Ten Movies

In this final episode of the season, Brian and Hemal discuss the ten movies we watched this season and provide the definitive ranking. While we typically enjoy disagreeing, we were pretty much on the same page when it came to Mr. Cruise’s oeuvre. Although we did disagree on what

Released last year, ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ returns 36 years later (!) to the story of Pete “Maverick” Mitchell. Once a cocky young flyboy, Mav is now a weathered test pilot whose career has stalled. He’s been put out to pasture, but he’s still in the Navy, a crazy maverick.

You complete me. You had me at hello. Show me the money! If you were around during the 90s, you have almost certainly repeated one of the many memorable lines from ‘Jerry Maguire’, the beloved rom-com / sports-comedy hybrid from fabled Gen X director Cameron Crowe.

So many iconic Tom Cruise movies one could choose from. Why the 2017 flop ‘The Mummy’? Wouldn’t it have been better to just watch the Brendan Fraser version for the fifth time?

If you like a tense thriller, ‘The Firm’ will be right up your alley. It’s a white-knuckler. Brian and Hemal both enjoyed it – and felt that Tom Cruise was going beyond his usual skill set (running! grinning! running!) to give us an honest-to-goodness character.

It’s possible to lean a little too hard into the horrible – ‘Interview with the Vampire’ is a seriously dark movie. Way darker than you’d expect a mid-90s Hollywood blockbuster starring the likes of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt to be.

‘Minority Report’, released in 2002, marks the first time that famed director Steven Spielberg worked with Tom Cruise. Two titans of popular American cinema, together for the first time!

Hemal and Brian went long on this one. There’s a lot to unpack! At its heart, ‘A Few Good Men’ is less a mystery or a legal thriller than an extended philosophical exercise, putting the classical liberalism of virtue ethics against cold-eyed utilitarianism if you like that.

If you haven’t seen ‘Days of Thunder’, it’s basically the exact plot of ‘Top Gun’, except all the airplanes are racecars and the story is significantly slower and more ponderous.