The All-Time Best Tom Cruise Movies

When your career as an A-list movie star spans more than four decades and you’re arguably one of the greatest actors of all time, it can be pretty challenging to narrow down the cream of the crop. Deciding between the best Tom Cruise movies is a daunting task. Do you prefer the death-defying action of his Mission: Impossible films or the romantic charm of Jerry Maguire?

After small roles in films like Taps and The Outsiders, Cruise was officially on track for stardom by the fall of 1983 with a pair of star-making performances in Risky Business and All the Right Moves. Within three years, he was the hotshot alpha male of a generation thanks to the success of Top Gun, followed shortly by The Color of Money and Cocktail, which benefited from the same cocky charisma that made Maverick an action-movie icon.

In the late ‘80s and early ’90s he continued to challenge himself with prestigious, acclaimed dramas like Rain Man, Born on the Fourth of July (which earned him his first Oscar nomination), and A Few Good Men. He then moved into actor-producer mode with 1996’s franchise-launching Mission: Impossible, which spawned decades’ worth of increasingly dangerous and increasingly popular sequels. In between the first M:I film and the series-capping Dead Reckoning, he showed new depths in the likes of Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut, new self-effacing comedic dimensions in Tropic Thunder, a stone-cold villainous side in Collateral, and a wiser, father-figure side in 2022’s legacy sequel Top Gun: Maverick. Even as Cruise has been one of the most controversial figures in Hollywood, his work has endured. It’s certainly worth debating where films like Minority Report rank among the best movies of all time.