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.
A 1995 thriller from Single White Female and Reversal of Fortune director Barbet Schroeder, with a script by novelist Richard Price, Kiss of Death is a remake of the 1947 film noir with its story transplanted to (then-)present day Queens. David Caruso drew the most attention in the solid cast that also included Samuel L. Jackson and Helen Hunt—it was his first major big-screen starring role following his departure from TV's NYPD Blue—but his performance as a reformed ex-con didn't go over well with critics or moviegoers, and Caruso was ultimately nominated for a Razzie. But the rest of the cast and the film itself drew a more positive reception from critics, and Cage was singled out for a strong performance as the asthmatic, psychopathic gangster Little Junior Brown.
“The movie’s streetwise screenwriter, Richard Price, knows characters like this do exist — but only an actor like Cage can bring them off.” —Glenn Kenny, Entertainment Weekly
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