Tom Cruise arrived in Hollywood with a bang and has been a star—at the box office, in tabloids, on talk shows—from that moment on. While Cruise may not be the best actor of his generation, he is the epitome of a movie star.

In time with the release of “Top Gun: Maverick” in 2022 and ahead of the seventh “Mission: Impossible” film coming to theaters in 2023, our content partners at Stacker ranked Cruise’s movies, according to IMDb rankings. Films with Cruise cameos were not included. There are some bad teen comedies and a handful of over-the-top action roles in Cruise’s filmography, but there’s genius to be found as well in the three-time Oscar nominee’s career.

Keep reading to learn more about Cruise’s Top 10 films.

10. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

– Director: Stanley Kubrick

– IMDb user rating: 7.5

– Metascore: 68

– Runtime: 159 minutes

Legendary director Stanley Kubrick’s final film, released 12 years after “Full Metal Jacket”—and four months after his death—tells the story of a New York City doctor (Cruise) who dives into the netherworld of a high-class sex cult and its secret occult rituals after he learns that his art curator wife (Nicole Kidman) has a propensity for flirting with other men. The symbolism-heavy erotic thriller is clearly the work of a master, though it never reaches the heights of other Kubrick films.

9. Collateral (2004)

– Director: Michael Mann

– IMDb user rating: 7.5

– Metascore: 71

– Runtime: 120 minutes

Cruise is built to play heroes, but in Michael Mann’s stylish, sparse thriller he gives one of the performances of his career as a villainous contract killer. Jamie Foxx plays a cabbie who picks up Cruise and agrees to keep the cab running during five stops for a few hundred bucks. Eventually, he realizes that Cruise is murdering people and must find a way to stop him without getting himself killed. A co-star is essential to get Cruise at his best, and Foxx is a perfect on-screen partner-in-crime.

8. A Few Good Men (1992)

– Director: Rob Reiner

– IMDb user rating: 7.7

– Metascore: 62

– Runtime: 138 minutes

This military courtroom drama, directed by Rob Reiner, features Aaron Sorkin’s debut screenplay—complete with sharp and incisive dialogue, often delivered hastily while walking from room to room. Eventually, Jack Nicholson steals the film with his memorable, “You can’t handle the truth!” scene. But Cruise holds his own as the military attorney questioning the old colonel. Demi Moore, Kiefer Sutherland, and Kevin Bacon all play supporting roles in the film based on Sorkin’s play of the same name.

7. Mission: Impossible – Fallout (2018)

– Director: Christopher McQuarrie

– IMDb user rating: 7.7

– Metascore: 86

– Runtime: 147 minutes

In this action spy thriller, after a mission goes haywire, a dangerous anarchist, Solomon Lane (Sean Harris) escapes custody. Ethan Hunt (Cruise) and his Impossible Missions Force team (a fictitious government agency), are blamed for the mission going sideways. They attempt to complete the initial assignment—to recapture Lane and recover the stolen plutonium.

6. Minority Report (2002)

– Director: Steven Spielberg

– IMDb user rating: 7.7

– Metascore: 80

– Runtime: 145 minutes

Based on the short story by Philip K. Dick, this Steven Spielberg megahit posits a future where the police can arrest people for “Precrime.” Cruise plays a Washington D.C. detective in the Precrime unit who learns that he has been implicated in a future murder of a man he’s never met—and must go on the lam in the heavily surveilled 2054 America. This high-concept film is action-packed, and Cruise is a key chess piece for Spielberg to use to tell his futurist story.

5. The Last Samurai (2003)

– Director: Edward Zwick

– IMDb user rating: 7.8

– Metascore: 55

– Runtime: 154 minutes

This 19th century epic tells the story of Nathan Algren (Cruise), a Civil War veteran hired by the Japanese emperor to train an army to eliminate the last of the samurai. But after being captured, Algren falls in love with the samurai lifestyle and tradition, and begins to believe in the noble warriors’ ways of life. This film seemed created in a lab to win Cruise an Oscar, but he wasn’t even nominated for his portrayal of Algren; Japanese actor Ken Watanabe, however, was nominated in Best Supporting Actor for playing samurai leader Katsumoto.

4. Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

– Director: Doug Liman

– IMDb user rating: 7.9

– Metascore: 71

– Runtime: 113 minutes

Sometimes films overcomplicate things, but Doug Liman’s “Edge of Tomorrow” has trimmed all the fat. This action-packed film follows Major William Cage (Cruise) as he is dropped into a seemingly impossible fight against alien invaders—only to die and have to start over, again and again. With the help of a scene-stealing Emily Blunt, Cruise gets closer to winning each time, in this “Groundhog Day”-meets-”Starship Troopers” action movie masterpiece.

3. Magnolia (1999)

– Director: Paul Thomas Anderson

– IMDb user rating: 8.0

– Metascore: 77

– Runtime: 188 minutes

“Magnolia” earned Paul Thomas Anderson a second Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay and helped Cruise score a nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Cruise plays Frank T.J. Mackey in a sprawling tale of one rainy day in LA, which Anderson originally meant to be “something very small, very quick, very intimate.”

2. Rain Man (1988)

– Director: Barry Levinson

– IMDb user rating: 8.0

– Metascore: 65

– Runtime: 133 minutes

Dustin Hoffman won a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Raymond Babbitt, an autistic savant brought on a cross country road trip during his brother’s bid to grab a piece of their father’s fortune. Cruise portrays Charlie Babbitt, the initially arrogant, heartless brother who learns to appreciate the value of family. One New York Times reviewer referred to Charlie as “the film’s true central character.”

1. Top Gun: Maverick (2022)

– Director: Joseph Kosinski

– IMDb user rating: 8.6

– Metascore: 78- Runtime: 130 minutes

“Top Gun: Maverick” follows test pilot Captain Pete “Maverick” Mitchell (Cruise) and his return to the U.S. Navy to train new Top Gun recruits. The team has been assigned a daunting mission: to strike a hardened and well-protected nuclear enrichment facility in an unnamed enemy country.

For the film, Cruise personally developed an intensive five-month training program for the actors that resulted in them shooting their own action scenes—from a real F/A-18 Super Hornet jet flown by Navy fighter pilots.