The 10 Best Nicolas Cage Movies

Seldom does Cage's erratic energy manifest as sex appeal. Yet as wounded, one-handed baker Ronny in Moonstruck, his table-flipping spontaneity proves irresistible to Cher's widow Loretta, in spite of her engagement to his brother. The film endures largely on account of the two performers' electricity; when Loretta kicks an empty Coke can down a quiet Brooklyn avenue after a night with this surly stud, you sure do believe they were made for each other. Criminally, Cage was the only one of the film's core cast not to be nominated for an Oscar – Cher and Olympia Dukakis both scored big on the night, while Vincent Gardenia was nominated for Best Supporting Actor – but he shines regardless in one of his most romantic roles to date.

Viewed from the other side of holy action trinity The Rock, Con Air and Face/Off — which triple-whammied during the following two years — 1995's Leaving Las Vegas seems an even more remarkable entry in the Cage canon. Playing an alcoholic screenwriter determined to drink himself to death in Sin City, despite somehow finding love with Elisabeth Shue's world-weary sex worker, Cage deservedly earned himself an Oscar, and gave no clue whatsoever that he was about to become a blockbuster action star. It is a painfully raw, exposed-nerve performance of red eyes and dishevelment, crafted in collaboration with writer-director Mike Figgis. Not that Cage tamped down his trademark flourishes; rather, he expertly folded them into his character Ben Sanderson's self-determined downward spiral. Ben's existential dereliction gives him a believable sense of showy social abandon that makes his rapid decline kind of entertaining, in a profoundly uncomfortable way.

Cage's recent career boom has largely consisted of roles which see him go all-out über-Cage (see: his Lovecraftian llama farmer in Color Out Of Space), or deliver something surprisingly melancholic (see: Pig, further down). In Panos Cosmatos' mesmeric heavy metal odyssey Mandy, he gave both. Sure, the film delivers a blood-soaked Cage chainsaw-battling demon bikers in a hellish dimension, and smelting a special shiny axe to hunt down "crazy evil". But the WTF insanity is intertwined with a deep, soulful sadness as Cage's Red Miller avenges Andrea Riseborough's Mandy Bloom – the woman with whom he's been living a peaceful woodsy existence, kidnapped by cultists. No scene captures both sides of Cage better than when he's swigging Vodka straight from the bottle, stood there in his pants in a flower-patterned bathroom, grunting and growling animalistically. It's hilariously out-there, but also a disturbing outpouring of unabashed grief, a man pushed beyond the brink. The wildest thing about Mandy is its depth of feeling.

Where do you start with Con Air? It's a film that knows how ridiculous it is, how insane it is, how – frankly – fucking awesome it is, every gloriously stupid action sequence one-upping the last. Well, you start – and finish – with Nicolas Cage, who holds it all together, grounding it with sincerity and heart while being completely self-aware. As soon-to-be ex-con Cameron Poe, desperate to get home to his wife and kid after being banged up for years and now stuck on a plane with the world's most unhinged criminals, he is the everyman and the wild man, putting his principles first, agog at the chaos swirling around him, risking it all to do the right thing – over and over again. He makes you care. And hey – this was the best hair he ever had. Witness it.

Cage's storied career bears no shortage of showy roles, but it's when he dials down the theatrics for a more sombre, introverted turn that things can get really special. His mournful turn as porcine-loving chef-turned-hermit-truffle-hunter Robin Feld in Pig stands out as the very best of his understated roles, searching for justice after a brutal pig-napping, an exile reluctantly making his return from to the cut-throat world of Portland haute-cuisine. The anti-John Wick, it sounds entirely absurd on paper, but Michael Sarnoski creates a sensuous, raw and authentic fable that lets the Great Showman dial it all down and mine his inner depths. Like a rare truffle buried beneath the roots of a venerable oak, this is one to dig up and savour from beginning to end.

Concealed in an obscure corner of Cage's vast, prolific filmography is this hidden gem, Red Rock West, which stands as strong as any of his work. It's a noirish neo-Western, as dry and dusty as the Wyoming desert it's set in, with modest ambitions but big rewards. Cage puts in a remarkably understated, impassive performance as the blandly-named Michael Williams: a drifter living out of his car who impulsively takes on a false identity when mistaken for a hitman. What follows is an irresistibly well-pitched thriller, full of intrigue and thoughtful grace notes, and the rare film where Cage plays the straight man to another actor's madman (that honour goes to Dennis Hopper, as 'Lyle, From Dallas', the real hitman). It was dumped into the direct-to-video doldrums upon initial release in the early '90s, but is finally being recognised as a genuine top-drawer entry for Cage, in a career not short of them.

Charlie Kaufman turned screenwriting on its head with his script for Spike Jonze's meta comic-drama Being John Malkovich, but the pair's follow-up – Adaptation – took that meta madness and ran with it. And didn't stop. Kaufman, writing himself into the film, created a twin brother for himself. And who better to play the twins – one pretentious and neurotic, the other vibrant and carefree – than Cage, who, as he had already proved, could do anything (and everything). He is a blast as both, the perfect yin and yang. And his greatest achievement was that even though the two looked exactly the same – no differentiating beards or hairstyles here – they were completely distinctive, purely by way of Cage's two incredible, deeply nuanced performances. He is very much his own special effect. Such is the magic of Nicolas Cage.

"I can eat a peach for hours," drawls Cage's Castor Troy lasciviously in Face/Off, the greatest film ever to have a forward slash in its title. The magic of his performance is such that we would gladly watch him do it (well, at least for two hours – anything more than that would be insane). This Troy story is a two-part tour de force. In the first act, we get a deliriously amped-up Cage, grabbing a choir girl's behind, rampaging around an airfield, and wielding a pair of gold-plated pistols so fancy they have their own lacquered wooden box (other contents of said box: a pack of Chiclets, a money clip, three rolled joints, a switchblade and four pieces of Bazooka Joe bubble gum). Then, on a dime, the character switches skin with the FBI agent who's been hunting him, and we get a totally different Cage: haunted, sensitive, vulnerable, though still prone to operatic gestures involving him running his fingers over people's faces. No matter whether it's Cage-as-Castor or Cage-as-Sean we're watching, every step of the way through John Woo's action classic, he's not just good – he's peachy.

Like a lot of great films, sometimes it takes a little while for everything to come into focus. Raising Arizona had a somewhat rocky road behind the scenes; here, the immovable force of Nicolas Cage — whose Nouveau-Shamanic ways demanded loosey-goosey improvisation — met the unstoppable objects of the Coen brothers' meticulous planning. (Cage later called the director brothers "autocratic".) Reviews upon release were mixed, too. But time has been kinder, and it is now a certified cult classic. As ex-con turned wannabe father H.I. McDunnough, Cage is goofy and gregarious, a Southern charmer who somehow makes child kidnapping seem wholesome; his winning performance is equal parts pathos and pratfalls. When filmmakers like Edgar Wright are declaring it their favourite film of all time, it's a sign that H.I. has finally come of age.

Let's cut the chit-chat, a-hole: The Rock is, quite simply, the best. Marking Nicolas Cage's official rebirth as an action hero (it was the unlikely follow-up to his Leaving Las Vegas Oscar win months earlier), this is a hard-granite slab of pure action movie gold — not to mention, the rare Michael Bay film to earn a prestigious Criterion Collection release. Cage plays Stanley Goodspeed, a desk jockey of an FBI agent forced into the field when some grumpy ex-Marines hold Alcatraz, and the city of San Francisco, hostage. Cage's odd-couple double-act with Sean Connery is glorious, his obsession with chemistry a delight ("I'm a chemical super-freak, actually"), and, by the time of his slow-motion, arms-aloft, flares-in-the-air finale, his status as a bona fide action movie icon confirmed.