The Best Nicolas Cage Movies Ranked

Neurotic, anxious, and a germaphobe, Cage plays a small time crook imprisoned by his own mental limitations—which are all exacerbated when he learns he has a teenage daughter named Angela (Alison Lohman). Against his will, Angie movies in, and the film becomes a light familial comedy about a highly dysfunctional father-daughter dynamic as he teaches her the family business. It’s also one of the most appealing star vehicles from the era where Cage was at the height of his Hollywood popularity. The whole ensemble, which includes Sam Rockwell, has so much chemistry that you can’t even see how the movie is hoodwinking you. – David Crow

14. Vampire’s Kiss (1988)

This mostly forgotten 1989 film about a bad boy literary agent who believes he’s been turned into vampire has roared back to life in the YouTube era, as film fans giddily shared scene after scene of Cage’s most unhinged acting to date. From donning fake vampire teeth to eating a (real) cockroach, to running through the streets of New York screaming “I’m a Vampire,” Cage fully commits to the role and takes an expressionistic approach to portraying a man’s descent into madness.

In the film, Cage’s protagonist might live in the literary world but he’s convinced he’s a bonafide ‘80s yuppie on par with Gordon Gekko or Patrick Bateman. He snorts cocaine, he hangs out at nightclubs to pick up women, and… he becomes convinced he’s turning into the titular vampire from 1922’s Nosferatu. This might be all in his head, but it doesn’t save his victims. It’s campy and unintentionally funny, sure, but it’s also weirdly magnetic. There’s truly nothing like it. – Nick Harley

13. Mandy (2018)

Landing squarely in the midst of Cage’s lost decade—when he was appearing in just about every direct-to-video release that he could in order to pay off massive personal debts—Mandy stood out from the deluge of other Cage-starrers and arguably began a mini-renaissance of the actor’s career and critical acceptance. He stars here in director Panos Cosmatos’ psychedelic horror outing as Red Miller, a lumberjack whose artist wife Mandy is murdered by a religious cult after she refuses to give into the cult leader’s sexual advances. Driven to extremes by grief and rage, Red sets out to avenge himself on the cult and the demonic, drug-fueled biker gang who serve as their enforcers.

Shot to deliberately evoke the often freaky horror and action thrillers of the 1970s, infused with graphic violence, and again anchored by a wonderfully demented yet complex performance by Cage, Mandy has modern cult classic written all over it. – Don Kaye

12. Kick-Ass (2010)

By the end of the 2000s, Cage’s career was at an ambiguous place. He still starred in Hollywood action movies, but they increasingly looked like the trashy Ghost Rider superhero flicks instead of his heyday as a John Woo muse in the ‘90s. Meanwhile his more interesting, dramatic works had (for a time) dried up. 2010 turned that around for a while with the wide releases of Bad Lieutenant and Kick-Ass, the latter of which on paper sounds like another trashy superhero joint. And perhaps it was within the comic book panels of Mark Millar and John Romita Jr., where Kick-Ass was created, but in the hands of director Matthew Vaughn, the material became a zippy, genre-bending action spectacle in the same vein as Grindhouse.