Entertainment

Top 10 Tom Cruise Movie Performances

Tom Cruise is one of our favorite actors in Hollywood. We have ranked top 10 movies by Tom Cruise check it out.

10. Rain Man (1988)

While Cruise is obviously adept at providing the presence and physical dexterity action films require, his skills as an actor really shine through in drama films of this caliber. Rain Man gives Cruise the chance to stretch his abilities without resting on his typical charms. The entire film depends on his ability to capably communicate his character’s tricky arc: Cruise plays Charlie Babbitt, an unscrupulous and cunning yuppie who finds out that most of his estranged father’s estate is being given to an older brother he didn’t know about (Dustin Hoffman in an Oscar-winning role). As the two brothers travel across the country, Cruise delivers a genuinely touching portrayal of a man shedding his abrasive, self-centered nature to become a protective, tenderhearted brother. He has rarely felt so vulnerable onscreen.

9. Top Gun (1986)

Maverick is the quintessential cocksure, determined, highly skilled leading character that Cruise has spent a career perfecting. For many people, Top Gun is synonymous with the actor — it’s the first image they think of when they think of Tom Cruise. And while the film, directed by Tony Scott, exemplifies some of the worst aspects of Reagan-era America, Cruise himself isn’t dragged down by this one bit. It’s easy to see why this performance has left such an impact on the pop-culture imagination. His physical bravado, confidence, and joyfulness cast a spell.

8. Mission: Impossible (1996)

It’s easy to believe that Tom Cruise The Action Star has always been with us. But Mission: Impossible is when he became the real-life action figure we know him as today. And what a doozy it is. Helmed by Brian de Palma, in the film Cruise effortlessly toggles between espionage-thriller mood and impactful physicality. The movie perfectly demonstrates how smoothly Cruise can shift between tones when he needs to — just look at the infamous Pentagon break-in sequence, where he blends sweaty anxiety with light humor and, on top of all that, the action-movie tension needed to make it all work.

7. Minority Report (2002)
Minority Report is a sleek, absorbing science-fiction yarn that manages to turn a Philip K. Dick story into an expressive blockbuster action film. But Tom Cruise’s performance as John Anderton, an on-the-run detective in a futuristic world in which people can be arrested for crimes before they’ve even committed them, pushes the dark social commentary and exhilarating nature of the story to new heights. As Anderton, Cruise marries the best of his genre-film talents into one impressively gripping performance. There’s a haunted quality to his Anderton, the kind of man who carries his past wounds with him. Cruise proves to be extremely potent as a neo-noir lead.

6. Born on the Fourth of July (1989)

This adaptation of the autobiography of the same name by Vietnam War veteran Ron Kovic (played by Cruise) is an emotional gauntlet for the actor — and it requires a dramatic physical transformation too. I’ve lamented Cruise’s work in period pieces, but he works well in this film’s ’60s and ’70s settings. One of Cruise’s specialties is to dissect the American myth, and he gets ample opportunity to do so here as he charts Kovic’s transformation from a fresh-faced soldier to an emotionally wounded, paralyzed, war-protesting vet. A mirror opposite of the more traditional military leads Cruise tends to play, his performance here is arresting, raw, and powerful.

5. War of the Worlds (2005)

Cruise is not exactly the first actor you’d expect to play an Everyman like Ray Ferrier, the longshoreman at the heart of Steven Spielberg’s 2005 sci-fi epicBut he brings gravity and heart to the central dynamic of the film — Ferrier’s desire not to be a failure as a father, and the all-consuming goal to protect his children from the alien havoc decimating the world. It’s an excellent, absorbing, humane performance that sees Cruise’s typical mania soften into a heartwarming dedication to save his family.

4. Magnolia (1999)

Few modern actors understand the mask-like quality of celebrity better than Tom Cruise, who interrogates these ideas with aplomb in Magnolia. Has Cruise ever been more utterly disturbing or strangely entrancing than as self-help guru and living embodiment of toxic masculinity Frank T.J. Mackey? Cruise only plays a supporting role here, but he’s what the viewer is drawn to most; he embodies modern masculinity’s most noxious qualities. And when all that bravado is threatened by the mere mention of his family, the way Cruise communicates the damaged vulnerability lurking beneath the surface is a marvel.

3. Collateral (2004)

In a Black Book interview, director Mary Harron shared that actor Christian Bale found inspiration for American Psycho’s obsessive serial killer Patrick Bateman in Tom Cruise. “We talked about how Martian-like Patrick Bateman was, how he was looking at the world like somebody from another planet, watching what people did and trying to work out the right way to behave. And then one day he called me and he had been watching Tom Cruise on David Letterman, and he just had this very intense friendliness with nothing behind the eyes, and he was really taken with this energy.” It’s for precisely this reason why Cruise never feels like a truly capable romantic lead: There’s something practiced, even unnatural about his charisma, like a mask being worn. Most directors miss out on this quality, but Michael Mann capitalized on it. Cruise delivers one of his most assured and complex performances as Vincent, a hit man who ropes in an unsuspecting cabdriver played by Jamie Foxx. Cruise’s charisma is finally used as a weapon, not a lure.

2. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Dr. Bill Hartford is an unlikely part for Cruise. He’s humiliated, confused, and frequently out of his depth in Stanley Kubrick’s odd erotic drama Eyes Wide Shut. But it proves to be one of Cruise’s richest and most complex performances as he navigates a strange milieu of sexual desire. The tension between him and then-wife Nicole Kidman, playing his movie wife Alice Hartford, along with Cruise’s utter lack of an equilibrium make this as much about sexuality as it is about the trials and tribulations we endure to find any sense of happiness.

1. Interview With the Vampire (1994)

Lestat, the preening and egotistical creation by Gothic novelist Anne Rice, is the photo negative of a typical Tom Cruise role — at least that’s how he seems at first. He doesn’t run or channel manic energy or do stunt work; he saunters and stalks with the coolly focused energy of a wolf. He’s languid and frightening, lupine and menacing. But Lestat does share one trait that snakes its way through Cruise’s greatest work: bold narcissism. Interview With the Vampire allows Cruise to lean into that. It lets Cruise be something he’s rarely been — archly humorous, disturbingly erotic, truly dangerous. It’s wondrous watching him turn from sincere to brutal as he plays off the cheerfully cruel Kirsten Dunst and the solemn Brad Pitt.