Today I started writing a different post about movies, but realized that before I could write about my favorite movies, I was going to have to take a step back and address the fact that multiple of them star Tom Cruise. That’s not something you can just put out there in 2011 and expect people to accept: you have to defend yourself, and you have to defend Tom Cruise.

I’m not defending Tom Cruise’s personal life, though it’s become bizarre enough that he’s entered the category of actors who—like Woody Allen, Charlie Sheen, Alec Baldwin, and now maybe Jim Carrey—have developed sizable contingents of potential fans who won’t even consider watching the actors’ movies because whenever the actors are onscreen, the viewers just see CRAZY, WEIRD, and possibly MANIPULATIVE or ABUSIVE or LECHEROUS. Whatever Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes have going on, and what vaccines they do or don’t give their children, is not a question I’m getting into.

But then there are those who think Tom Cruise is just plain bad as an actor. They might give him slack up through Risky Business (1983), Top Gun (1986), The Color of Money (1986), Rain Man (1988), and Born on the Fourth of July (1989)—but then the 80s ended, and Days of Thunder (1990) signified the beginning of the end. His character was named Cole Trickle, and given that Cruise co-wrote the damn thing, he had only himself to blame for that fact. Mission: Impossible and Jerry Maguire (both 1996) represented the end of Cruise’s days as an even potentially unproblematic leading man, and after a three-year hiatus, he and his then wife Nicole Kidman appeared together in Stanley Kubrick’s swan song, the majestically weird Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

In 2001, Cruise split from Kidman and starred in Cameron Crowe’s Vanilla Sky, the first film to be widely regarded as having been Ruined By Cruise. (People had other issues with the film, but Cruise was generally the first problem mentioned when people started enumerating the film’s flaws.) Minority Report (2002) was pretty bad-ass, but then came Far and Away (2002), The Last Samurai (2003), War of the Worlds (2005), Valkyrie (2008), and Knight and Day (2010). Especially after 2005’s infamous “couch incident” on Oprah, the 21st century has turned Cruise into a living joke.

So when I tell people that two of my favorite movies are Eyes Wide Shut and Vanilla Sky, they’re usually give me a look of appalled condescension and say, “Those are Tom Cruise movies.” In 2011, a Tom Cruise movie might be okay for a stoned makeout session, but not to declare to be a genuinely good film.

I beg to differ.

In his best roles, Cruise is a high-flying prodigy brought low by adverse circumstances. It’s an easily caricatured trope, but in those roles, it’s precisely the semi-crazed sincerity that inspired Cruise to jump on Oprah’s couch that works in his favor. Whether he’s sweating it out in the Top Gun cockpit or yelling at Cuba Gooding Jr. in Jerry Maguire or discovering a telltale mask on his pillow in Eyes Wide Shut or pleading for technical support in Vanilla Sky, you believe that Cruise is at the end of his rope but gnawing down hard. Whatever self-awareness he may lack in life, on screen he can convincingly create the illusion that he’s plagued by self-doubts that he’s shoving aside because he has to, or he’ll lose everything.

Though he’s no longer the poster boy he was in the 80s, Cruise is still a completely magnetic screen presence—a fact he’s parlayed into memorable supporting turns in Magnolia (1999) and Tropic Thunder (2008). Among messianic American actors of Cruise’s generation, Cruise’s sense of humor and willingness to take risks puts him more in the Tom Hanks camp than the Kevin Costner camp. And really, among the three, Cruise is the campiest.

Things are only going to get campier for the middle-aged golden boy when he shows up in the big-screen adaptation of the musical Rock of Ages, slated for release next year. I’ll watch that flick, and I’ll keep watching Cruise’s older movies. I suspect you will too—and if, one day, you happen to shed a tear while stoned and watching Tom Cruise over your makeout buddy’s shoulder, just remember: I told you so.

– Jay Gabler