert Zemeckis

Flying High

Flight is a movie that peaks during its opening scenes, but what a peak it is. Its first act plane-crash sequence is the movie’s clear peak, an edge-of-your-seat ten minutes that are both breathlessly thrilling and terrifyingly believable. In the cockpit is Whip Whittaker (Denzel Washington), a seasoned airline pilot with a serious alcohol and drug addiction. Coming off a night of heavy drinking and a morning of cocaine use, Whip’s seemingly routine morning flight from Orlando to Atlanta suffers a severe mechanical error. Through a combination of Zen-like calm and sheer skill, Whip manages to land the plane in a field with only six lives lost. Though hailed as a hero by the media, he’s too busy mourning the death of his flight attendant paramour to bask in the spotlight.

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7500

July 17, 2020July 19, 2020 Kevin Fentress Movie Reviews airplane, amazon, germany, joseph gordon-levitt, one room, terrorism, thriller

7500

Cabin Pressure

7500, an airborne thriller from Amazon Studios, stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Tobias Ellis, the co-pilot of a nighttime flight from Berlin to Paris, on which his girlfriend (Aylin Tezel) is working as a flight attendant. Shortly after the plane takes off, a quartet of terrorists storm the cockpit brandishing makeshift knives. Though Tobias manages to close the cockpit door, the scuffle leaves him injured and the captain (Carlo Kitzlinger) incapacitated, along with a terrorist Tobias knocked out and tied up. Left to fly the plane and contact authorities on the ground by himself, Tobias’s only links to the rest of the plane are the intercom system and the security camera mounted just outside the cockpit. As the terrorists in the main cabin grow impatient, they force Tobias to make increasingly brutal choices as the de facto hostage negotiator. Continue reading →