The popular imagination, on many occasions, tends to project the image of a film critic as a pedantic and sour entity incapable of enjoying himself and who faces feature films with an arched eyebrow by default; but this week, the NBR —Association of American Critics—has shown that nobody is bitter about a blockbusterand even less if it is as glorious as ‘Top Gun: Maverick’.
The danger zone captivates US critics.
The National Board of Review has delivered its awards for the best of the year, and the feature film by Joseph Kosinski starring Tom Cruise has been the great winner with the selection, winning the the awards a the best film of 2022 and the best cinematography; the latter in recognition of the enormous technical and artistic effort of the DOP Claudio Miranda.
With this double the sequel to ‘Top Gun’ turns on its jets and takes off for the big event of the year; an Oscar delivery ceremony that, a priori, relegates this type of product to the technical categories —criminal that of ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’—, and in which this year the new adventure of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell.
In the rest of the categories, the victory of Steven Spielberg as Best Director for his work in ‘Los Fabelmans’, the acting awards to Colin Farrell and Michelle Yeoh for ‘Souls in pain in Insherin’ and ‘Everything at once everywhere’, the award for best adapted screenplay went to ‘All Quiet Front’, the German film that lost in the category of best film foreign in front of ‘Close’.
Slowly we are getting an idea of where the shots can go in the 2022 awards season, but with the Golden Globes just around the corner — if they ever go back to what they were, we’ll see how the nominees respond — it’s clear there’s still a lot of cloth to cut.