Tom Cruise has been entertaining us for more than four decades — most recently in action flicks like Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning and Top Gun: Maverick. Maybe that’s why the teaser for his new film, Digger, directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, is getting so much attention online. The black comedy with an under-wraps plot seems different from anything the Oscar winner has done in years.

Cruise rose to fame in the ’80s with starring roles in Risky Business and Top Gun before more dramatic turns in films such as Rain Man and Born on the Fourth of July, which earned him his first Academy Award nomination and his first Golden Globe win. With the ’90s came A Few Good Men, The Firm, Interview with the Vampire, and Jerry Maguire, which earned him a second Oscar nom and another Golden Globe. At the turn of the century, Cruise homed in on the action genre with movies like Minority Report, The Last Samurai, and War of the Worlds while also making Mission: Impossible into a blockbuster franchise that spanned eight films over almost 30 years. His other Oscar nominations — for Best Supporting Actor in Magnolia in 2000 and for Best Picture as an executive producer of the Top Gun sequel in 2023 — as well as his more comedic roles, like in Tropic Thunder and Rock of Ages, showcase his breadth. For more Cruise action, check out these movies on Netflix.

Oblivion

Set in 2077 on a postapocalyptic Earth, Oblivion (2013) stars Cruise as Jack, a maintenance technician who has almost completed his mission and is set to rejoin humanity’s colony on Saturn’s moon Titan. But when he and his partner, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), discover a woman (Olga Kurylenko) who’s survived a spaceship crash, Jack begins to question everything he knows about the alien war that destroyed the planet — and himself. Joseph Kosinski (Top Gun: Maverick) directs this homage to ’70s sci-fi, which co-stars Morgan Freeman (The Shawshank Redemption) and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (Game of Thrones).

Oblivion

2h 4m   PG-13   2013

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