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What’s next for Tom Cruise? The actor, now in his sixties, is showing no signs of slowing down—not that anyone thought he’d ever rest. After spending his early career working with just about every major director of the eighties and nineties, he put out eight Mission: Impossible films and inarguably “saved the movies” following the COVID-19 pandemic with one of the biggest sequels of all time: Top Gun: Maverick.
Next up? Cruise plans to make even more blockbuster sequels in Days of Thunder 2 and trilogy-capping Top Gun 3. He’s also starring in Digger, now in theaters, a critically panned satire about the current state of the world. Still, Cruise’s performance is so berserk that he’ll likely compete for Best Actor at the Oscars again. Insanely, he’s on the list of actors who have never won the golden man. (We’re not counting his honorary Oscar.)
So, to properly celebrate his career, we ranked every Tom Cruise film—from his brief appearance in The Outsiders to his latest role in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Digger—from worst to best. Though with Cruise, even his “worst” films are often never his fault. —Josh Rosenberg
46. The Mummy (2017)
Whoever said “Only the good die young” never knew about the Dark Universe. This franchise non-starter from 2017 starred Tom Cruise in a grim reboot of The Mummy that strove to launch a rival to Marvel’s superheroes using Universal’s dormant creature features. A misplaced effort to build a franchise first and a good movie second is what made The Mummy feel dead on arrival, and proof that Tom Cruise alone can’t save a project from damnation. —Eric Francisco
45. Rock of Ages (2012)
Pour some sugar on this one—because it’s bland as hell otherwise. In this critically reviled film version of the Broadway hit, Tom Cruise has a supporting role as “Stacee Jaxx,” a shirtless, bandana-wearing rocker set to play his last gig with his hair metal band. While Tom Cruise belting out “Wanted Dead or Alive” better than Bon Jovi needs to be seen (and heard) to be believed, you don’t have to sit through this slog of a movie. It’s actually impressive just how much Rock of Ages renders the high-octane lifestyles of rock ’n’ roll into something so chaste. —E.F.
44. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (2016)
Tom Cruise’s casting as Jack Reacher irked purists of the Lee Child book series, but the 2012 movie did well enough to warrant a sequel in 2016 with the accidentally apt title Jack Reacher: Never Go Back. Once again, Tom Cruise puts on a steady performance as the hard-hitting wanderer of Child’s novels, and this time goes on the run with How I Met Your Mother’s Cobie Smulders. But with a stock plot and formulaic set pieces, Never Go Back wears out what the first movie already wore thin. Even completionists may find this one numbing to sit through. —E.F.
43. Losin’ It (1982)
In the category of “teenage sex comedies,” you can do better than Losin’ It. In this forgotten movie from 1982, Tom Cruise plays one of four high school boys—along with Jackie Earle Haley, John P. Navin Jr., and John Stockwell—who head to Tijuana, Mexico, for a road trip in 1965. Along the way, they pick up a woman (Shelley Long) in the midst of divorcing her husband. Released shortly before Cruise broke out in Risky Business, Losin’ It features a future movie star still learning the finer points of his craft. He’ll get it someday. It just won’t be in this laughless dud. —E.F.
42. Legend (1985)
A mesmerizing score by Tangerine Dream and an unforgettable Tim Curry (RIP) sadly aren’t enough to make Legend all that crucial to the Tom Cruise canon. While there is fun to be had in watching a spry twenty-two-year-old Cruise run around this storybook-inspired eighties fantasy, the whole thing coasts more on its dreamlike vibes than its actual merits as a film. And if we’re talking strictly about Tom Cruise, it’s far from his best effort. —E.F.
41. Endless Love (1981)
You probably know the Diana Ross and Lionel Richie song better than the movie itself. In 1981, Tom Cruise made his acting debut in Endless Love, a young adult romance from director Franco Zeffirelli about two teenagers in love split apart by their parents. (Zeffirelli also helmed the acclaimed 1968 film version of Romeo and Juliet.) The future Mission: Impossible star has just one (1) scene, so, if he’s why you’re watching Endless Love in the first place, you can turn it off after the twenty-minute mark. Even author Scott Spencer, whose 1979 novel the movie adapted, wasn’t impressed with how this one turned out. —E.F.
40. Lions for Lambs (2007)
One would hope that Robert Redford directing Tom Cruise would yield incredible results. Instead, Lions for Lambs is a severe disappointment that even the additional star power of Meryl Streep and a fresh-faced Andrew Garfield can’t save. Set against the War on Terror, the movie is composed of three different but interconnected storylines, with Tom Cruise inhabiting one as a Republican senator and presidential hopeful who invites a TV journalist (Streep) for an interview. We love Robert Redford around these parts, but Lions for Lambs is a hunk of dead meat that isn’t exciting, interesting, or even all that smart. —E.F.
39. Far and Away (1992)
By 1992, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman were married and arguably the preeminent Hollywood power couple of the nineties. But their second feature together, Far and Away, didn’t do much for their luster. Directed by Ron Howard, this western epic stars the two as Irish immigrants who seek a new life in America, and eventually enter the Land Run of 1893. Far and Away is your standard-issue period romance that uses the backdrop of westward expansion as a metaphor for defining one’s own destiny. Which is kind of the problem. You’ve seen movies like Far and Away before, and probably better ones too. And those movies don’t have Tom Cruise putting on an embarrassing Irish accent. —E.F.
38. Valkyrie (2008)
Tom Cruise’s name was still radioactive to moviegoers when this period thriller opened at Christmas in 2008. But those who saw Valkyrie back then were likely to say the same thing: It’s not bad! Inspired by the real-life July 20, 1944, plot in which Nazi officers plotted to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Cruise stars as Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, whose goal of taking back Germany ultimately goes unfulfilled. (Um, spoilers?) Not the best World War II movie but also not the worst Cruise vehicle, Valkyrie is a modestly entertaining war movie that is just good enough to make you forget you’re watching Tom Cruise play a Nazi. —E.F.
37. Knight and Day (2010)
Almost a decade after Cameron Diaz and Tom Cruise starred in Vanilla Sky, they teamed up again for the comparatively more dimwitted but admittedly exciting rom-com romp Knight and Day, directed by James Mangold. Cruise plays a secret agent on the run from the government whose life crisscrosses with June (Diaz), a vintage car restorer on her way to her sister’s wedding. Before all romantic comedies doubled as action movies, Knight and Day was a notable example of two crowd-pleasing genres swirling as one. Nowadays, almost every Netflix or Apple TV movie looks like Knight and Day. We’re not saying it’s an innovator—it was just early to the party. —E.F.
36. Jack Reacher (2012)
Christopher McQuarrie directed Jack Reacher, kicking off a partnership with Cruise that would turn into four Mission: Impossible films and half a dozen other writing and production credits in Cruise’s filmography. It’s a seminal film, in that way, even if the Reacher name is now, and maybe forever, synonymous with Alan Ritchson’s portrayal in the current Prime Video series. But even though Jack Reacher is a totally serviceable action flick, Cruise is a mismatched fit for the character. His and McQuarrie’s Jack Reacher was just a little too polished, as if it rolled right out of the action movie factory and onto your screen. —J.R.
35. Taps (1981)
Taps marks Cruise’s real first film role (same for Sean Penn) following a brief appearance in Endless Love. He joins George C. Scott in a story about military-academy students who take over the campus after a controversy at the school results in its impending closure. Critics compared the film to Lord of the Flies, and they’re not wrong. There isn’t a happy ending, really, for any of the characters played by actors trying to make a name for themselves in the early eighties. Thankfully for Cruise, Risky Business was right around the corner. —J.R.
34. All the Right Moves (1983)
Tom Cruise plays Serbian American high school football defensive back Stefan Djordjevic in All the Right Moves, but when your only roles at this point are Taps and a barely-there part in The Outsiders, I guess you take whatever names Hollywood has for you. Still, Cruise turns this quaint football film about a coach (Craig T. Nelson) who needs to find his inspiration to teach again after he blackballs Djordjevic for “quitting” on the team into a decent star-making vehicle. —J.R.
33. American Made (2017)
American Made wasn’t a giant leap for Tom Cruise. The 2017 crime comedy directed by Doug Liman followed a pilot who turned from smuggling drugs to becoming an informant for the DEA. It featured Domhnall Gleeson, Jesse Plemons, and enough Cruise charm to keep the film moving. But American Made felt like a film that the action star could have made at any point in his career, and it didn’t feel all that special sandwiched in between two amazing Mission: Impossible entries. —J.R.
32. The Firm (1993)
The Firm is the first film anyone saw Tom Cruise do the run. You know the one—perfect form, like a man who is truly sprinting for his life. It was perfect for a movie like The Firm, which followed a young lawyer who finds himself on the run after he discovers that his higher-ups are involved in criminal schemes and mob money. After he starts working with the FBI to catch his shady bosses on tax evasion and RICO charges, he loses faith in who he can trust and who’s working in his best interests. With Sydney Pollack in the director’s chair, it turned into a decent and taut thriller for Cruise’s pre-Mission: Impossible career. —J.R.
31. Oblivion (2013)
Imagine a grittier version of WALL-E. That’s kind of Oblivion’s deal. In this 2013 sci-fi feature that marked Cruise’s first movie with Joseph Kosinski, Tom stars as a maintenance worker on Earth, when humanity lives on Saturn’s moon after an apocalyptic war with aliens. But after Cruise meets another survivor (played by Olga Kurylenko), he learns the truth about what really happened. Another middling Tom Cruise joint, Oblivion is fun in doses but can’t really shake off the feeling that you’re watching a movie adaptation of an Xbox game that doesn’t exist. —E.F.
30. The Outsiders (1983)
Look, we all agree that Francis Coppola’s The Outsiders is a great movie. And that the S. E. Hinton novel it’s based on was probably one of the better books we ever had to read for school. But as a Tom Cruise movie? Can we really call The Outsiders a great movie on his IMDb page? If you insist it deserves higher placement, I challenge you to tell me the name of Cruise’s character, or recite any of his lines. Right now. Don’t look it up. If you can’t, that is why The Outsiders ranks low. —E.F.
29. Digger (2026)
It’s a shame that Cruise’s performance in Digger is among 2026’s best, because watching Digger otherwise is a terrible experience. Director Alejandro G. Iñárritu and, apparently, Hollywood at large still haven’t figured out how to make a political satire about the end of the world post-Covid that isn’t completely insufferable. The jokes aren’t where they should be, the metaphors are relentlessly explained, and the clever twist isn’t enough to justify the majority of what you’re watching. But Cruise truly gives his all to Digger Rockwell—a John D. Rockefeller parody for modern times who accidentally causes a natural disaster when an oil rig explosion sends a massive iceberg toward a collision with Europe. If it wins him his first competitive Oscar (remember, he has an honorary Oscar), great. If I never have to watch Digger again? Even better. —J.R.
28. Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)
It pains me to write ill of a Mission: Impossible film. I’d rather rewatch any one of the franchise’s entries than half of the movies on this entire list. But when Luther Stickell (Ving Rhames) tells Ethan Hunt (Cruise) that The Entity is hacking into their networks for the hundredth time in Dead Reckoning Part One—which didn’t receive a proper ending until the clumsily renamed The Final Reckoning two years later—I can understand the criticisms of these mindless stunt showcases. Still, Cruise rides a motorcycle off a cliff and then parachutes onto a moving train in this one. It was a stunt so cool that Paramount previewed it to audiences six months in advance of the film’s premiere and it still made more than $570 million at the box office. —J.R.
27. War of the Worlds (2005)
One of the few Tom Cruise movies that has only gotten better with time, War of the Worlds is a visceral survival thriller that lets Steven Spielberg again flex his horror muscles. In this modernized retelling of H. G. Wells’s 1898 story, Cruise stars as an estranged family man who races to reunite his children with their mother during an alien invasion. Released in 2005, Cruise and Spielberg harnessed post-9/11 anxieties to reinvent a seminal science fiction classic. Upon its release, War of the Worlds was a box-office hit but critically deemed one of Spielberg’s weaker efforts. More than twenty years later, it is now considered one of his finest; but whether it’s one of Tom Cruise’s better movies is still up for debate. —E.F.
26. Mission: Impossible II (2000)
Look at any Mission: Impossible ranking online and you’ll find that Mission: Impossible II isn’t just at the bottom of the list, but that critics also view John Woo’s sequel as a bad movie outright. We’re guilty of it too. To my chagrin, M:I 2 sits at the lowest point of our own rankings. But could a Tom Cruise action film wherein he free solos a mountain and then receives his next mission via 2000s-era black sunglasses be a bad movie? Is it not cool when Cruise and the film’s villain drive their motorcycles into each other as fast as they can and then both jump off and collide with each other midair? Does he not kick a gun up from the beach sand with his feet and then spin around before firing it, all following a brawl with crashing waves in the background where he moves like a character in a fighting video game and dropkicks a guy? We all need to rewatch M:I 2 before we ever rank anything again. —J.R.
25. Days of Thunder (1990)
Yes, in 1990, Tom Cruise tried to make Top Gun with cars. Days of Thunder has its moments, sure, but the end result (mostly due to a poor script) is not as thrilling as it should’ve been. Still, Cruise is compelling enough on the track to make you wish he had done a Will Ferrell amount of sports movies, and director Tony Scott’s visual effects on the track are still pretty damn impressive. Tommy Boy clearly loves himself some Days of Thunder, because he’s reprising Cole Trickle (yes, that’s really his name) in the recently announced Days of Thunder 2 alongside Anne Hathaway. Maybe the sequel will have us reappraising the original when it comes around. —Brady Langmann
24. Cocktail (1988)
Does Cocktail get better with age or are other movies just getting worse? Either way, this romantic comedy made more than $170 million at the box office because a twenty-five-year-old Tom Cruise and his buddy Bryan Brown slung cocktail shakers behind the bar like they were Harlem Globetrotters. It’s like a magic trick. Distract the audience with sexy young actors flipping triple sec bottles around and you won’t even notice that there’s barely any plot in between the moment when you picked a card and it somehow reappeared in your back pocket. It might take longer for a drink, but I can watch their act all day. —J.R.
23. Mission: Impossible III (2006)
More often than I’d like to admit, I find myself arguing that Mission: Impossible III is at least a top-three M:I movie. Alas, this list is ranked by multiple Esquire editors, not just me, so this is as high as M:I III can go. Here’s why it’s better than you remember: M:I III, believe it or not, is the first time we see Cruise in I retired from the game, but they pulled me back in! mode. Yes, long before Cruise was pushing sixty in the final M:I films, M:I III picked up with an Ethan Hunt who had already retired from service. Cruise convincingly (and thrillingly) reenters the field, gamely battling against a shit-your-pants terrifying Philip Seymour Hoffman as the villain. —B.L.
22. Vanilla Sky (2001)
After they made magic together in Jerry Maguire, director Cameron Crowe reunited with Tom Cruise to release one of their most mystifying collaborations: Vanilla Sky, an American remake of the 1997 Spanish movie Open Your Eyes. Cruise stars as a playboy publisher who survives a disfiguring car accident. During his recovery, he grows closer to a beautiful woman (Penélope Cruz) but begins to question his waking reality. While audiences were initially hostile to Vanilla Sky due to its opaque storytelling—including its complicated timeline and its ambiguous ending—it now enjoys a cult audience who vibe with its ethereal spirit. —E.F.
21. Rain Man (1988)
Starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman as a luxury car dealer and his autistic brother, Rain Man dominated the 1988 Academy Awards. The film won Best Picture, Best Director (Barry Levinson), Best Actor (Hoffman), and Best Screenplay. However, Rain Man has a bit of a different reaction from audiences today. People on the autism spectrum look at Rain Man’s success as part of the reason why neurodivergent people in TV and film are often portrayed as socially awkward savants with exceptional intellects. The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael even called it an “acting stunt” (derogatory) for actors to play neurodivergent characters in an attempt to win awards. (Daniel Day-Lewis would win the following year for playing a character with cerebral palsy.) But everyone was certainly well-intentioned when Rain Man arrived in 1988, and it served as another star-making vehicle for Cruise and Hoffman—even if Hoffman received all the praise at the time. —J.R.
20. The Last Samurai (2003)
For a long time, The Last Samurai was held up as an example of all that was wrong with racially biased, white-centric Hollywood. But the pushback was a gross misunderstanding of The Last Samurai and the story it told (and told beautifully, I might add). Set during Japan’s Meiji Restoration and based on the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion, Cruise plays an alcoholic U.S. Army captain who is taken prisoner by one of the last living samurai clans. A stirring epic from Edward Zwick about the war between tradition and modernity, The Last Samurai should be considered one of Tom Cruise’s finest films—if one can get past Mr. Cinema in a kimono talking about honor. —E.F.
19. Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning (2025)
Naturally, AI was the final frontier for Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt. A man who dedicates his life to doing it for real is going to balk at artificial intelligence and then jump from one airplane onto another just to prove that he’s still the one in control. That’s why The Final Reckoning is such a perfect sendoff to Cruise’s hand in the Mission: Impossible franchise. “The Entity” may not be the scariest AI villain in film history. Esai Morales is basically just doing an impression of Agent Smith from The Matrix. But did I mention that a sixty-two-year-old Tom Cruise jumps from one airplane onto another? Let me see you try that one, Claude. —J.R.
18. Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol (2011)
Ghost Protocol is best known for two things. First, that Cruise climbs the world’s tallest building: the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Second, that M:I tried to insert Jeremy Renner into the franchise because they never imagined that Cruise would continue to jump out of airplanes in his sixties. But Ghost Protocol also marked Brad Bird’s (The Incredibles) live-action directing debut, and you can feel it all over this fourth installment in the M:I series. The solid spycraft and smooth team building that he set up in Ghost Protocol placed Mission: Impossible on the same level as any James Bond film, even if Skyfall would completely blow it out of the water just a year later. Still, there’s a lot of charm in Ghost Protocol’s set pieces, and it doesn’t surprise me that it was the highest-grossing entry in the franchise before Fallout. —J.R.
17. Tropic Thunder (2008)
First, take a big step back and literally, FUCK YOUR OWN FACE! Oh, what I wouldn’t give to see Les Grossman’s big, hairy forearms again. Of course, well before Tropic Thunder hit theaters in 2008, Cruise flexed his comedy chops onscreen and offscreen. Just never like this. As the movie-studio mogul Grossman, Cruise donned a bald(ing) cap and prosthetics, screaming and dancing his way through Ben Stiller’s aughts comedy. In a movie that’s all about the idiocracy of the Actor Transformation, Cruise transformed into the most idiotic character of them all. It was—and still is—the funniest Cruise has ever been. Do yourself a favor and watch that end-credits sequence again. —B.L.
16. Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation (2015)
Becoming a “Rogue Nation” isn’t as cool as “invoking Ghost Protocol” in my book, but it would be wrong to say that the set pieces in this fifth installment of the Mission: Impossible series weren’t leagues above anything the franchise had attempted yet. Climbing the Burj Khalifa is one thing; hanging from an airplane as it takes off is another. Same goes for the tense mission at the Vienna State Opera house, the chase through the Tower of London, and however the hell Cruise survived being sucked into the whirlpool of that underwater vault sequence. —J.R.
15. Minority Report (2002)
It’s a bit silly how much I love Minority Report, and mostly because Minority Report is a rather silly sci-fi film. It’s Steven Spielberg gargling a bit of Blade Runner, Total Recall, and Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones’s droid factory scene and then attempting to spit it out into something coherent. The film follows a detective (Cruise) in the future who investigates crimes before they happen. The information is sent to him via little tech marbles he uploads onto a giant computer after clairvoyant beings predict potential offenses through their psychic visions. Eventually, he finds himself among the possible perpetrators. So, he’s forced to question the very practice he’s dedicated his life to so far. I can’t say the plot doesn’t get more complicated from there, but my love for Minority Report remains crystal clear. —J.R.
14. Collateral (2004)
Tom Cruise grew himself a five o’clock shadow for Collateral. That’s how you knew he was up to something different with this Michael Mann action thriller. To play a hitman who takes a cab driver (Jamie Foxx) hostage for the night as he makes his rounds—a.k.a. “the villain” of the tight film—he had to basically become a new guy. But whatever powers those little face follicles gave him paid off. Cruise’s character is a psycho in this one, and nailing Mann’s insane filmmaking style is no small feat for any actor—even if you’re Tom Cruise. —J.R.
13. Born on the Fourth of July (1989)
Tom Cruise received his first Oscar nomination for this Oliver Stone Vietnam War biopic, which, in the late eighties, was exactly the kind of project you would drop everything for. Platoon damn near swept the Academy Awards three years prior and Born on the Fourth of July was basically its spiritual successor. Cruise plays former Marine Corps sergeant and antiwar activist Ron Kovic, who enlisted the Marines and quickly disillusioned with the war after it left him paralyzed from the waist down. Kovic reportedly loved Cruise’s portrayal of him so much that he later gifted him his Bronze Star Medal for heroism as a birthday gift. —J.R.
12. Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Despite praise from critics and audiences who saw it (eventually, anyway), Edge of Tomorrow—based on a Japanese novel—is one of Tom Cruise’s biggest box-office disappointments. It wasn’t an outright bomb, but opening third to Disney’s Maleficent and The Fault in Our Stars is a tough pill to swallow for a sci-fi blockbuster in which Tom Cruise shoots up aliens. But Edge of Tomorrow is genuinely one of the coolest Cruise flicks you’ll ever see, with the actor playing a futuristic soldier who must team up with an enigmatic war hero (Emily Blunt) to break free from a time loop. After the movie’s limp run in theaters, Edge of Tomorrow became a hit on DVD and Blu-ray, and today enjoys a reputation as an overlooked, underappreciated gem. —E.F.
11. Interview with the Vampire (1994)
Only Tom Cruise could get Anne Rice to change her mind. In 1994, Interview with the Vampire paired two of Hollywood’s biggest studs—Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt—in a film version of Rice’s dramatic horror novel. But the author had grievances with the production, specifically in how it cast Cruise as the antagonist Lestat. But once Rice saw the movie, she did a sharp 180-degree turn and gave the movie her endorsement. She has taste, because Interview with the Vampire is indeed one of Cruise’s better pictures. A moody, decades-spanning tragedy, Pitt stars as a 200-year-old vampire who recounts his life as a vampire to a San Francisco reporter. His memories include Lestat (Cruise), the flamboyant and charismatic vampire who turned him. —E.F.
10. The Color of Money (1986)
It takes an unimaginable amount of talent to hold your own against a titan like Paul Newman. As the hotshot pool player Vincent Lauria, Cruise deploys enough cocky swagger to prove himself as an equal match to Newman’s reprisal of Eddie “Fast Eddie” Felson. (How’s this for an Oscars result: Newman won Best Actor; Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio earned a Best Supporting Actress nomination; Cruise and director Martin Scorsese were snubbed entirely.) The simple fact that Cruise was still able to shine as the third wheel in Scorsese-Newman’s team-up proved that he could hang with the big boys. —B.L.
9. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
It’s a bummer we can’t talk about Eyes Wide Shut without weirdos bringing up conspiracy theories. But maybe it speaks to its surreal power as the last-ever movie by Stanley Kubrick. In this solemn erotic thriller, Tom Cruise stars with then-wife Nicole Kidman playing a well-to-do New York couple. After Kidman’s Alice confesses to fantasizing about infidelity, Cruise’s sleepless Bill walks down a rabbit hole that leads him to a sinister sexual underworld. In 1999, curious audiences came for what they thought would be a skin flick; what they got instead was psychological cinema that made our deepest desires feel forbidden. Decades later, audiences are still trying to parse out the movie’s naked truths. As for Cruise, well, who among us hasn’t been kept awake at night by the things we’ve seen and done? —E.F.
8. A Few Good Men (1992)
The movie gods came together on this legal drama—Rob Reiner, Aaron Sorkin, Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Kevin Bacon, Demi Moore, Kiefer Sutherland—and gifted audiences a film worthy of such an iconic moment as Nicholson’s character exclaiming “You can’t handle the truth!” Legal dramas aren’t easy films to push more than two hours long, even with Sorkin’s pen guiding the story along. But through this case of military abuses and the dangers of (nearly) unchecked power, A Few Good Men has stood the test of time thanks to its tight script (Sorkin’s specialty) and sheer star power. —J.R.
7. Mission: Impossible (1996)
That Tom Cruise made Mission: Impossible, which was based on a TV show from the sixties, work as a sleek, see-it-in-a-theater blockbuster is as impressive as any stunt he ever pulled in the franchise. As Ethan Hunt, right from the very beginning, Cruise was cool as hell, unknowable, physically capable, and an instant action icon. His insistence on pulling off that scene—yes, sweatily dangling from the ceiling, now a canonical moment in American cinema—isn’t just the stuff of legend. It planted some of the first seeds that led to plane jumps, breathless underwater missions, and mountainous skyscraper climbs. —B.L.
6. Top Gun (1986)
The film that took us all to the danger zone. Which, to be quite honest, means different things to different people. Is it the aerial photography, which not only felt revolutionary at the time, but still does now? Or the perfectly cast trio of Cruise, Val Kilmer, and Anthony Edwards? How about, straight up, Tom Cruise’s otherworldly sex appeal in this movie? The danger zone is all of those things, my friend. And even though Cruise would make Pete “Maverick” Mitchell an infinitely more complex man decades later in Top Gun: Maverick, leading men simply don’t get more charismatic, believable, and frankly badass than Tom Cruise in Top Gun. Take my breath away indeed. —B.L.
5. Mission: Impossible — Fallout (2018)
God, I love this movie. Mission: Impossible — Fallout is the absolute sweet spot of everything that made M:I great over the years. As always, you have the stunts—and you can just pick your poison in Fallout between the marathon bathroom fight and the HALO jump. It has a sleek, kinetic, and slightly dark feel, à la Mission: Impossible III. But if you look hard enough, Cruise plays Ethan Hunt with a remarkable amount of nuance this time around. He’s weary and lonelier than ever, which makes the especially body-battering finale pay off that much more. If M:I ended with Fallout, I would’ve been a happy man. Cruise was never better as Ethan Hunt. —B.L.
4. Risky Business (1983)
A relatively unknown Tom Cruise beat out Kevin Bacon, Tom Hanks, and Sean Penn for the role of teenager Joel Goodson in Risky Business, and it proved to be an undeniable breakout. Not just because he didn’t wear pants while lip-syncing to “Old Time Rock and Roll”—though you can’t slide on wooden floors in your socks anymore without feeling like a young Tom Cruise. The coming-of-age comedy flipped the genre on its head and told the story of an enterprising high schooler who gets accepted to Princeton after turning his parents’ suburban home into a brothel. It’s as much smart satire as it is a good time—and that’s rare in Hollywood. —J.R.
3. Magnolia (1999)
Frank T. J. Mackey is Tom Cruise’s best capital-P performance. Though he’s just one part of Paul Thomas Anderson’s nearly three-and-a-half-hour ensemble film, his pickup artist turned motivational speaker with an evangelical following and loads of daddy issues is the most commanding example of Cruise’s talents as a dramatic actor before he became Mr. Stunts. Had Anderson not set out to make the “epic, all-time great San Fernando Valley movie,” as he called it, and instead turned Magnolia into the definitive Cruise vehicle, it’s possible that Magnolia would have been the actor’s undisputed best film. It is, after all, one of only three acting Oscar nominations Cruise ever received. —J.R.
2. Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
After Top Gun: Maverick, you could retire the question of whether a sequel could ever be better than the original. T2: Judgment Day? Sure. The Dark Knight? Certainly. But Top Gun: Maverick? There’s arguably never been a better film in the “dude’s rock” canon. Maverick is the $1.5 billion–grossing film in which Cruise officially stepped into the role of Mr. Movies—flying hypersonic jets past Mach 10 speeds and garnering a reputation for “saving the movies” following the Covid-19 dip. Everyone wanted in on this blockbuster, with Cruise taking Glen Powell under his wing and making room for Monica Barbaro, Jay Ellis, Danny Ramirez, Manny Jacinto, and Lewis Pullman. Plus, Miles Teller is the spitting image of Anthony Edwards as Goose’s son, Rooster—which is also his best role since Whiplash. But Maverick is nothing without Cruise. For all the fun that Maverick’s cast has building on the success of the original, it’s still up to Mr. Movies to take the controls and fly us home. And boy, did he land this plane. —J.R.
1. Jerry Maguire (1996)
Jerry Maguire is the definitive Tom Cruise performance, if only because it calls on each and every damn thing that made the Cruiser a Hall of Famer. There’s the Cruisian charm: Maguire is smarmy, he’s sweet, and no matter which one he is, you want to be him. The dramatic work—mainly, portraying a man who is so incapable of true intimacy that his every relationship ends just a little too late—looks easy. He answers the call for comedy whenever director Cameron Crowe calls on him. (See: FREE FALLIN’!) He even partakes in some Tom Cruise Running! Cruise was rewarded with a Best Actor nomination for his work, and he should’ve won the Golden Man over Geoffrey Rush (who took the trophy for Shine) for it. Above all, though, nothing (nothing) gets better than Cruise’s delivery of those four words, over and over again: Show me the money! —B.L.
