Tom Cruise's 21 greatest films

Telegraph

15-05-2025

Secure the glassware and swaddle the crockery: a Tom Cruise phase shift might be about to take place. The actor is currently circling our planet for the launch of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the final instalment in the venerable spy action franchise. From 2011's Ghost Protocol on, the series established Cruise as cinema's preeminent daredevil idol – a one-off Buster Keaton-Paul Newman hybrid who carved out his own niche through sheer bloody-mindedness, then made it the highest-profile gig in the business.
Except Hollywood's Last Action Hero Standing is only the latest screen persona that Cruise has systematically built up then torn down over the course of the last 45 years. Though his image feels as fixed as a diamond, what it stands for keeps changing. No wonder his career has endured.
The Cruise of the late 2020s? He recently said he was keen to try his hand at a musical: perhaps he's forgotten about 2012's Rock of Ages, and who could blame him for that. But we'll probably first glimpse him next year in the tentatively titled Judy from Birdman's Alejandro González Iñarritu, which just finished filming at Pinewood after an epic seven-month shoot. Cruise reportedly plays a 'powerful global figure' who believes he's humanity's saviour, yet ends up causing untold damage in the process. If that sounds like unnerving self-satire, it's only the most recent instance of such in a body of work that's more subversive and self-aware than it might first appear.
Here are his 21 greatest roles, plus a couple of notable misses.
21. Top Gun (1986)
The story that the US Navy's recruitment rates ballooned 500 per cent after Top Gun's release is, alas, just urban myth. (The true uptick was reportedly around eight per cent.) But perhaps it's easy to believe because the film's director, Tony Scott, so perfectly recast the 1980s military action movie in the visual language of advertising that everyone left the cinema desperate to buy whatever Top Gun was selling. This included (in no particular order) pew-pew-grade militarism, a Reaganite fever-dream aesthetic of synth ballads and perpetual sunsets, and the 22-year-old Mr Cruise himself.
Today, two of these things haven't aged brilliantly, while the third appears to have barely aged at all. But the film itself has managed to stave off unfashionableness for almost 40 years through its glistening commitment to the cause. One might even argue the case for it as a progressive avant-courier: all of that volleyball homoeroticism is so glaringly obvious in the subtext that it barely even qualifies as sub. But perhaps better to just throw it on, ideally in 4K, and let Scott's awesome imagery and Cruise's live-wire energy do their work. As Maverick himself neatly puts it, 'If you think, you're dead.'
20. The Firm (1993)
Remember the days when a labyrinthine John Grisham legal thriller could be the fifth highest-grossing hit of the year? Cruise starred in this Sydney Pollack-directed doorstopper as a character type he'd already made into a personal trademark: the intense idealist bitten hard by disillusionment. His Harvard graduate, Mitch McDeere, scores a job at a Tennessee law firm that turns out to be a clearinghouse for all manner of villainy, and is courted by the FBI to help bring the place down from within. Numerous tense pursuit scenes made this the film in which the Tom Cruise Running meme really caught on: the actor's physical intensity allows him to hold his own against a redoubtable supporting cast, including Gene Hackman, Ed Harris, David Strathairn and Wilford Brimley in memorable roles.
19. The Colour of Money (1986)
In a recent on-stage conversation at the BFI, Cruise noted that rather than undergoing formal training as an actor, he'd devised his own on-the-job film school, seeking out great directors and throwing his unique spread of gifts at their feet. But what's so much fun about this Martin Scorsese pool-shark caper is watching the master himself learning ad hoc how to best utilise this charismatic 24-year-old hothead. Casting him opposite the 61-year-old Paul Newman, as he reprised (and later won an Oscar for) a role he first played in 1961, was an excellent start.
The film itself is Scorsese in gun-for-hire mode, and its premise of old pro versus bushy-tailed usurper a familiar one. But its depiction of a generational passing of the coolness torch, as Newman's 'Fast Eddie' Felson schools Cruise's Vincent Lauria in the art of converting your god-given talent into profit, is sweetly meta. It would be fascinating if Cruise, himself now 62, deigned to play the older role in a similar project today – but what 24-year-old out there could keep pace with him?
18. Edge of Tomorrow (2014)
Perhaps the great video-game-films-that-technically-wasn't-one, this Halo-esque sci-fi romp had Cruise play a military grunt who becomes trapped – or perhaps blessed – by an infinite-lives-cheat of a time loop in the heat of an alien war. This was the actor's third collaboration with the screenwriter and future four-time Mission: Impossible director Christopher McQuarrie, though it the first in which each had fully grasped the other's strong suits. In 2008's Second World War drama Valkyrie, Cruise felt miscast in a meaty character-actor role, while in 2012's Jack Reacher, McQuarrie's script felt too cowed by the mighty Cruise Legend.
But a samsaric slog towards glory? Well, that was a format that suited Cruise well, and in his shakiest decade – stretching from 2007's Lions for Lambs to the Great Mummy Debacle of 2017 – the film proved a notable highlight.
17. Interview with the Vampire (1994)
Cruise would likely be less than delighted if you told him his defining screen quality was zealotry. But across a career so cleanly split into different phases, it's the one note that keeps cropping up. His most obvious adherent of the gospel of mortal transcendence is Ethan Hunt in his later Missions: Impossible – yet just before that role originally turned up, Cruise played another man whose devotion to his own mad creed of self-elevation is second to none.
In Neil Jordan's adaptation of the Anne Rice novel, the actor played the princely vampire Lestat, a leopard-sleek creature of pure hedonism who recruits a downtrodden widower – played by another hot rising star, Brad Pitt – as prey, novitiate and consort. As a villain who was also radiantly (bi)sexual, Lestat was a rare Cruise role in those respects, and at the time Rice openly questioned his suitability for the role. (She recanted after seeing the film.) The high goth-pop style makes the film itself an unmistakable early-90s artefact, but the Cruise/Pitt pairing anticipates the far more modern craze of 'shipping', in which online fandoms concoct dream erotic couplings. Honestly, Gen Z doesn't know what it missed.
16. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)
In November 2010, a photograph appeared online of Tom Cruise straddling the spire of the Burj Khalifa, the record-breaking skyscraper in downtown Dubai which is literally half a mile tall. Dressed in an olive t-shirt and blue jeans, Cruise was presumably wearing some sort of harness, though no safety equipment was visible in the shot. The picture simply showed one of the biggest film stars on the planet perched breezily 2,722 ft above its surface.
The Scientology-filled Noughties had been rough on Cruise's reputation. But if his comeback narrative was now taking shape, this was the moment that secured it: the man would clearly stop at nothing in his quest to amaze. The Mission: Impossible film in which Dubai – the fourth in the series – appeared was the one that rebuilt the franchise around its star's new daredevil persona, and in Pixar's Brad Bird it had the ideal director to bring that cartoonish derring-do into the material world. The film is a hoot throughout, but the sheer blockbuster showmanship of the entire Dubai sequence eclipses the rest. When Cruise dives for that open window in front of a busy auditorium, you'll rarely hear a collective gasp like it.
15. Rain Man (1988)
Cruise has yet to receive an acting Academy Award, but he was twice an indispensable foil for an Oscar-winning co-star. One of those was Jerry Maguire's Cuba Gooding Jr. The other was Dustin Hoffman, who via Barry Levinson's acclaimed comic drama, inducted the then-25-year-old Cruise into his fruitful stint on the prestige-movie circuit. Hoffman plays Raymond Babbitt, an autistic savant whose late father leaves him his $3 million fortune – much to the chagrin of his initially arrogant and self-centred younger brother Charlie; played, of course, by the exciting new star of Top Gun and Cocktail.
At the time, all eyes were on Hoffman: public awareness of autism was low compared to today, making his the newsier as well as showier role. But today, Cruise's performance feels like the superior one; the actor is both the film's anchor point and animating spirit. Charlie's journey of maturation and acceptance is the one the viewer also takes, and it's thanks to Cruise's nuanced and sensitive work amid all the period-accurate yuppie flash that we also end up taking his older sibling to our hearts.
14. Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)
As Cruise's signature series evolved into its current and final form – sheer style and excitement, built around headline-making stunts – it shifted conspicuously away from the blockbuster trends of the time. But the most successful of the McQuarrie-helmed run of the spy series owes a sizeable debt to one other contemporary collection of big studio movies: the works of Christopher Nolan, and The Dark Knight most of all. Folding itself around a Joker-esque double-cross, its (ultimately functional) plot takes in London, Belfast, Paris and the Himalayan peaks, if you please, with outrageously imaginative action set-pieces mounted at each stop on the itinerary.
No individual spectacle here – not even Henry Cavill's Selleckian moustache – has proven quite as iconic as Ghost Protocol's Burj Khalifa climb, nor a certain air-duct infiltration coming up below. But its unflagging commitment to making its audience gasp in every scene – even the cellar-bound exposition dumps are crammed with reversals and tricks – makes it one of the 21st century's finest summer movies.
13. Born on the Fourth of July (1989)
There are teasing glimmers here of the road not trod by Cruise – the one he might have followed Leonardo DiCaprio down to a more conventionally prestigious A-list career. Oliver Stone's second sally at Vietnam – third, if you count the director's own military service – gave Cruise the first great dramatic role of his career as veteran Ron Kovic, who returns from serving his country paralysed and wheelchair-bound, only to find his country unwilling to acknowledge, let alone repay, the debt.
Cruise plays Ron's complex response to this rejection wonderfully: he's furious, strident though battle-scarred, yet also still terrified on some dreadful, subcutaneous level that the fault for his fate lies with him rather than the war machine that welcomed him with wide, smiling jaws.
12. Risky Business (1983)
How do you make a megastar? Paul Brickman's classic coming-of-age mood piece came up with an ideal answer for its moment: take one half-obnoxious, half-boyishly charming new talent, and find him a role that draws on both qualities in liberal measure.
The 20-year-old Cruise's casting as Joel Goodsen ('good son', geddit?) is the sort of studio-backed vote of confidence that simply wouldn't happen today – even before you get to the nature of the film itself, in which a privileged high schooler converts his temporarily absent parents' mansion into a brothel, with the help of Rebecca De Mornay's call girl par excellence.
Today, the film plays as both a hallucinatory death throe for the Gen-X cycle of virginity-loss comedies and a phantasmagoric premonition of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. 'The dream is always the same,' Cruise purrs in the opening scene, referring to the durable fantasy of an experienced older woman bringing about a younger man's sexual awakening. But as the Me Decade kept heating up, even desire got itself snarled up in capitalism's teeth. The early scene in which Cruise slides into shot, trouserless and clutching a bottle of whisky, to the strains of Old Time Rock and Roll, marked the exact moment at which his fame was assured.
11. War of the Worlds (2005)
If the suavely charismatic Cruise feels cast against type as a floundering divorced father in Steven Spielberg's millennial sci-fi epic, that's surely by design. War of the Worlds, on which work got underway in early 2002, is one of the great post-9/11 films – and there's a tragic force in seeing the man who gave us Maverick and Ethan Hunt, two Hollywood icons of 1980s and 1990s mid-crisis prowess, wandering hopelessly through aircraft wreckage as a new and previously unimaginable form of carnage breaks out across the United States.
Reports fizzed of a feud between star and director, due to the former's then-unorthodox views on American psychiatry and healthcare, growing devotion to Scientology – a recruitment tent was apparently flung up on set – and, later, erratic conduct on the publicity circuit. (Few remember it these days, but this one was the Oprah Sofa Hop film). But if that tension bled onto the screen, it was all to the good, adding a baleful pathos to what would prove to be one of his last conventional(ish) movie-star turns.
10. A Few Good Men (1992)
Rob Reiner's masterful legal drama found Cruise at the peak of his disillusioned-golden-boy form – a character type he'd play a number of times, but perhaps never better than here, depending on how you feel about a couple of thrillers coming up below. Reiner's masterstroke was in pitting Cruise's unseasoned US Navy lawyer, Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, against Jack Nicholson's soul-puckeringly salty Guantanamo Bay base commander Colonel Nathan R Jessep.
A classically clean-cut 1990s Hollywood leading man versus his rough and rancorous 1970s counterpart, for whom 'handling the truth' about the human condition, in all its riveting horror and sleaze, had been a job description from the off.
The culture was at an inflexion point and A Few Good Men captured it perfectly – and while Nicholson's brimstone bombast won the film its reputation, its true power lies in the internalised subtlety of his younger co-star's work. The split second in which Kaffee realises he's actually managed to extract the confession from Jessep he never thought he'd obtain might be the single finest bit of acting of Cruise's career.
9. Jerry Maguire (1996)
Cruise's performance as the gregarious sports agent who undergoes an existential crisis feels so planted at the centre of his early-stardom skillset that it can be hard to believe he hadn't made a straight romance or comedy or blend of the two before it – let alone one as breezily delightful as Cameron Crowe's.
Watched now, it's easy to recognise it as a spiritual sequel to Risky Business: one in which Cruise's character has to unlearn all the hawkish lessons of the Reagan years, and find fulfilment through others – 'You complete me,' he memorably tells Renee Zellweger's Dorothy – rather than in his own status, however hard-won it might be. All that show-me-the-money bluster turns out to be mere carapace: beneath it there's an aching want, and Cruise brilliantly makes us feel it, even as we lap up his attempts to beat a new path towards a softer, Nineties take on sweet success.
8. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (2025)
Over the years, we got used to Cruise's signature action series as a sort of filmic distillation of its leading man's eccentricities. But even so, its last instalment is awe-inspiringly bananas. After the franchise got its fleetest, funniest entry in 2023's Dead Reckoning, this sequel thunders into cinemas like an apocalyptic tract; opening with baleful visions of decimated cities as a godlike AI, The Entity, prepares to turn the Earth's nuclear arsenal against its makers.
As for Ethan, he's been promoted from secret agent to humanity's saviour – descending into the underworld (in the form of a wrecked submarine) then undergoing death and resurrection before eventually taming Satan himself, with the help of his discipl… sorry, crew. After an unsettling start the thing just tears along – one epic time-bomb fuse crackling towards the inevitable – and it's hard to imagine anyone, never mind Cruise, ever topping its nearly wordless submarine infiltration and climactic dogfight for sheer action chutzpah on a human scale.
7. Minority Report (2002)
The first Spielberg/Cruise collaboration was smoother than their second, though for contemporary audiences it was a deeply unsettling watch. Minority Report was one of those queasily relevant capital-G Great films that has its queasy relevance thrust upon it. Though developed in the 1990s and shot in early 2001, it emerged the following year into a world still gathering itself after the September 11th attacks, and its themes of omnipresent suspicion, surveillance and state-supported media overload all chimed balefully with the brave new world into which it was released.
Cruise stars as a Washington DC police chief in 2054, where law enforcement is assisted by a trio of psychic 'precogs' who identify felons-to-be before they can act on their criminal intentions. The role is another spin on that classic Cruise mid-career type: the golden boy waking up to the dark side of the institution he formerly backed. But the film's philosophical richness and enveloping future-noir setting, plus the at-times Jacobean levels of punishment Cruise's character undergoes, gives this film the air of a high-stakes inflexion point. The original star image he'd studiously forged was now ready to be hammered and alloyed into a new, high-tensile form.
6. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning (2023)
The most joyous and exuberant of the Mission: Impossible films is also, counterintuitively, the longest – at least until the release of the near-three-hour Final Reckoning next week. The seventh entry in the series recasts Hunt's adventures as a globe-trotting parlour game – who's got the key? – and features everything from clifftop motorcycle jumps to close-up magic, plus a falling-grand-piano joke straight out of a Looney Tunes short.
The film's embrace and elevation of cliche is one of its covert strengths: witness Simon Pegg's bomb-defusing scene in Abu Dhabi airport's luggage room, which propels one of the corniest spy-movie gambits around into the realm of the sublime. Director Christopher McQuarrie's miraculous climatic homage to Buster Keaton's The General shows that he and Cruise know exactly what cinematic tradition they're working in, and Dead Reckoning was the moment both actor and director reached its peak.
5. Mission: Impossible (1996)
It almost goes without saying that Cruise's career is now defined by the role of Ethan Hunt – the undercover agent with the giveaway grin who's just a little too determined; too resourceful; too too-much in general to pass as fully mortal, never mind sane. But the film that first matched star with role was a very different proposition to his later Keaton-esque exploits.
It's both a summer crowdpleaser and a proper id-churning Brian de Palma thriller, in which spycraft and cinema are two sides of the same shiny-grimy coin, and Cruise's good looks, not just clean-cut but knifelike, could signal tragic naiveté as well as steely resolve. Of course he was hyper-capable in any crisis the plot threw at him – the air-duct infiltration, Channel Tunnel chase and chewing gum blast number among the 1990s' very finest action scenes. But it was also the last time Cruise played a man for whom the true nature of the universe wasn't a personal secret or private joke, but a mystery that did its stubborn best to stay uncracked.
4. Collateral (2004)
Anonymity is a far from natural mode for Cruise – the whole point of him is he's unmistakable and irreplaceable. But as the hitman Vincent in Michael Mann's moonlit LA thriller, his natural habitat is shadows and smoke. He even looks as if he might be made out of the things: grey suit, tie, hair, chin and watch, accentuated with charcoal firearms and glasses. As a uniform it renders him anonymous, but as a costume it elevates him to an archetype: the minimalistically cool assassin gliding through a metropolis that can't see him, dispatching his five targets and ruining Jamie Foxx's night in the process.
The film was to be Cruise's last before his Scientologically-assisted fall from grace – and therefore the last in that electrifying mid-career run of roles that turned his cocksure Top Gun-minted image against itself. Two more examples – somehow even better than this one – are just below.
3. Magnolia (1999)
For a while, whenever Cruise met a new filmmaker he admired, he tended to send them away with the same piece of homework: write me a role. Paul Thomas Anderson obliged after visiting the actor on the set of a certain interminable London production we'll get to in a moment. The result, whom Cruise shot off to play as soon as the London gig was done, was Frank TJ Mackey: a part that channelled Cruise's own leonine charisma and egotism to monstrous ends.
A toxic 'seduction coach' who exhorts his beta-male disciples to 'respect the c___' and 'tame the c___' (guess which body part is which), Mackey is a broken young boy masquerading as a rock star – and the terrible power of his stage and screen tirades are eclipsed by a late, low-key meeting with his estranged father. This former womaniser is now croaking on his deathbed, but remains the focal point for his son's rage and regrets. Cruise invests both the big and small moments with mesmerising power and psychological insight: it led to his third (of three) acting Oscar nominations, and it was a crime he didn't win.
2. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Cruise's links to Scientology didn't negatively affect his career until a decade later. But by the mid-1990s, a nagging sense of cosmic restlessness could already be seen behind the gleaming smile, while around his high-profile marriage to Nicole Kidman, tabloid speculation had already started to swirl. Stanley Kubrick was able to channel those subliminal shudders of unease into his masterful final film: a psychosexual thriller that cast Cruise as an elite New York doctor whose dissatisfaction in his marriage to Kidman leads to a long, dark, nightlong plunge into the city's spluttering eroto-capitalist underbelly.
Cruise's almost blank, affectless performance stands apart from every other one he's given: Kubrick pushed him through countless takes, including more than 90 of him walking through a door, in order to achieve the desired effect. The result is as riddlingly charged as the film it slips through, and often feels as if Cruise is being manipulated by exterior forces, which is all part of the fun.
1. Top Gun: Maverick (2022)
In 1986, Top Gun gave us Cruise as Western pop cinema's latest leading man. Almost four decades on, its immeasurably superior sequel, in which his movie-star power outstrips a Mach 10 hypersonic jet, more or less confirmed him as its last. Every fibre of this astonishing film is entwined with its star's public persona: the superhuman caught-on-camera feats; the emphasis on personal excellence over adversity; the tireless devotion to delight – even the very nature of its post-Covid release strategy, which involved fending off multi-million dollar streaming bids and holding out for the then-struggling theatrical circuit.
'You saved Hollywood's ass,' Steven Spielberg told Cruise at the following year's Oscar lunch, all prior bad blood clearly expunged. Nor was Spielberg exaggerating. Cruise had become – and, for now at least, remains – the tireless champion his business doesn't really deserve.
And the misses...
The Mummy (2017)
Why did Cruise ever feel the need to embroil himself in the Cinematic Universe business? He's one of the few actors around who just feels too big for the form – but nevertheless, around ten years ago he attached himself to the first (and, in the event, final) instalment in Universal's planned series of interlinked classic monster reboots. The result was an almighty shambles, entombed in desolate CG and stowed with tidbits filched inanely from across the horror canon. The hero, meanwhile, could have been played by almost anyone, making it one of the few Tom Cruise films that simply doesn't feel like one.
Tropic Thunder (2008)
Ben Stiller's meta-comedy about a disastrous Vietnam movie shoot still has its champions – perhaps due to its trafficking in proudly un-PC material at the very last moment it was possible for a major studio production to do so. But its satirical content is broad to the point of dimness and just not very funny, while Cruise's initially hush-hush supporting role as a vile studio exec – part Scott Rudin, part Harvey Weinstein, and cooked up personally by Cruise and Stiller themselves – is so repetitive that the gag wears out fast. A single-scene cameo might have been something, but Cruise's enthusiasm for more must have felt too good to pass up.