Tom Cruise hasn’t always been the crazy stuntman that we love today. For some time, he was an actor trying to win an Academy Award, while working with some of the best and most unique directors in the world. He has done films with Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick, Brian De Palma, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Oliver Stone. Not many actors can say that.
While we love his action movies and were first in line to see Top Gun: Maverick, sometimes we miss the Tom Cruise that wasn’t always a superhuman, sci-fi hero, and when he could play other types of characters, that you could meet in the real world. Now, he takes actual physical risks. Back then, he also took them as an actor in dramatic roles. Be it a lawyer, a Vietnam vet, a doctor, or even a charlatan, there were many flavors on his acting palette. Let’s travel around his filmography and talk about Tom Cruise’s Best Drama Movies, ranked:
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7 Rain Man (1988)
MGM/UA Communications Co.
Charlie Babbitt (Tom Cruise) always has money problems. When his millionaire father dies and leaves everything to his autistic brother Raymond (Dustin Hoffman), Charlie tries to get the money. During a road trip that includes a stop in Vegas, everything changes, and, by the end, they become real brothers.
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Although all the attention and awards for Rain Man went to Hoffman as he had the showier part, the movie wouldn’t work without Cruise. His character is the one who evolves and changes during the movie. He starts as a bad person (something new for his characters), is selfish, and was always bullying Raymond. The film ends with him finding a brother he loves.
6 The Color of Money (1986)
Touchstone Pictures
This disguised sequel to The Hustler was the occasion for Cruise to work with two film giants: Martin Scorsese and Paul Newman. Cruise’s character, Vincent Lauria, goes on the road with Fast Eddie Felson (Newman) to learn all the tricks of the pool trade. He soaks up so many of them that he becomes a rival. The movie ends with a great game between the teacher and the student.
Some people consider The Color of Money a minor work in Scorsese’s filmography, but how could they be right, when we have scenes like the final confrontation between them, an incredible soundtrack, and some slick camera moves? Newman won an Academy Award, and this movie showed that Cruise could be more than good looks and a million-dollar smile.
5 Collateral (2004)
Dream Works and Paramount Entertainment
A contract killer has to do five kills in one night in Los Angeles, and decides to take a skilled taxi driver hostage to help him complete his assignment. In Collateral, Tom Cruise plays the contract killer in one of his only times as the villain (being the vampire Lestat, was the other one). Cruise nails this cool and competent man, using his charisma for evil. He and Jamie Foxx complement each other very well, and you would believe why Vincent would use this taxi driver, as both are very good at their jobs (like all Michael Mann protagonists).
In the DVD commentary, Mann shares that he and Cruise had mapped out an incredibly detailed backstory for Vincent that explains his strange moral code without any regard for human life.
4 Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Stanley Kubrick Productions
When Stanley Kubrick calls, you say yes. That’s what Cruise and his then-wife Nicole Kidman might have thought when they decided to make Eyes Wide Shut with the English genius (in what would be his last film ever). Cruise plays Bill Harford, a normal and boring doctor who, once his wife Alice (Kidman) tells him she has fantasies about cheating on him, falls into a fever dream of paranoia, jealousy, and obsession, where there are no easy answers in a marriage with many cracks.
Kubrick required his whole cast and crew to show up for 400 days (a lot more than most movies), and this slow-cooking approach might be what makes Cruise’s acting so different from most of his other films.
3 Born on the Fourth of July (1989)
Universal Pictures Film
One of Oliver Stone’s best films, this movie is the real story of Ron Kovic, and it earned Cruise his first Academy Award nomination. Born on the Fourth of July follows Kovic, a Marine sergeant who served in the Vietnam War and comes home in a wheelchair, struggling with PTSD and alcoholism.
The film is heart-wrenching, desperate, and stomach-turning, showing us the realities of war. Cruise makes us feel every one of those emotions in his saddest and darkest performance. Maybe there’s a parallel universe where he decided to do more roles like this one, and Cruise is in the same acting group as Daniel Day-Lewis or Christian Bale, because his interpretation of Kovic is unlike anything he did before or after.
2 A Few Good Men (1992)
Columbia Pictures
Based on the play by Aaron Sorkin on what was his first foray into films, this movie is a courtroom drama about the court-martial of two marines. Their lawyers are Lt. Daniel Kaffee (Cruise) and Lt. Commander JoAnne Galloway (Demi Moore).
A Few Good Men is more than known for the explosive ending in the courtroom by Jack Nicholson, but it’s much more. Between the quotable lines, and the principled individuals doing the good thing even when it goes against their interests, we could already see some of Sorkin’s ideas. Cruise went a couple of rounds against Nicholson and didn’t lose on a role that employed all his boy-scout charm while giving him some edge.
1 Magnolia (1999)
New Line Cinema
A movie about people trying to be happy in Los Angeles. A movie of the strange coincidences in life. A movie that got Cruise his last Oscar Nomination. That’s Magnolia. Cruise hadn’t played a supporting role in a while, and he did it for this incredible film. He’s one of its most detestable characters, Frank “T.J.” Mackey, a misogynistic self-help guru with daddy issues.
As he explains in Amy Nicholson’s bookTom Cruise: Anatomy of an Actor, Paul Thomas Anderson wrote a role for Cruise so complex, that it would be “un-turn-downable.” Cruise gave him his all. Not only when he’s the self-proclaimed guru, but especially in the last scene with his father, the moment that shows who this character really is, making the movie more poignant, and his character full. It was an incredible performance then, and it still is.
