As hard as it might be to believe now, there was a time in Tom Cruise‘s career where he wasn’t playing slight variations on similar characters in big-budget tent-pole franchises. Understandably, his work in the Mission: Impossible series and his work in Top Gun: Maverick have resulted in his biggest box-office successes, so it’s easy to see why he keeps returning to those worlds. Still, there was a time when he took on much more ambitious roles in unlikely genres, which resulted in movies that have stuck with audiences for years.

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