Tom Cruise is more than a movie star, a briskly running man, or a harmful face of Scientology. He is a magnetic, decades-spanning actor who has reinvented his public image into that of the champion of cinema. The President of Movies. The King of the Theatrical Experience. Is it disingenuous? Self-aggrandizing? Possibly, but Cruise’s contributions and devotion to film are undeniable. The man started off as a heartthrob and went on to sprint through movies by some of the best directors of our time: Sydney Pollack, Stanley Kubrick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Michael Mann. Rarely does an A-lister, perhaps the A-lister of his era, work so frequently with those straddling the line between the arthouse and the blockbuster. Nominated for Best and Best Supporting Actor during his long and diverse career, Cruise has performed in his share of reflective star vehicles, recently gravitating towards the stunt spectaculars of the Mission: Impossible series, testing his own mortality up on the silver screen. His public persona is strange, his influence myriad and somewhat sinister, and he remains (on and off-screen) more symbolic of Hollywood power than almost any other actor. All of this, combined with his considerable charisma and insistent energy, makes him an actor with an especially fascinating filmography. Here, we look at the best Tom Cruise movies ever made.
Here are the 20 best Tom Cruise movies:
20. Interview with The Vampire: The Vampire ChroniclesYear: 1994
Director: Neil Jordan
Stars: Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Kirsten Dunst, Christian Slater, Antonio Banderas, Stephen Rea
Rating: R
Runtime: 122 minutes
Anne Rice’s 1976 gothic novel about bloodsuckers in Spanish Louisiana got the epic big-screen treatment almost two decades after its debut, and 200 years after its narrator Louis’ induction into the immortal realm. New Orleans—home to many “cities of the dead” or above-ground cemeteries, due in part to the plagues that ravaged late 18th century slums—is also the perfect setting for a grief-stricken, navel-gazing young plantation owner like Louis (played by Brad Pitt) to lose himself. Preening and stalking his way through the streets, Louis’ maker and lead vamp Lestat (Tom Cruise) embodies an otherworldly decadence and European sophistication. Cruise, whose casting was initially criticized by Rice herself, nails it as a glib, undead dandy. A preteen Kirsten Dunst steals scenes as a spitfire orphan-turned-ageless bloodsucker, while Antonio Banderas and Stephen Rea terrify in their limited screen time. Director Neil Jordan, working with cinematographer Philippe Rousselot and production designer Dante Ferretti, captures their nocturnal existence in hedonistic hues and the light of lanterns strewn throughout the French Quarter, a universe that still stands frozen in time. —Amanda Schurr
19. Risky BusinessYear: 1983
Director: Paul Brickman
Stars: Tom Cruise, Rebecca De Mornay, Joe Pantoliano, Curtis Armstrong
Rating: R
Runtime: 98 minutes
Tom Cruise’s breakout film is as fittingly deceptive as its star’s abilities. A teen sex comedy, shot by director Paul Brickman and cinematographers Bruce Surtees and Reynaldo Villalobos like a dreamy slasher film. A movie about a rich little yuppie becoming a pimp, suffused with Brickman’s pointed class critique. Naturally, the movie that made Cruise a star isn’t quite what it seems, just like Cruise was never just the handsome, pantsless high schooler lip-syncing to “Old Time Rock and Roll.” In fact, that song’s juxtaposition with Tangerine Dream’s synth score creates the charming friction that sums up Risky Business—and that makes it so winning despite its ludicrous premise. Cruise teeters between easy emasculation and inhumanly confident grins, the very notion of sex seeming foreign and terrifying to him. His deliveries are momentarily confident, yet constantly undercut by his own insecurity. Rebecca De Mornay picks him apart with ease, in part because Cruise is so good at being guileless. The arc he covers shows off a range that could believably hold cockiness, silliness and fallibility, a combo that put action heroes and romantic leads within his grasp. With a sharp script filled with zingers and a central performance that rightly holds up as a star-maker, Risky Business is ’80s suburban satire done right. Not bad for a movie that’s effectively a horny Home Alone.—Jacob Oller
18. Top Gun: MaverickYear: 2022
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Stars: Tom Cruise, Jenifer Connelly, Miles Teller, Jon Hamm, Monica Barbaro, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer, Jay Ellis, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Danny Ramirez, Greg “Tarzan” Davis
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 137 minutes
Not quite four years since Mission: Impossible–Fallout and much of Tom Cruise’s purpose remains the same—if it hasn’t exactly grown in religious fervor. In Top Gun: Maverick, the sequel to Tony Scott’s 1986 original, Cruise is Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, a man trapped in the past, refusing to advance his career as resolutely as he refuses to do much of anything besides continue to prove he’s the greatest pilot in the world—a title the film never forgets to remind the audience that Maverick earned long ago—and mourn his best friend, Goose (Anthony Edwards), who died 35 years ago in an accident for which Maverick still feels responsible. Tom Cruise is also, simply, “Tom Cruise,” the only notable show business scion left to throw his body into mind-numbing danger to prove that it can be done, to show a younger generation that this is what movies can be, what superstars can do. Must do. The more modern action films teem with synthetic bodies bursting apart at the synthetic seams, the more Tom Cruise builds his films as alters upon which to splay his beautiful sacrificed flesh. To that end, Joseph Kosinski is the precisely correct director to steer Cruise’s legacy sequel. As was the case with Kosinski’s Tron: Legacy, Maverick seems to exist to justify its existence, to update an IP that seems to only work in the past. For Top Gun this means translating Scott’s vision of sweat-drenched beach volleyball and unmitigated military spectacle into a soberer IMAX adventure, moving from the halcyon days of Reagan’s America to a world with no more need of a man like Maverick. “The future’s coming, and you’re not in it,” he’s told; every one of his superior officers appears to have no patience for him left. One can’t help but imagine that every new Tom Cruise vehicle is a way for him to reckon with that. Kosinski’s dogfights are pristine, incredible feats of filmmaking, economical and orbiting around recognizable space, but given to occasional, inexplicable shocks of pure chaos. Then quickly cohering again. If Scott’s action was a melange of motion never meant to fully cohere, keeping the American dream just that, then Kosinski is dedicated to allowing the audience a way into the experience. With his regular cinematographer Claudio Miranda, he revels in symmetry to keep the audience tethered. A wide glimpse of a dogfight in total, resembling a beach scene earlier, so suddenly appeared silently in the vast theater and unlike anything I’d ever really seen before, I gasped.–Dom Sinacola
17. The FirmYear: 1993
Director: Sydney Pollack
Stars: Tom Cruise, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Gene Hackman, Ed Harris, Holly Hunter, Hal Holbrook, David Strathairn, Gary Busey
Rating: R
Runtime: 154 minutes
Imagine: It’s 1993 and the biggest R-rated movie of the year is a middlebrow legal drama, adapted from a John Grisham novel. It features a ridiculous, sexy-messy piano score and the drunken advances of Gene Hackman. It is mostly about mail fraud. Everyone you know has seen it. We may no longer live in a world where these kinds of movies are massive hits, but Sydney Pollack’s rock-solid thriller remains a symbol of yesteryear’s mainstream. A ridiculously good cast cobbles together a showcase of phenomenal character performances (Holly Hunter and David Strathairn drip liquid sex) while a byzantine plot is resolved as simply as it seems from the outset: Big creepy law firms are quickly identifiable as evil, and just as quickly dismantled. Tom Cruise even gets to run amok a little, dodging hitmen as often as he puzzles over documents. The pull and rejection of white-collar wealth by a Man with Morals, culminating in a too-long chase sequence that makes those Morals physical? Now, that’s the early ’90s to me.—Jacob Oller
16. Born on the Fourth of JulyYear: 1989
Director: Oliver Stone
Stars: Tom Cruise, Kyra Sedgwick, Raymond J. Barry, Jerry Levine, Frank Whaley, Willem Dafoe
Rating: R
Runtime: 145 minutes
This biographical drama scored Cruise his first Oscar nomination, and won Oliver Stone a second Best Director Oscar. In other words, it’s Stone at the peak of his powers, which means that today it plays as beautifully photographed, intensely acted, runtime-filibustering bombast. Cruise plays real-life veteran Ron Kovic, who went from naïve gung-ho military enlistee to fiery antiwar protestor thanks to a harrowing (and sadly not uncommon) experience in the Vietnam War. Somewhat surprisingly, Stone rushes through Kovic’s actual conversion from disillusioned rock-bottom to passionate advocacy; less surprisingly, he seems more interested in Kovic’s drunken patronization of Mexican brothels than moments that might read smaller or quieter. Throughout it all, though, Cruise is impressively raw and electric as his All-American confidence gives way to fear and frustration.—Jesse Hassenger
15. Rain ManYear: 1988
Director: Barry Levinson
Stars: Tom Cruise, Dustin Hoffman, Valeria Golino
Rating: R
Runtime: 140 minutes
This Best Picture-winning megahit has to answer for some enduring popular misconceptions about autism, because of the way the movie conflates the particular autistic-savant characteristics of Raymond Babbitt (Dustin Hoffman) with living on the broader spectrum, giving Hoffman plenty of opportunities to showboat in that Oscar-friendly way. (He won Best Actor again, naturally.) This well-meaning, sometimes uncomfortably cringe-inducing material is incorporated into a hoary mismatched-buddies road-trip dramedy, and in retrospect, it’s the film’s most mass-market element—Tom Cruise playing a shades-sporting slickster getting back in touch with his humanity—that’s also its most nuanced and durable element. As Raymond’s younger brother Charlie, who doesn’t know of Raymond’s existence until the death of their father, Cruise (as has been noted repeatedly in the years and decades following Hoffman’s awards triumph) gives the more dynamic performance of the two. Watch him in the scene where he tries to give Raymond a hug after a dance lesson, only to be startled by his brother’s physical reaction—his rattled realization of Raymond’s limits, and how much he’s come to care about them. Or in the scene, late in the picture, when Charlie’s hurt feelings shift away from his father cutting him out of his will, and toward the way Raymond was kept from him for so many years. Cruise makes the relationship enormously touching, and director Barry Levinson lets those emotions arrive on their own terms, rather than forcing explosive confrontations or unearned mega-happy endings.—Jesse Hassenger
14. Mission: Impossible—Rogue NationYear: 2015
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Stars: Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Rebecca Ferguson, Sean Harris, Alec Baldwin
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 131 minutes
Thrilling and suspenseful, Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation balances a glitzy, glamorous aesthetic with brash action, a frenetic pace and sheer excitement. The entry in the Tom Cruise-starring franchise sets its hooks quickly and hurtles you forward. The continually escalating mayhem propels the film past any of the otherwise glaring plot holes, and the action is chaotic enough to gloss over how ludicrous the plot actually is once you stop and think about what’s happening—which is of relatively little consequence. Almost ten years into the M:I franchise, this installment is a welcome addition to the expert action-filmmaking canon.—Brent McKnight
13. The Color of MoneyYear: 1986
Director: Martin Scorsese
Stars: Tom Cruise, Paul Newman, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Helen Shaver, John Turturro
Rating: R
Runtime: 120 minutes
Even back in 1986, there was no shortage of movies where Tom Cruise played a cocky young prodigy who learns to control both his gift and (to some extent) his cockiness, often with the help of a mentor figure. To wit: Top Gun was literally in the box office top ten the weekend that The Color of Money opened, and remained there for much of the latter’s theatrical run. But the pool-hustler version of this movie has a few distinct advantages over its high-flying, ultrapopular cousin: It has the good sense to place the Cruise character in someone else’s story, adding much-needed perspective to his hotshot persona; that someone else is played by Paul Newman, reviving his Fast Eddie character in a sequel to The Hustler; and that sequel is directed by Martin Scorsese. In this decades-later catch-up, Eddie mentors the impetuous Vincent (Cruise) in the ways of pool-hall hustling, with supernova stars Newman and Cruise exchanging taut dialogue courtesy of novelist and screenwriter Richard Price, implicitly ruminating on what might await a charismatic young man whose livelihood depends on racking up wins. It was a commercial paycheck gig for Scorsese, which makes the movie all the more embarrassing to any number of filmmakers who couldn’t rip something this electric from their souls.—Jesse Hassenger
12. Mission: Impossible—Ghost ProtocolYear: 2011
Director: Brad Bird
Stars: Tom Cruise, Paula Patton, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 133 minutes
After the thrilling opening sequence of Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol, we cut to a Moscow prison where Ethan is mysteriously being held. Agents Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg) and Jane Carter (Paula Patton) are plying their tech and explosives skills to break him out. The scene is jaunty and light-hearted, and scored, in the film’s reality, to Dean Martin’s “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head.” Light fuse. Cue famous theme. What follows is still the best entry in the Mission: Impossible franchise, and one of the best action movies of the last decade. Not bad for first-time live-action director Brad Bird, though with his widely acclaimed previous work on animated features The Iron Giant, and Pixar’s The Incredibles and Ratatouille, it’s not a huge surprise. Ethan and his thrown-together team (including late-to-the-game IMF analyst William Brandt, played by Jeremy Renner) find themselves on their own with limited resources when their infiltration of the Kremlin goes horribly wrong and the IMF is blamed. This causes the U.S. government to invoke the titular spectral protocol, in which the entire agency is disavowed in order to avoid a war much worse than a Cold one with Russia. From there, it’s a global cat-and-mouse game with a megalomaniacal arms dealer who’s attempting nothing less than to wipe the Earth clean to start the cycle of life anew. Cruise is as electric as ever, and Ghost Protocol is wholly satisfying, and a breathtaking blast from start to finish.—Dan Kaufman
11. CollateralYear: 2004
Director: Michael Mann
Stars: Tom Cruise, Jamie Foxx, Jada Pinkett Smith, Mark Ruffalo, Peter Berg, Javier Bardem, Bruce McGill
Rating: R
Runtime: 115 minutes
Compared to the dazzling iconography of Heat, the character-study immediacy of Thief, or the digital-arthouse experimentation of Public Enemies, Collateral could be seen as minor Michael Mann, a pared-down thriller pitting a meek cab driver (Jamie Foxx) against the sleek hitman (Tom Cruise) who hires him for the evening. Though it’s a little too workmanlike to qualify as top-tier Mann, the director’s stylistic flourishes here power a series of precise switches: the flip from daytime/interior 35mm to nighttime/outdoor digital; Foxx’s cabbie going from a great night on the job to a nightmare; and, most amusingly, Tom Cruise’s insistent can-do spirit suddenly embodying a ruthless killing machine (who nonetheless doles out Cruise-style life coaching). In between Mann’s more epically intricate crime sagas, Cruise’s Vincent steers Collateral into a simpler but no less thrilling vision of haunted Los Angeles nightlife.—Jesse Hassenger
10. Mission: Impossible—FalloutYear: 2018
Director: Christopher McQuarrie
Stars: Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Henry Cavill, Angela Bassett, Sean Harris, Michelle Monaghan, Alec Baldwin
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 148 minutes
At some point midway through Mission: Impossible—Fallout—the sixth entry in the franchise and director Christopher McQuarrie’s unprecedented second go at helming one of these beasts—CIA brute Austin Walker (Henry Cavill) asks his superior, CIA Director Erica Sloane (Angela Bassett), how many times she thinks Übermensch Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) will put up with his country screwing him over before he snaps. Walker’s question is rhetorical, intended to convince Sloane that Hunt is actually John Lark, the alias of a shadowy conspirator planning to buy stolen plutonium whom he and Hunt also happen to be chasing, but the question is better put before Cruise, the film’s bright, shining star. It’s a question that hangs over this dependably mind-blowing action flick more obviously than any installment to come before: How long can 56-year-old Cruise keep doing this before he, truly and irrevocably, snaps? Fallout never offers an answer, most likely because Cruise won’t have one until his body just completely gives out, answering for him by default. Fallout shows no real signs of that happening any time soon. What it does show is a kind of blockbuster intuition for what makes our enormous action brands—from Fast and the Furious to the MCU—thrive, behind only Brad Bird’s Ghost Protocol as the best of the now 22-year endeavor. Where Bird leaned into the franchise as a literalization of its title, redefining the series by balancing the absurdity of what Cruise was impossibly doing (the Burj Khalifa scene is one of the greatest action sequences ever) with the awe of bearing witness to what a human person could accomplish if devoid of all Thetans, McQuarrie considers the two pretty much the same thing. The only reaction worthy of such absurdity is awe—and the only American tentpole films worth our awe anymore are those deemed Mission: Impossible. It’s all so goddamned beautiful. I love these movies. —Dom Sinacola
9. Vanilla SkyYear: 2001
Director: Cameron Crowe
Stars: Tom Cruise, Penélope Cruz, Cameron Diaz, Jason Lee, Kurt Russell
Rating: R
Runtime: 145 minutes
Vanilla Sky is truly like being high and having your high mutate from euphoria, to hilarity, to paranoia, to fear, to calm fatigue, right before you finally nod off into a deep and blissful sleep. Vanilla Sky follows Cruise’s David Aames: Wealthy heir to his late father’s publishing company, which he struggles for ownership of alongside a board of shareholders he refers to derogatorily as “The Seven Dwarves.” On the side, he has a not-quite-romantic but very much sexual relationship with a woman named Julie Gianni (Cameron Diaz), who views their relationship as both very sexual and, unbeknownst to David, very romantic. At a party, David’s best friend Brian Shelby (Jason Lee) introduces him to Sofia Serrano (Penélope Cruz), who David quickly falls for—much to the chagrin of Julie. Scorned by David and, apparently, deeply unstable, Julie offers David a ride to work the next day, having followed him from his party to Sofia’s apartment where he had spent the night. After espousing an absurd monologue—in which Diaz has to utter the sentence “I swallowed your cum, that means something” with the kind of complete and total sincerity that got her nominated for numerous awards that year—Julie intentionally loses control of the vehicle and crashes the car. Julie is killed in the crash, David is left permanently disfigured and, suddenly, he must now navigate through life as a shudder weird and ugly person while he develops an increasingly passionate romance with Sofia. Having already taken a small handful of surprising detours by this point, Vanilla Sky only becomes far more deranged. There are ludicrously edited montage sequence that elicit belly laughs, like the one in which David, post-face-mangling, gets plastered in a club out of spite; lines of corny dialogue conveyed with the type of cinematic sincerity that is quickly fading into obsolescence, like Lee’s oft-recurring one about life being about “the sour and the sweet.” Of course, there are the infamous pop-rock needle drops utilized with a devil-may-care attitude from a director who had just recently won an Oscar for his acclaimed film about rock music journalism. Cruise optioned the rights to a remake of Open Your Eyes immediately upon seeing it at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, then enticed director Cameron Crowe on board as director based on their previous collaboration on Jerry Maguire. Vanilla Sky is thus unique from the original because of Cruise’s involvement and what the film can be interpreted as meaning to him: A movie about a man preoccupied with his image, with his mortality and the fruitless quest for eternal youth. It remains a totem of a Hollywood that no longer exists, one where even a remake could be a swinging-for-the-fences concoction of wide-eyed auteurism, celebrity egotism and a double-dose needle drop of “One of Us” by Joan Osborne.—Brianna Zigler
8. Mission: ImpossibleYear: 1996
Director: Brian De Palma
Stars: Tom Cruise, Jon Voight, Henry Czerny, Emmanuelle Béart, Jean Reno, Ving Rhames, Kristin Scott Thomas, Vanessa Redgrave, Emilio Estevez
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 110 minutes
Yup—stop for a minute and contemplate that the first M:I film was directed by Brian De Palma. A guy known more for art house thrillers and anti-heroes helms the first in a possible franchise starring an A-list actor (before Hollywood was only interested in franchises), not to mention the first film Cruise ever produced, a risk in and of itself. And yet, it all worked: Mission: Impossible is a plot-heavy, intelligent, patient action film, establishing a cypher of an action star who would go on to perfectly serve every single director to come. By now, it’s expected that with every new film in the franchise, Tom Cruise will step up his stuntman game, and every new director will be given the chance to interpret Ethan Hunt as he (or she, we can only hope) sees fit. In Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation, Cruise asserts himself as perhaps the world’s most prominent asexual action hero, but 20 years ago no one had any idea what kind of conceptual framework he was putting into place. Mission: Impossible was a new breed of blockbuster action film, and the franchise’s longevity is clear evidence that, no matter what’s happened since, Tom Cruise is a guy whose risks seem to always pay off.—Dom Sinacola
7. A Few Good MenYear: 2022
Director: Rob Reiner
Stars: Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, Kevin Bacon, Kevin Pollak, J. T. Walsh, Cuba Gooding Jr., Kiefer Sutherland
Rating: R
Runtime: 138 minutes
Actors love Aaron Sorkin, because he gives them sharp dialogue that often includes showy pieces of one-upmanship designed to make their characters sound like the smartest guy in the room (even if the room has been specifically designed by Sorkin to make his guys look smart). This doesn’t mean, however, that every actor is well-suited to deliver his theatrical, neo-screwball bon mots—and Tom Cruise, who lacks experience in Sorkin’s more frequent arenas of stage and television, doesn’t necessarily seem like the best match with that style. But it turns out that first-class movie stars throwing themselves into Sorkin’s verbal sparring is one of the writer’s many paths away from insufferability (David Fincher pruning his material is another). A Few Good Men is mostly just a dad-movie courtroom-mystery potboiler, yet the obvious joy that Cruise, Nicholson, and even a buttoned-up Demi Moore bring to their roles makes it feel so thoroughly like an old-fashioned classic that it almost becomes one anyway. Cruise in particular brings a level of physicality, and his trademark cockiness, to Sorkin’s patter, playing a Navy lawyer called upon to actually mount a convincing defense rather than copping a plea and calling it a day. Sure, Nicholson and Moore are good, but Cruise’s real scene partners are the baseball bat he swings around and the apple he chomps on—appropriate for a story that ultimately hinges on courtroom showmanship.—Jesse Hassenger
6. Minority ReportYear: 2002
Director: Steven Spielberg
Stars: Tom Cruise, Samantha Morton, Colin Farrell, Max von Sydow
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 140 minutes
The more we become connected, the more any sense of personal privacy completely evaporates. So goes Steven Spielberg’s vision for our near future, couched in the signifiers of a neo-noir, mostly because the veil of safety and security has been—today, in 2002 and for decades to come—irrevocably ripped from our eyes. What we see (and everything we don’t) becomes the stuff of life and death in this shadowed thriller based on a Philip K. Dick story, about a pre-crime cop John Anderton (Tom Cruise) whose loyalty and dedication to his job can’t save him from meaner bureaucratic forces. Screenwriters Scott Frank and Jon Cohen’s plot clicks faultlessly into place, buoyed by breathtaking action setpieces—metallic tracking spiders ticking and swarming across a decrepit apartment floor to find Anderton, the man submerged in an ice-cold bathtub with his eyes recently switched out via black market surgery, immediately lurches to mind—but most impressive is Spielberg’s sophistication, unafraid of the bleak tidings his film prophecies even as it feigns a storybook ending.—Dom Sinacola
5. Jerry MaguireYear: 1996
Director: Cameron Crowe
Stars: Tom Cruise, Cuba Gooding Jr., Renée Zellweger
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 138 minutes
Besides acting as the megahit blockbuster of 1996, Jerry Maguire also quickly achieved the status of the modern day romantic-comedy done right. Certainly, between Say Anything and Almost Famous, writer/director Cameron Crowe has never been one to hide his inner softie. Jerry Maguire is no different, featuring career-best performances from Tom Cruise, Renee Zellweger and Cuba Gooding Jr. as well as litany of memorable lines still quoted to this day. And, let’s face it, whoever doesn’t get at least a little bit teary-eyed when Renee Zellweger proclaims, “You had me at hello,” is probably a Cylon spy who should be blasted away at once. —Mark Rozeman
4. War of the WorldsYear: 2005
Director: Steven Spielberg
Stars: Tom Cruise, Dakota Fanning, Miranda Otto, Tim Robbins, Justin Chatwin
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 116 minutes
It was something of a gamble to cast Tom Cruise, during his 20-year reign as one of the biggest and most opaque movie stars in the world, as a blue-collar screw-up working on the docks; in 2005, Cruise even at his most humble didn’t exactly scream “hero of a Bruce Springsteen song.” Yet Cruise’s casting turns out to be crucial in the success of this Steven Spielberg sci-fi thriller, shot and cut at a Cruise-like speed in one of Spielberg’s regular bursts of productivity. There may be some logistical elements of this alien-invasion picture that are a little half-baked, but the movie runs on its ground-level depiction of wildly fantastical events, and Cruise provides a bridge between the movie’s outlandish sights and regular-guy sightlines. His Ray Ferrier is basically a Cruise character who never discovers his special purpose—flying, racecar driving, flair-bartending, acting—and doesn’t ever achieve escape velocity from his humble and/or hardscrabble upbringing. In other words, he’s a Cruise-ified version of a Spielberg bad dad, and the attack of long-dormant alien tripods puts Ray and his family through the wringer. Spielberg’s evocation of 9/11 imagery is equally thrilling, astonishing, and terrifying, and at the center of the chaos is Cruise, trying his best to fake his way through the protective-father motions he realizes are expected of him. Though it was a big hit (only somewhat overshadowed by Cruise’s off-screen antics), the movie didn’t have a particularly sterling reputation in its day, which has thankfully come around to some degree in recent years. Almost 20 years later, it feels more and more like Spielberg was completing a definitive trilogy of kinetic, disturbing sci-fi thrillers reflecting anxieties in the earliest moments of the 21st century.—Jesse Hassenger
3. Edge of TomorrowYear: 2014
Director: Doug Liman
Stars: Tom Cruise, Jenifer Connelly, Miles Teller, Jon Hamm, Monica Barbaro, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer, Jay Ellis, Glen Powell, Lewis Pullman, Danny Ramirez, Greg “Tarzan” Davis
Rating: PG-13
Runtime: 137 minutes
Major William Cage (Tom Cruise) spends his days in the film’s near-future setting spinning the armed forces’ ongoing efforts against a hostile alien race (dubbed Mimics) without ever setting foot on a battlefield. At least until a gruff general (Brendan Gleeson) sends him on a particularly dicey mission. The result is Cage’s death, but the story doesn’t end there. Instead Cage awakes at the beginning of the day he died with his memory intact, and quickly discovers the resurrections will recur every time he dies. His only hope of escaping the endless cycle lies with super-soldier Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), who knows from experience exactly how Cage might be able to use this new ability to help humanity win the war of the worlds. Based on the manga All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka and adapted for the screen by Christopher McQuarrie (Cruise’s current go-to director completely in sync with his physically-defying action spectacle) and Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, Edge of Tomorrow recalls other notable time loop sagas, including Groundhog Dayand Source Code in the witty and engaging way it moves its story forward piece by piece. As Cage relives the same day over and over again, he also learns how to become a true soldier, trains with (and falls for) Rita, discovers how the aliens function and ever so patiently formulates the perfect plan of attack. Like a video game hero with infinite lives, Cage has the opportunity to refine and correct every mistake he makes along the way. However long Cage is on that journey, Edge of Tomorrow is a blast, and Cruise carries the surprisingly amusing action like a pro—his skill with deadpan comedy proving even more valuable than his infamous enthusiasm for sacrificing his flesh over and over and over.—Geoff Berkshire
2. MagnoliaYear: 1999
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Stars: Jeremy Blackman, Tom Cruise, Melinda Dillon, Philip Baker Hall, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ricky Jay, William H. Macy, Alfred Molina, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Jason Robards, Melora Walters
Rating: R
Runtime: 188 minutes
Paul Thomas Anderson’s magnum opus follows multiple plotlines, while still deeply developing each of the film’s many principal characters, played more than ably by some of the decade’s greatest actors—Julianne Moore, William H. Macy, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jason Robards and Alfred Molina, to name but half. Father/child relationships are explored, but the themes throughout are grand ones. Add in Tom Cruise’s best performance of his life and a killer soundtrack from Aimee Mann, and you have one of the greatest movies of the 1990s.—Josh Jackson
1. Eyes Wide ShutYear: 1999
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Stars: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack
Rating: R
Runtime: 158 minutes
It’s always fascinating to see what the old masters come up with at the end of their careers. Eyes Wide Shut was Kubrick’s final message before he passed away, and it reveals an artist still grappling with the complexities and vagaries of the human heart, as well as organs slightly southward. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman are brilliantly cast, and the eerie, dreamlike atmosphere that pervades the film is palpable. When you re-emerge into the world of light outside the theater (or your darkened living room), you won’t quite be able to explain the journey you’ve been on. But it will stay with you for a long, long time.—Michael Dunaway