Critics rave over Cruise's Top Gun sequel

Top Gun: Maverick earned a 96 per cent positive rating on the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregation website, which had collected 75 reviews as of Thursday afternoon. The movie debuts in theatres on May 27.

Cruise returns in the film as Pete Mitchell, the cocky navy pilot, codenamed Maverick, who has never risen through the ranks because of his penchant for bucking authority.

Mark Kennedy of the Associated Press called the movie "a textbook example of how to make a sequel".

"The movie satisfies with one foot in the past by hitting all the touchstones of the first film," Kennedy said, "and yet stands on its own."

Box office analysts predict the movie from Paramount Pictures will rank as one of the biggest box office hits of the summer. The movie had been scheduled for release in June 2020, but Paramount delayed its debut multiple times during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at BoxOffice Pro, said ticket sales would hit $US100 million ($A146 million) over the Memorial Day weekend in the US and Canada. That would make it highest-grossing debut of Cruise's career.

Critics said the movie offers thrilling flight scenes, an emotional story and strong performances by the supporting cast including Miles Teller, who plays the son of Goose, Maverick's partner who died in the original 1986 film.

But most of the praise was showered on Cruise.

"It's a fresh-faced gloss on the original ... powered, like the original, by a star who'll simply never stop being a star," wrote K Austin Collins of Rolling Stone.

Leah Greenblatt of Entertainment Weekly said the movie "belongs in almost every scene to Cruise".

"At this point in his career, he's not really playing characters so much as variations on a theme - the theme being, perhaps, The Last Movie Star," she said. "And in the air up there, he stands alone."

Australian Associated Press