His pool-hall wizard Vince (so self-adoring that he literally walks around in a t-shirt with his own name on it) simply cannot help showing off, broadcasting his considerable skills with a cue for all to see – even if it means imploding the hustling scheme he's cooked up with Paul Newman's veteran Fast Eddie. Released in the same year as the original Top Gun, this lesser-known Martin Scorsese banger is absolutely the former's equal in displaying the young Cruise's prodigious talent, captivating charisma, and cocksure confidence. Feast your illegally transplanted retinas on that. Plus, we get to see him have eyeball surgery. This meeting of legendary cinematic minds produced something darker and more dystopian than you might expect, but Cruise is on impeccable screen-swiping form as an action hero, a care-taker for precog Agatha ( Samantha Morton), and a man whose entire world-view is shattering around him, desperate to clear his name. But when his own face comes up as the unit's next criminal to catch, it throws the entire system – and Anderton's beliefs around it – into question. Cruise is John Anderton, an officer in the Pre-Crime unit of 2054, which uses the visions of three psychic siblings (the 'precogs') to proudly reduce the murder rate in Washington DC to zero. If you know someone's about to commit a crime, can you punish them before they do it? That's the knotty question at the heart of Minority Report, which saw Cruise team up with the one and only Steven Spielberg for a gritty, noirish thriller with a lot on its mind. Even back in '96, the Mission movies were all about breathless setpieces – though at that point, they were more about beads of sweat pooling on Hunt's forehead while he dangles in a temperature-controlled computer vault, than strapping himself to an aeroplane while it takes off. And at the centre of it all is Cruise's Ethan Hunt, perpetually on the backfoot, barely surviving near-impossible predicaments by the skin of his teeth. There's that iconic lit-fuse title sequence and theme tune. There's the twisty, double-triple-crossing plot which turned memories of the original show upside down. But the DNA of the ultimate Tom Cruise franchise all comes from this first entry. When Brian De Palma first brought '60s spy series Mission: Impossible to the big screen in the mid-'90s (with Cruise producing as well as starring), it wasn't yet an action juggernaut – the height of spectacle here is an exploding fish tank, or the helicopter-in-a-train-tunnel chase (which perhaps began Cruise's fondness for clinging to speeding vehicles). The highway to the danger zone begins here… Empire’s ranking of the 10 best Tom Cruise movies spans his entire career – early works, curiosities, all-time American classics, and pulse-pounding adventures – going (spoiler alert!) right up to the thrilling, nostalgic, and emotional Top Gun: Maverick. And through all those career modes, there’s a sense of sincerity in the stories being told and the characters being brought to life – one that, today, finds him pushing the limits of on-screen action further than most thought possible. He’s also had a fascinating career – one that began with a series of roles that dialled into his charisma and confidence as an upstart, before moving into more nuanced character dramas, and then into blockbuster spectacle. There’s a reason he’s still one of Hollywood’s biggest stars and made Empire's list of the 50 Greatest Actors of all time: the man makes amazing movies. Through the years, Cruise has proved that there are few vehicles or buildings he won’t cling to or jump from no skill he can’t master to showcase on screen no story he can’t hone into its most crowd-pleasing shape. Feats of physical endurance and stunt-based spectacle? Mostly, check. A performance of magnetic intensity? Check. When you sit down to watch a Tom Cruise film, there are things you know you’ll see: Running, really fast? Check. The ‘ Tom Cruise movie’ might as well be its own genre.
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