10 good Nicolas Cage films, and 10 "good" Nicolas Cage films

It feels fairly disappointing, egregious even, that the tedious epic The Last Emperor won Best Picture at the Oscars in 1987. Moonstruck and Broadcast News are still quality films, while The Last Emperor has been forgotten. Cher and Olympia Dukakis each won Oscars for Moonstruck, and Cage could have reasonably done so as well. His performance is out there, animalistic but compelling, and the movie around him is so strong.

Vampire’s Kiss is not good. It’s also not bad. It’s…an experiment? Cage certainly seemed to take it that way. The movie is bugnuts bonkers and well worth seeing as a curiosity. Cage ate a cockroach for the film. Ever seen that clip of Cage angrily reciting the alphabet? That’s from Vampire’s Kiss.

This is the movie that Cage won an Oscar for. Now, maybe Leaving Las Vegas feels like a heavy-handed melodrama, and it is. It’s not the best film he’s been in, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t quality. Plus, Cage’s Oscar win had to be included in the proper good section.

Goofy action films make up a sizable portion of Cage’s filmography. Con Air falls into the entertaining category, though it is not good. The premise is silly. Cage plays Cameron Poe, a convict who is not really a bad guy (he killed a man defending his wife) and finds himself on a prison transport plane. The plane, naturally, is taken over by scenery-chewing criminals. Steve Buscemi plays a serial killer who…is treated as comic relief? That’s Con Air in a nutshell.

The Rock does just enough right to rise above Con Air in terms of quality. Michael Bay’s film is not amazing moviemaking, but it is a legitimately good action flick. Ed Harris’s antagonist, who takes over Alcatraz in a move of domestic terrorism, helps flesh this film out.

Perhaps the pinnacle of ‘90s “so bad it’s good” action flicks. John Woo, you’re crazy for this one. Cage is a criminal. John Travolta is an FBI agent. They…swap faces. Cage gets to do his Travolta. Travolta gets to do his Cage. There’s a prison with magnet boots. It’s a delight.

Left to his own devices, Charlie Kaufman makes movies that are free of substance and borderline aggravating. However, for all his excesses, if somebody puts some guardrails on him and you get a good director, you can get a quality screenplay out of him. Adaptation, directed by Spike Jonze, is such a film. Cage plays, um, Charlie Kaufman, a struggling, socially awkward screenwriter. Meanwhile, his twin brother, Donald, is an affable writer of successful potboilers. Chris Cooper won an Oscar for his work in the film.

National Treasure and its sequel are silly fun in all the right ways. There’s a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence. We don’t need to say more, do we? If you know what you’re getting into, you can enjoy it.

Now, to enjoy Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men, you have to be able to enjoy a performance with a lot of business to it. Cage’s character is A LOT. Sometimes, too much. Sam Rockwell is there as well, though, and Scott is a talented director. Many consider this one a lost gem of the 2000s.

The bees. The bear suit. All the lunacy. The original Wicker Man is a sensible, eerie horror movie. Cage’s The Wicker Man is a meme factory. This adaptation was written and directed by Neil LaBute, who, um, has a relationship with women that is what you might classify as disconcerting. Even so, there’s fun to be had in all the ineptness.

Hey, animated films are still films. The Croods was a big success. It made $587 million worldwide and earned a sequel. Cage voices Grug, the patriarch of a family of cave-dwelling Cro-Magnon types, thrown into a tizzy when a modern human appears.

Right before the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, we got Ghost Rider . Cage plays Johnny Blaze, aka Ghost Rider, but it’s a throwback to the messy days of superhero movies before Christopher Nolan was over in the DC world and the MCU crew got things situated properly. Cage does play a guy with a flaming skull head, though.

By the 2010s, there were basically three types of Cage movies. First, the bad, big-budget action films. Second, direct-to-video action films nobody but bad movie aficionados have ever heard of. Third, the low-budget indie films that were occasionally quite good. David Gordon Green only remakes horror films now, but he used to make contemplative character studies like Joe. Cage plays Joe, a wayward man in Texas with a job as a tree poisoner, who takes in a 15-year-old drifter as an apprentice to protect him from his abusive father.

Among the bad, forgettable action flicks and quasi-thrillers Cage made in the dark times, Stolen has an outsized reputation for its enjoyable badness. A portion of that is owed to the trailer, wherein the voiceover artist pronounced “Stolen” wrong, and apparently, they couldn’t afford a second take. That level of shabbiness is all over the production.

Mandy is not for everybody. It’s bonkers, but not in an out-of-control, unintentional way. No, it’s an ethereal, strange film with a clear intention. Director Panos Cosmatos is tapping into a certain skill Cage has that some directors have known how to find. It’s outré horror of the highest order.

The Left Behind books are religious apocalyptic thrillers known for incompetence in storytelling and prose, even among some who are Christians. They have a silly element to them, which in turn finds its way into this film adaptation. Cage was at a point in his career where, sure, he’d be the protagonist of a Left Behind adaptation. He was. It was bad. At least Cage made it fun.

In the 2020s, there was a turn. “Actually, Cage is a genuinely good actor” became the popular assessment of him. He stopped doing as many bad films and started doing more character work. Pig has a bit of Joe and a bit of Mandy to it. It’s another ethereal movie about a loner, this time a truffle hunter who needs to find his beloved pig.

This one is kind of on the fence. It’s close to being genuinely good, but not quite. It’s the kind of horror movie that is lauded for its craziness. Mom and Dad was praised for how nuts it is (a promotional poster included the line “Like Home Alone on bath salts”), and some of that comes down to not so much true quality but sheer audacity. That lands it here.

The knowingness of Cage as a performer comes full circle. In The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Cage plays…himself. He plays a version of himself, who, down on his luck, takes on a lucrative private gig of hanging out with a billionaire who seemingly has ties to criminal activity of some sort.

Is Renfield good? It’s a question we’re still debating. Cage definitely is having fun playing Dracula. He’s entertaining. Does the movie work, though? Is it too winking? Does the comedy have enough punch? Or is it a mild delight built upon Cage eating scenery, like so many films before it? In time, we will know for sure. For now, we have a lot left to…sink our teeth into.