Every Good Nicolas Cage Movie, Ranked
One of Hollywood's most prolific and versatile actors, Nicolas Cage launched his big-screen career in the early 1980s at the age of 17 and has since appeared in over 80 features in seemingly every genre, including screwball indie comedy, harrowing drama, rom-com, thriller, action, animation, and horror. In that span, Cage has moved from indies to big-budget popcorn fare and back again, along the way working with quite a few noted directors including Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, David Lynch, the Coen brothers, Spike Jonze, and his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola. (Cage's birth name, of course, is Nicolas Coppola.)
But for every great (or at least interesting) project in Cage's filmography, there is at least one outright dud, befitting a man who has both won an Academy Award and been nominated for more Razzies than all but five other actors in history. Cage has famously taken on numerous roles in low-profile, straight-to-video genre films in order to fund a lavish lifestyle and pay off a tax debt. But the resulting string of instantly forgettable, poorly reviewed titles appears to have dried up, and recent years have seen the actor once again selecting far more interesting projects and returning to the world of critical acclaim.
Fortunately, his latest film (The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent) looks like it will be another one of those late-career highlights. But where, exactly, does it place among his other work? In the gallery on this page, we rank every "good" Nicolas Cage movie in order (saving the best for last) by Metascore, which represents the consensus of top professional film critics. In this case, we are restricting the list to only those films scoring 61 or higher, which encompasses all titles receiving generally positive reviews from critics.
Additional content from Keith Kimbell.
Possibly the unlikeliest "sequel" (or "remake"?) ever made, this pulpy 2009 crime drama is theoretically a follow-up to Abel Ferrara's NC-17-rated arthouse classic from 1992. But this mostly unrelated film comes from a different director (the great Werner Herzog), is set in New Orleans rather than New York, and features a completely new cast, characters, and story. In fact, the only commonalities between the two films are their titles, a producer, and a shared focus on a corrupt police officer—Harvey Keitel in the original, Cage in the second film. New Orleans broke a string of eight consecutive duds for Cage, who gets to deliver a "sublimely deranged lead performance" (in the eyes of AV Club critic Scott Tobias) as the titular drug-addicted lieutenant who manages to date a prostitute, steal drugs and money, threaten witnesses, run up a huge gambling debt, and become an informant for a gangster over the course of two hours.
“Frankly, the story isn’t remotely as interesting as Cage. Nothing is. In Ferrara’s movie, Keitel emptied himself out. But there’s a hellion’s joy in Cage’s cop.” —Wesley Morris, The Boston Globe
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