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.
One of a string of noir-like thrillers directed by John Dahl in the 1990s (and the last one that Dahl himself wrote), this twisty arthouse sensation stars Cage as an ex-Marine turned drifter who finds himself accidentally entangled in a murder-for-hire scheme in Red Rock, Wyoming, where he has gone seeking work. Lara Flynn Boyle, Dennis Hopper, and J.T. Walsh also star.
Rather unusually, Red Rock West skipped theaters in the United States and debuted on HBO in 1993 (after screening at TIFF), where an enterprising San Francisco theater owner saw the film and requested it to be screened in his theater in early 1994. A wildly successful run there led to a theatrical release in additional North American cities, preempting a planned VHS release. Only a few other films in history, including the cult classic Repo Man, followed this home video-to-theaters model.
“The acting is solid throughout, from Cage's subdued but fuming Michael and Hopper's familiarly psychotic Lyle, to Walsh's weaselly Wayne and Boyle's fatal femme. It is a treasure waiting to be discovered.” —Richard Harrington, The Washington Post