Introduction

If you chronicle his career starting with “Risky Business,” in 1983 (apologies to that small but devoted contingent of “Losin’ It” fans), Tom Cruise has starred in 35 feature films. He has been a movie star for 35 years, so you do the math: Cruise is a measured, meticulous, one-movie-a-year guy, and for a long time that worked for him.

He made rousing popcorn crowd-pleasers, or he teamed up with prestigious directors and made artful movies — or, often enough, he did both at once. In recent years, the Cruise method hasn’t worked out as well, although it still yields occasional gems. What’s remarkable to see, when you sink into his best work, is what an indelible actor he is. There are a number of words that he owns (like, you know…cocky), but as soon as you try to pigeonhole Cruise, he comes back and surprises you with his soulful subtlety.

I should say that there’s a reason Oliver Stone’s “Born on the Fourth of July” didn’t make this list: I think it’s a bad movie, and that Cruise is woefully miscast in it. (You can see how hard he’s trying, but he pantomimes the pain.) In the 10 films below, though, he hits the true note.

10. A Few Good Men (1992)

The perfect straight-up, no-frills, essence-of-Tom performance. The most famous line in the movie, of course, comes from Jack Nicholson: “You can’t handle the truth!” Yet if you go back and re-watch that scene from Rob Reiner’s solidly carpentered adaptation of Aaron Sorkin’s military courtroom drama, what you see is the slow build-up of confrontational energy between Nicholson, as a self-righteous Marine autocrat in thrall to his hidden code of ethics, and Cruise, as the Naval attorney who goads Nicholson into revealing his true colors. Throughout, what you see is that Cruise is an explosive actor because he’s such a great interactor.

9. Tropic Thunder (2008)

After the washout of “Lions for Lambs” (2007) and the continued fallout from the Oprah Winfrey couch-jumping incident, Cruise, for the first time, really seemed to be on the ropes, and that required a maneuver that was either desperate or balls-out, or maybe a bit of both. In Ben Stiller’s very funny and close-to-the-bone movieland satire, Cruise scored a triumphantly scuzzy cameo as Les Grossman, a portly, bald, venomous, and vulgar studio head who tosses off lines like “Look, f— stick! I’m incredibly busy, so why don’t you get the hell out of here before I snap your d— off and jam it into your a—!” You could make a parlor game out of figuring out which fulminating, gold-chain-wearing meshugenah Hollywood power-monger Cruise was taking off on, but the beauty of the character is that he has so much DNA from so many abrasive Tinseltown monomaniacs. Cruise, in the ultimate cast-against-type stunt, nails the grandiose hostility with such hilarious petty glee that you can see why there was talk of a spin-off movie. Come to think of it, maybe it’s time.

8. The Color of Money (1986)

Thirty years later, it’s hard to recapture just how exotic it was to see Cruise, the shark-grinned teen-idol megastar of “Risky Business” and “Top Gun,” team up with a filmmaker as prestigious as Martin Scorsese to make a sequel to “The Hustler.” It was Scorsese’s inspiration to realize that Cruise could bring the same peacock effrontery to the role of Vincent Lauria, a nine-ball hustler crowned with an ironic ’50s wedge of hair, that he did to his youth flicks, and that it could work beautifully in a serious context. As a character, Vincent is crafty but callow, and that makes him both a video-game-era heir to “Fast” Eddie Felson in the original version of “The Hustler” (1960) and a worthy partner/foil to the now middle-aged Eddie, played by an older-wiser-but-just-as-wily Paul Newman. The scene in which Vincent, in an unbroken rotating shot, sinks every ball to “Werewolves of London” remains an apotheosis of Cruisian bravura.

7. Collateral (2004)

This gritty and gripping Michael Mann two-hander-on-wheels is a very good movie that, at the same time, is ludicrously overrated (a lot of critics seem to feel it’s one of the greatest works of art in the history of cinema). Yet it allowed Cruise, playing a contract killer who takes a Los Angeles cabbie (Jamie Foxx) hostage, forcing him to chauffeur him to a series of hits (yes, the plot is a transparent contrivance), to display a brand a new color — a sociopathic malevolence. Everything about him is literally steely: hair, suit, stubble, attitude. But Cruise doesn’t just wallow in stone-cold violence. He lets you see the icy tick-tock of his mind.

6. Risky Business (1983)

Head bowed, with his back to us, he slid out from the edge of a suburban foyer, in sweat socks and a floppy dress shirt, as though he were on the concert stage of his dreams, and when he began to lip sync to Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock and Roll,” using a candlestick as microphone, you could feel an earthquake happening. What was it about those two minutes that announced the birth of a movie superstar? It had a lot to do with what a clean-cut, clear-eyed preppie the former seminary student Thomas Mapother was: This wasn’t exactly the first lip-sync scene in history, yet it was the first time in a movie that someone who looked like this had let himself go in such a delirious, unguarded, dancing-with-myself way. That dance told you something about the spirit that was alive in Tom Cruise — bolder, fiercer, and rock-and-rollier than you might ever guess. The whole movie was about the secret reveries of Cruise’s Joel, who gets involved with Rebecca De Mornay’s dream-girl prostitute but learns that he has to pay the price. Paul Brickman’s 1980s morality play was very much “The Graduate” for Gen-X, and it did for Cruise what that film did for Dustin Hoffman: made him a whole new species of movie hero.

5. Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol (2011)

In recent years, Cruise has turned doing his own stunts into a kind of PR shtick, but when he did it here, in the most outrageously inspired of all “Mission: Impossible” films, it was comparable to Buster Keaton’s acrobatics in “Sherlock Jr.” — a daredevil coup that became integral to the actor’s artistry. The extended sequence in which Cruise slithers across the surface of the Burj Khalifa, the towering skyscraper in Dubai that’s the world’s tallest building, is an action-suspense epiphany at once jaw-dropping, terrifying, and exhilarating. It’s all about IMF agent Ethan Hunt’s implacable crazy valor, a quarter mile up in the air with suction cups on his hands, and that boldness — thrillingly — becomes inseparable from Cruise’s. But if that’s all there was to the film, it wouldn’t be on this list. Director Brad Bird sustains a mood of death-defying trickery, where audacity trumps fear and nothing is what it seems, and Cruise is like a heat-sinking arrow shooting through each scene. This is his most fully realized thriller performance, worthy of comparison to the actors who killed as James Bond.

4. Rain Man (1988)

How do you interact with someone who can’t? That was the challenge Cruise faced in Barry Levinson’s ticklishly offbeat and bittersweet buddy movie, in which Cruise’s Charlie Babbitt winds up on a road trip with his older brother, Raymond (Dustin Hoffman), an autistic savant who’s got the math skills of a computer…and the inter-connective human qualities of someone who’s never had a true conversation. Hoffman’s performance is genius (he gives us a glimpse of Raymond’s soul without ever once cheating the limits of his perception), but it’s Cruise’s work — now coddling, now arrogant, now frustrated, now sorrowful, now face-to-face with his past — that makes Hoffman’s possible. The beauty of “Rain Man” is that by the time the film is over, you can’t imagine either of these characters without the other.

3. Top Gun (1986)

It’s tempting to call Tony Scott’s slickly irresistible joystick war-game rouser the quintessential Cruise film. That’s because it embodies, for all time, the myth of Tom Cruise: the high-fiving rebel hotshot who can cruise through any situation, all grins and bravura and trouble-shooting attitude, because he isn’t held back by the psychological conflicts that ground the rest of us. He’s a born high-flier — the dude who would be king. Many think of “Top Gun” as a guilty pleasure, but actually it’s a terrific movie: a new-fangled version of old-fashioned corn, with dogfight sequences that now look nearly classical in their precision. What gives the action its glow is Cruise’s effortless belief in the power of his stardom. That’s a quality you can’t bottle or fake — it’s just got to be there. Another thing you might call it is the quintessence of Hollywood.

2. Jerry Maguire (1996)

Too many Cruise films spin around a love-interest factor that’s central yet, in the end, forgettable (Elisabeth Shue in “Cocktail,” Nicole Kidman in “Days of Thunder,” Cameron Diaz in “Knight and Day”). But Cameron Crowe’s exquisite drama about a sports agent who gets plunged into a career and identity crisis is the Cruise movie where the romance doesn’t just stick, it brings out a whole other dimension in the actor — a gentle, imploring ardor that knocks his Cruiseness sideways. The moment when he tells Renée Zellweger “You complete me” probably speaks for more people, at this point, than “Casablanca” and “Annie Hall” combined, and that’s because Cruise felt his way into the line’s inner meaning, which is that in “Jerry Maguire” it’s no longer enough to be Tom Cruise.

1. Magnolia (1999)

What’s the greatest line of Tom Cruise’s career? “You complete me”? “Show me the money”? “I feel the need — the need for speed”? No, it’s the line that Frank T.J. Mackey, the samurai-haired alpha-male motivational speaker Cruise plays in “Magnolia,” says to his cancer-ridden father (Jason Robards) on his deathbed: “Don’t go away, you f—ing a—hole!” At that moment, Frank is feeling everything about his absentee TV-producer father he ever felt — namely, that he despises him, because he’s worthy of being despised. But then, there it is: “Don’t go away.” How much of the primal feeling that so many of us have about our parents does THAT capture? In Paul Thomas Anderson’s giddy Altmanesque swirl of an L.A. ensemble drama, Cruise, cast as a guru who teaches men how to seduce and betray women, gives the most transporting performance of his career by deconstructing the very notion of what Tom Cruise is: a majestic control freak, flexing his power muscles, always living, in triumph, in the present tense. Then he takes us into the past and shows us the Cruise who exists beneath all that. And he touches our souls.