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10 Best Tom Cruise Movies

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This weekend, Tom Cruise re-ups with director Doug Liman and flies back into theaters with American Made, a real life story about a TWA pilot who is recruited by the CIA and soon finds himself in the midst of one of the biggest covert missions in U.S. history.

Early reviews of the film are promising as critics have given the film a fresh score of 88% on Rotten Tomatoes.

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Since few things excite us more here at PopCulture.com than a fresh Tom Cruise movie, we thought now would be the best time to take a look back and rank the 10 Best Tom Cruise movies!

What are your favorite Tom Cruise movies? Check out the video at the top of the article to see if it made the list, or just scroll down and check out what we’ve got to say about ’em, and most importantly – go check out American Made this weekend in theaters!

10. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

10Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol was the fourth movie in the Mission Impossible series. It also happens to be the best, and why wouldn’t it be? It was directed by Brad Bird who brought the world such gems as The Iron Giant and The Incredibles. Tom Cruise has always had a propensity for performing his own stunts, and none of them were crazier or more death defying than when Ethan Hunt scales up the Burj Khalifa tower. Just watching the scene gives us vertigo and Cruise deserves some major props doing it himself.

9. Tropic Thunder

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First things first – When are we getting a Les Grossman spin-off movie!? The 2008 satire had a powerhouse cast of comedy vets, such as Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Danny McBride, not to mention the brilliant turn by Robert Downey Jr as Kirk Lazarus. But somehow Tom Cruise in a bald cap and a fat suit managed to steal the show as the grotesquely profane studio executive, Les Grossman. The closing credits alone are worth the price of admission when Les fist pumps out a dance number to the tune of Flo Rida’s “Apple Bottom Jeans.”

8. Edge of Tomorrow

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One of Tom’s best movies in recent years, the full title is Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow, but since no one ever calls it that, we’re just gonna stick with EoT. Directed by Doug Liman, the movie was another great example of how well Tom Cruise meshes with science fiction (there’s a pretty obvious joke to make here, but we’ll refrain). Unlike his other sci-fi action ventures, however, Tom Cruise played his character as a coward who must ultimately man up unless he wishes to repeat his Groundhog Day-style death over and over again. Thanks to the movie’s premise, the film could have quickly become redundant and boring, but Cruise and his co-star Emily Blunt deserve a lot of credit for keeping things interesting.

7. Minority Report

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While Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg would go on to make The War of the Worlds, their first team-up was their finest with Minority Report, a movie about a police force that uses “pre-cogs” to stop all crime before it ever actually happens. Cruise’s performance is stellar and much more tragic than most blockbuster hollywood stars ever attempt to tackle.

6. Jerry Maguire

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In recent years, Jerry Maguire has almost become a parody unto itself. In fact, some people believe that every time someone yells “Show me the money!” or “You had me at hello,” an angel kicks Cuba Gooding Jr in the shin. But that shouldn’t stop you from appreciating the fact that Tom Cruise as Jerry Maguire, a desperate sports agent, is probably one of his more relatable performances.

5. Interview with the Vampire

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Make all the “Tom Cruise sucks” jokes you want here, but it’s not often that someone can outshine Brad Pitt, especially in the mid-nineties when Pitt was at the height of his status as a sex symbol, but that’s exactly what Tom Cruise does. Based on the book by Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire allowed Cruise an opportunity to play Lestat with a delicious wickedness, one of the few roles that allowed you to momentarily forget he’s the quintessential definition of a mainstream star.

4. Rain Man

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To date, 1988’s Rain Man is the only movie that Tom Cruise has been apart of to win “Best Picture” at the Academy Awards. While most credit Dustin Hoffman’s outstanding performance as a man with autism (with good reason, he also won the “Best Actor” award that year), let’s not forget that the movie is built around how truly awful Cruise’s self-centered character treats his brother, and it’s his character’s development throughout that slowly builds the foundation upon which the entire movie stands.

3. Risky Business

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While Tom Cruise had already appeared in some great ensemble classics at this point (The Outsiders, hello?), this is the movie that launched Tom Cruise into a different stratosphere and made him a household name. Indeed, it’s hard to hear Bob Seger sing “Old Time Rock N’ Roll” without thinking of Tom Cruise sock sliding into his living room wearing only those tighty whitey skivvies.

2. A Few Good Men

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The fact that A Few Good Men isn’t No. 1 on the list is bound to irk a few people out there, and that’s completely understandable seeing as how Rob Reiner managed to wrangle in a fantastic ensemble cast to surround Tom Cruise in a movie that immediately became an instant classic. Watching Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson go toe-to-toe in a courtroom in the closing moments is an all-time film highlight that led to one of the most memorable lines in movie history. Don’t agree? Well, that’s okay because clearly, YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!

1. TOP GUN

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Watching the contentious relationship between Tom’s Maverick and Val Kilmer’s Iceman blossom into the coolest bromance in film history is sheer movie magic that many have since tried to emulate but few could ever pull off. Sure, it’s a tad cheesy and that beach volleyball scene set to Kenny Loggins’ “Playing with the Boys” might be slightly homoerotic, but it’s also everything that makes Top Gun a damn near perfect 80s movie. Before all of the scientology, and the couch jumping, and bizarre laughs, there was Top Gun, and Tom Cruise would never be cooler than he was here.
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