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David Mumpower: I have a strange take on this question in that I don't really like Tom Cruise as a person. I think he's probably unwell and possibly insane. I haven't seen Going Clear, and I'm willing to accept he's manipulated by people who use him. I still find him creepy. Despite that statement, whenever I look at his body of work, I am reminded anew of how spectacular he is at picking scripts.

Let's start with Top Gun, which already excludes a couple of films I like. Then, we can skip to a seven-film sequence of A Few Good Men, The Firm, Interview with the Vampire, Mission: Impossible, Jerry Maguire, Eyes Wide Shut, and Magnolia. Not everyone is going to love all of those films but overall, that's an amazing CAREER for 99% of Hollywood. Now, let's skip Mission: Impossible II, whose main purpose is to demonstrate how lovely Thandie Newton is. After that rare miss, Cruise adds the following titles to his resume: Vanilla Sky, Minority Report, The Last Samurai, Collateral, War of the Worlds, and Mission: Impossible III. Which is the better set of films, the first seven I listed or those six? I don't even know, but I *think* the latter.

After that, Cruise makes a couple of interesting films that fell victim to his unpopularity with Lions for Lambs and Valkyrie. After that, he throws out a hilarious redemptive turn in Tropic Thunder, an underrated role in an underrated film, Knight & Day, and probably his best action film ever, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. While I'm not a fan of it, I'd also have a BOP webmaster mad at me if I didn't acknowledge Oblivion, and he follows that up with one of the best films of 2014, Edge of Tomorrow, and one of the best films of 2015, Rogue Nation.

There are actors we've listed who can compete with him on best three films (Damon probably wins that), and five films (Julia Roberts Meryl Streep can both hang there), and maybe even seven films (Will Smith, Johnny Depp, Tom Hanks and George Clooney all compete well up until here), but if we go any deeper than that, it's not even close. I mean, here's my ten favorite Cruise films (in reverse order as Mr. Gruchow did): Edge of Tomorrow, Ghost Protocol, MI3, Collateral, The Last Samurai, Minority Report Jerry Maguire, A Few Good Men, The Firm, Top Gun. Some of the movies I've excluded are blockbuster hits that are more than 80% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Nobody else in the industry EVER can say that.

Like him or not, Tom Cruise is The Man in Hollywood.

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