The 10 Best Tom Cruise Performances, Ranked

While the Mission: Impossible franchise has grown exponentially in the three decades since its inception, and Cruise and co. have delivered some of the most outrageous stunts Hollywood has ever seen, it's still the opening salvo in the now $4.35 billion-grossing franchise – the 16th-highest-grossing franchise in Hollywood history – that is the high point.

Directed by the legendary Brian De Palma, who brought all his penchant for the suspenseful, paranoid, and deliberately theatrical to proceedings, Mission: Impossible helped solidify Cruise's spot as Hollywood's premier star in the 1990s, in a performance much more restrained and vulnerable than its successors.

Making a sequel to one of the quintessential films of the 1960s sounds like folly, but in 1986, not only did they make one, but it was directed by Martin Scorsese. On paper, The Color of Money had failure written all over it. In reality, it became as culturally important as its predecessor, helping cement Paul Newman as one of the greatest to ever do it, while continuing Cruise's ascent to becoming the world's latest – and biggest – movie star.

Coming off the back of Top Gun, Cruise's stature was already high, but this was something of a surprise move for him. He plays Vincent Lauria, a young, ambitious but naive pool player who wants to be the best and befriends the great Eddie Felson as his mentor. Come for the pool shots, stay for an epic finale.

The early 1980s were a time when Hollywood filmmakers fully immersed themselves in the sex comedy. From the beginning of the decade through the first four or five years, sex sold, with films like Porky's and Fast Times at Ridgemont High among the biggest hits of the fledgling new decade. In 1983, Risky Business, a sharper, more complex coming-of-age drama became a huge hit and catapulted its lead to superstardom.

It follows the sexual exploits of high school senior Joel Goodson (Cruise), who is staying home alone during his parents' vacation and meets a call girl named Lana (Rebecca De Mornay). Starting as a goofy, timid young teenager doing culture-defining dancing in his underwear, Cruise shows the qualities that would define four decades as the world's biggest star: sincere, sharp and superb.

He had us at hello, of course. Standing out as one of Cruise's most vulnerable and insecure characters, Jerry Maguire continues to be one of the star's most underappreciated roles and one that, in any other year, would – and should – have won him an Academy Award.

Teaming with Cameron Crowe straight after his first Mission: Impossible, Cruise makes Jerry's transformation from confident sports agent to scared, selfish and desperate man so raw and believable because he doesn't play him as a fundamentally different man at the film's crescendo – he is the same man, but finally knowing what he wants from life.

Whenever Michael Mann makes a film, audiences and film lovers stop and take notice. The director of Manhunter, Heat, and The Last of the Mohicans took on Collateral with Russell Crowe attached to star, but after his departure, he approached Cruise with the lure of something very different: the role of the film's antagonist.

Working covertly as a FedEx deliveryman before production to help sell an "unrecognisable" Cruise, Mann found his hitman, Vincent, someone able to infiltrate anywhere to carry out his assignment. Brilliantly subverting his typical movie-star charms, Cruise excels as the cold, calculating hitman dressed in grey from head to toe as he goes about his business one hit at a time with chilling precision.

Another somewhat strategic career move after the literal heights of Top Gun and Cocktail, he followed Rain Man with Born on the Fourth of July, the true story of Ron Kovic, a real-life Vietnam vet and anti-war activist – a deliberate move away from his clean-cut, charismatic image that had helped him achieve so much.

Initially patriotic, Kovic is paralysed on duty and soon realises that America has little place for damaged vets. And, in that, comes a big irony for Cruise: his greatest weapons – smile, energy, confidence – are taken away from him, instead relying on his physicality, vulnerability, and raw emotional intensity to convey a man whose entire sense of identity has been shattered, with achingly beautiful results.

Paul Thomas Anderson is one of Hollywood's most influential directors of the last three decades, and his recent Oscar wins for One Battle After Another have only cemented his status. After Hard Eight and Boogie Nights, Magnolia was the filmmaker's biggest and most ambitious film at the time and, after seeing the latter, Cruise wanted to work with him.

Post-Eyes Wide Shut, Magnolia presented Cruise with the perfect antidote to his repressed husband in the form of Frank T.J. Mackey, a loud, crude, crass but supremely confident male guru – a million miles away from what Cruise had done before or since. In a perfect marriage of director and star trusting each other, it remains one of the star's most outlandish but emotionally crushing turns.

Rain Man is probably the most important role – and film – of Cruise's whole career. Without it, the actor isn't the actor we know today. After some of his earlier roles had catapulted him into the stratosphere as a movie star, his turn in Barry Levinson's devastating and moving film brought him back down to earth.

As Charlie Babbitt, brother to an autistic savant named Raymond (Dustin Hoffman) who is to inherit their father's vast fortune, Cruise is an emotionally damaged, abrasive, angry and self-centred asshole. But, through that relationship, Charlie transforms, finding solace, love, and strength in someone other than himself, showcasing Cruise's supreme abilities for drama that would shine through again later in his career.

The history of Stanley Kubrick's film is as well known – perhaps even more well known – than the film itself, given some of the madness that happened on the set back in 1996 when production began. It ultimately ended in June 1998, with Kubrick's perfectionism causing the shoot to run on, and one scene of Cruise going through a door was shot 95 times. Kubrick sadly passed away before the film was released in 1999.

Cruise plays Dr William Hartford, husband to Alice (Nicole Kidman), who tells him she has contemplated cheating on him in recent months. Psychologically scarred by the admission, Hartford embarks on a night-long odyssey through New York's sexual underworld. In an unusually restrained turn, Cruise showcases his true range under Kubrick's guidance: insecure, complex and totally vulnerable; his performance is silent and jealous, and utterly magnetic throughout.

Based on the play by renowned writer Aaron Sorkin, who later wrote The Social Network, A Few Good Men was a hot production before Rob Reiner, director of This Is Spinal Tap and Stand By Me, wanted to make it into a film. Soon, he had Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, Kiefer Sutherland, and Kevin Bacon headlining it.

Cruise plays Lt. Daniel Kaffee, a young, hot-shot, wisecracking lawyer tasked with defending U.S. Marines charged with murdering a fellow soldier. Best known for its explosive final moments as Cruise and Nicholson exchange one of cinema's finest acting stand-offs, it's easy to forget that Cruise is sensational throughout, injecting his humour and charm into heavy subject matter in one of his most underrated performances.