The Essential Nicolas Cage: 15 Must-See Movies

Nicolas Cage is my favorite actor because no matter what movie he’s in, no matter what role he’s playing, he is awesome. Whatever weird, eccentric choices he makes, it they are awesome. Even if they may arguably be wrong for the character, like Ghost Rider eating jelly beans, he has a clear reason for making the choice and his thought process is fascinating.

Born Nicolas Coppola to father August Coppola (Francis Ford’s brother), he is only credited with that surname in the TV movie “Best of Times” and the small role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. From Valley Girl, his first leading role, on, he was Nicolas Cage. Even though he never changed his name legally, he won’t go by Coppola anymore.

“Nicolas Cage is who I really am, even though my passport says otherwise,” Cage said at a TIFF press conference in 2011. I kind of had to reinvent myself to be able to have the guts to sit here in front of you today. Nicolas Coppola was a very scared little boy. I had to reinvent who I was going to be to make my dreams come true.”

Through the ‘80s, Cage was a respected actor in edgy dramas and quirky comedies, but always dabbled at mainstream fair like the Top Gun knockoff Firebirds, the rom-com Honeymoon in Vegas and whatever Guarding Tess was. I was in film school when Cage really made the leap to blockbusters with his action trilogy The Rock, Con Air and Face/Off. Film school snobs said he’d sold out, despite the fact that he won an Oscar for a Mike Figgis indie movie shot on 16mm the year before.

I don’t think Cage ever sold out. He’s always taken risks and tried things, fought for interesting character choices and championed the kinds of movies Hollywood wouldn’t make without a big star’s weight behind them. He’s probably the reason Ghost Rider got a movie at all, even though it was maybe not the ideal portrayal of the character the first time. He directed a movie in 2002, Sonny, which I hardly consider selling out, though the film made a mere blip and he hasn’t pursued directing since.

With big risks can come big falls when it doesn’t work out. Windtalkers was a reunion with John Woo and a poignant dramatic conflict: could you kill a human being to keep his knowledge out of enemy hands? But then Cage’s character never actually had to make that choice. His 3D exploitation film Drive Angry bombed hard and Season of the Witch did better but it seems even more forgotten. The two are related because Cage said he did Witch because he wanted to get shot in the eye with an arrow. During production, they nixed that idea, so in Drive Angry he gets shot in the eye with a gun. When you hear Cage explain it, those seem like perfectly good reasons to mount an entire production and release it in thousands of theaters.

Sometimes he had personal reasons for choosing a film, but he spent many years trying to use his clout to reach a younger audience. Choosing films like National Treasure, G-Force and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Cage felt he could reach “both parents and children.” He was supposed to be Superman in the late ‘90s when Tim Burton was going to direct Kevin Smith’s script, but several directors later (McG and Brett Ratner had a go) that film became Superman Returns with Brandon Routh.

By National Treasure, Cage became a bona fide pop culture phenomenon, most notably when Andy Samberg came up with the “Saturday Night Live” segment “Get in the Cage with Nicolas Cage.” Guest stars with a new movie out would be interviewed by Samberg’s Cage, and ultimately Cage himself would appear with his “SNL” alter ego. Samberg’s Cage would usually resort to stealing the Declaration of Independence, because that was probably the reference most of the “SNL” audience would get. There have also been College Humor skits about his career choices, YouTube montages of Cage “loosing his shit” in various movies, and my personal favorite, Ticklish Cage.

Serious film criticism has been rightly devoted to Cage as well. Outlaw Vern coined the term mega-acting, because it’s not technically overacting. Overacting suggests it’s a mistake. Mega-acting is going above and beyond the norm when it’s right for the character. Cage called it Nouveau Shamanic.

This week, Nicolas Cage faces The Rapture in the faith-based film Left Behind, based on the novel first filmed starring Kirk Cameron. Will he have a mega-acting reaction to The Rapture, or will he play it more like Birdy or The Family Man? If you want to experience the full range of Nicolas Cage, here are the 15 essential films to watch. This was really hard for me, since I could recommend all sorts of obscure stuff like Dead Fall and I even had to leave out big ones like Matchstick Men, National Treasure and Red Rock West. For Cage it’s worth digging deeper.

Slideshow: The Essential Nicolas Cage: 15 Must-See Movies

Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.

The Essential Nicolas Cage: 15 Must-See Movies

Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

“What’s the point of being a teenager if you can’t dress weird?”
This was Cage’s first on screen exploration of voices, and it is actually a failure, but it’s still the origin of one of his most important tools. Peggy Sue (Kathleen Turner) faints at her high school reunion and wakes up back in high school in the ‘60s. Can she do it over and marry the cool guy instead of her loser husband (Cage)?
Cage does a voice that sounds like a cartoon. It doesn’t seem to have much of a point except to not sound like Nicolas Cage. Director Francis Ford Coppola hated it and has never worked with his nephew again. Kathleen Turner even told us in an interview that she hated it too.
Raising Arizona (1987)

"I'll be taking these Huggies and whatever cash you got."
Nicolas Cage isn’t much known for his comedies, though he’s done many. Perhaps the good ones like this and The Weather Man have been marred by memories of Guarding Tess and Trapped in Paradise. The Coen Brothers comedy set a pretty high bar though, also establishing them as genre-diverse filmmakers after their debut Blood Simple. Cage plays H.I. McDunnough, a repeat offender who proposes to the police officer (Holly Hunter) who kept taking his mugshots. When they can’t have kids, and adoption isn’t an option, they scheme to kidnap a quintuplet, a crime further complicated when McDunnough’s criminal buddies escape from prison and catch on.
Cage does some big slapstick, like scraping his hands on the ceiling in the trailer fight scene and running with a bag of Huggies during the film’s epic chase. Amid all the Coen-esque craziness, Cage finds some genuine emotion with Hunter and what seems like a sincere apology in his confrontation with the bounty hunter (Randall “Tex” Cobb) at the end.
Moonstruck (1987)

"Love don't make things nice. It ruins everything."
Nicolas Cage was one of the only cast members who didn’t win an Oscar for this movie. Cher and Olympia Dukakis did. It might be the first time Cage played a pure leading man, but it still has the edge of crazy. We meet Ronny (Cage) stoking an oven doing a rant about how he lost his hand in the fire, but he cleans up well. He falls in love with Loretta (Cher) and they have an affair.
The famous scene is when Loretta slaps him and tells him, “Snap out of it!” She is engaged to Ronny’s brother, who was her late husband’s best friend. Movies have a way of making us root for adultery (Sleepless in Seattle, Bridges of Madison County). Moonstruck is a quirky fairy tale about family expectations and following your heart, so I would also like to give a shout out to Cage’s 1994 rom-com It Could Happen to You, in which Cage plays the world’s nicest guy in a sweet and clever modern fairy tale. Back in the ‘90s it might have been called an essential, but we’re beyond that now, so it’s a footnote in the Moonstruck legacy.
Vampire's Kiss (1988)

"How could somebody MIS-file something? You just PUT it IN the right file according to alphabetical order."
If you haven’t seen Vampire’s Kiss, then you haven’t seen Nicolas Cage go crazy. And if you’ve seen all his other crazy movies and think you’ve seen it all, you’ve gotta see Vampire’s Kiss. This is where Cage nails a crazy voice. He plays Peter Loew, a yuppie book agent who dons a pseudo-highbrow affect and posture. He believes he was bitten by a vampire and is transforming, but he wassn’t. He’s just crazy.
The vampire performance is unbelievable but what’s really jaw dropping are Loew’s angry tirades against his incompetent assistant. The alphabet scene, in which he gets angrier the closer he gets to Z, is worth the price of the DVD alone. Cage regards this as a landmark performance himself, and says he called upon it again when he made Face/Off. So we have Vampire’s Kiss to thank for Face/Off. Oh, and this is the movie where he eats a real cockroach. Twice. It’s take two we see in the film.
Wild at Heart (1990)

"Those toenails dry yet, sweetheart? We got some dancing' to do."
Nicolas Cage in a David Lynch movie? Imagine how crazy that gets. Sailor (Cage) and Lula (Laura Dern) are lovers on the lam, and Sailor is violent crazy in this. It opens with a savage beating, and this might be the first inkling we get of Cage’s Elvis obsession. He would later do Elvis again in Honeymoon in Vegas and on “Saturday Night Live.” Rock star poses are an important part of Cage’s technique, so doing Elvis is a key to Sailor.
Leaving Las Vegas (1995)

"You can never, never ask me to stop drinking."
Nicolas Cage won his Oscar for playing fired Hollywood screenwriter Ben Sanderson, who goes to Las Vegas to drink himself to death. Of course playing the alcoholic stupors are the showy side of the part, but pay attention to what Cage does in the human interactions. He starts a platonic romance with a Vegas prostitute Sera (Elisabeth Shue), with whom he just wants to talk.
Cage is really engaging in those dialogue scenes. He’s able to use his gestures and inflections to endear himself to both Sera and the audience, considering what Ben is there to do and what judgments we might have of him. It’s interesting to note that Ben is the only person in the movie who isn’t using Sera, but he’s not going to last.
The Rock (1996)

"How in the name of Zeus's butthole did you get out of your cell?"
Cage’s first of many films with Jerry Bruckheimer was instrumental in transforming him into an action hero. Firebirds was mediocre and forgotten, but with Bruckheimer he found someone who could match material to Cage’s strengths. He’s second fiddle to Sean Connery in The Rock but he steals every scene they share, thus announcing his domination of the action genre for the ensuing decade.
Cage plays Stanley Goodspeed, a chemist who has to follow Alcatraz’s only escapee John Mason (Connery) back into the prison to defuse a terrorist bomb. Cage came up with the idea that Goodspeed would not swear, so his exclamations in the place of generic action profanity are amazing. I suppose it’s character growth when he finally says “shit.” Cage also added the Beatlemaniac character trait, giving Goodspeed quirky characteristics inside an explosive Michael Bay movie. This is where many of us really fell in love with Nicolas Cage.
Con Air (1997)

"Put the bunny back in the box."
Of the three action movies Cage did in a row from 1996 - 1997, Con Air is the one with no subtext whatsoever, and it’s proud of it. Con Air is just the All-American action movie and Cage is the All-American hero. Falsely convicted of murder for defending his wife, getting out to see his daughter and stopping a planeload of convicts from escaping, Cameron Poe (Cage) is also a war veteran to boot. I think he may have baked an apple pie in a deleted scene, but I can’t verify that.
Straightforward has rarely been a hallmark of Nicolas Cage, so between The Rock and Face/Off I think it was extremely vital to see he could do the straight laced action hero. He would do it for National Treasure and make it family friendly too. Maybe it’s not quite that simple. The all-American hero is the archetype and Cage plays it up, bulging out of his Die Hard undershirt with long hair blowing in the wind as he runs from explosions in slow motion. I actually grew my hair long for a few years trying to achieve Con Hair. I couldn’t get past my shoulders.
Face/Off (1997)

"I could eat a peach for hours."
A high concept premise that transcends sheer fun into something awesome and legitimately dramatic, Cage plays terrorist Castor Troy who falls into a coma when Sean Archer (John Travolta) catches him. To find out where Castor has planted a bomb, Archer has to switch faces and impersonate him. But Castor wakes up and takes Archer’s face as well.
This is batshit crazy but you believe it because the characters end up identifying with each other’s families and it’s downright poignant. Cage is cranked up to 11 as Castor and maybe 12 as the guilt-stricken Archer. The story goes that Paramount wanted to change the movie’s title to something generic, so Cage came up with the scene where he says, “I want to take his face... off” over and over so they had to use the title.
Adaptation. (2002)

"Trick photography."
Double the Cage, double the crazy. Cage plays screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, in a meta tale about Kaufman’s own struggle to adapt The Orchid Thief. Cage nails Kaufman’s self-loathing version of himself with all his tics, as well as the alter ego Kaufman created in his twin brother Donald Kaufman, a fictional creation (or was he?).
Donald is the total Hollywood type brazenly working on a purely commercial serial killer movie called The Three, where the killer, the detective and the victim are all the same person. Charlie is too distracted by his own neurosis to finish his work, but also rejects Donald’s big Hollywood notes. It’s two Cages arguing with each other. What are you waiting for?
The Weather Man (2005)

"Tartar sauce, tartar sauce, tartar sauce. Man, I'd like to put my face in there."
After his biggest success to date, National Treasure, and his acclaimed work in Adaptation and Matchstick Men, Cage took a risk in the decidedly uncommercial comedy Gore Verbinski decided to direct between Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Cage plays weatherman Dave Spritz, who seems well meaning enough but makes a lot of mistakes, particularly where his wife (Hope Davis) and father (Michael Caine) are concerned.
Spritz isn’t even that beloved by his viewers. They prefer to pelt him with milkshakes when they drive by him on the street. The uncomfortable comedy is palpable, with off center observations that have more to say about relationships than you realize at first. Cage is not afraid to be unlikable and just the fact that he chose this movie, that he saw the good in it, makes him awesome.
The Wicker Man (2006)

"Not the bees! Not the bees! Aghhhhh!"
Nicolas Cage in a bear suit punching women. Do I need to say more? Oh, I do? Well, the Wicker Man remake is most famous for Cage’s climactic bee attack. Cage refers to The Wicker Man as a comedy, so he knew what he was doing. He plays a cop investigating a missing person on a strange island populated only by women. I think if they just put the bear suit fight scene on the poster, they would’ve had a hit. That’s really all I’ve got. Cage, bear suit, punching women. People like the bees too.
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

"What are these fucking iguanas doing on my coffee table?"
Nicolas Cage owned a home in New Orleans and after Hurricane Katrina started making several movies in his neighborhood, which also benefited low budget films with a tax incentive. The first and most significant of those is Werner Herzog’s sequel to Bad Lieutenant. He should have followed the Another 48 Hours/Another Stakeout lead and called it Another Bad Lieutenant because Cage is playing a completely different character than Harvey Keitel did.
Cage plays a New Orleans lieutenant who injures his back saving a prisoner from drowning. He becomes addicted to pain killers, and hard stuff like crack, justifying him to really freak out. It’s directed by Werner Herzog who infuses the cop drama with weird touches like iguanas.
Kick-Ass (2010)

"He should have called himself Ass-Kick instead."
At the height of his box office power, Cage took a supporting role and made it the best part of the movie. Based on the Mark Millar comic book, a teenager (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) puts on a costume and tries to fight crime as the hero Kick-Ass. Meanwhile, Big Daddy (Cage) has been training his daughter (Chloe Moretz) to be Hit Girl all along. Cage plays Big Daddy with Adam West’s voice. He knows comics, he knows tone and he found the perfect outlet for those absurdities.
Joe (2013)

After a half decade of pushing his Nouveau Shamanic acting style in supernatural roles like Ghost Rider, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Drive Angry, Cage decided to remind the world that he can practice restraint just as well. He did The Frozen Ground as a straightforward serial killer movie, but he really honed a nuanced performance in Joe.
Joe (Cage) leads a forest cleanup crew and takes a young boy (Tye Sheridan) under his wing. There are still some Cagey outbursts. He’s still got it, but should anyone be a fair weather Nicolas Cage fan, or like those old college classmates who thought he’d sold out, Joe is the periodic reminder that Cage never does just one thing. He’s still got roles like Joe in him and I can’t wait to see what he does next.