1. Tom Cruise
Tom Cruise is a great actor - all other opinions are wrong - but that's not to say he couldn't try harder. It is impossible to escape the fact that Tom Cruise is Tom Cruise, and that significantly hinders his artistic output. He has been the biggest movie star in the world for twenty years, and it's so much easier to make another Mission Impossible movie than something like Magnolia. Cruise oozes charm like no other, and that has built him into the perfect arrogant, but eventually lovable hero. He's the only actor in the world you could envisage as Jerry Maguire, and he's been Mr. Charisma ever since he strutted about in Top Gun, but there's only so many times you can play the all-smiling hero before the effect begins to fade. Tom Cruise's movies never have to worry about having a successful box-office taking, because they tend to be commercial successes by default, and even when he did play relatively against type in Minority Report, the movie made a killing. In honesty, Minority Report is probably the worst example of Cruise playing against type: he plays a loner, hampered by addiction and riddled with self-loathing, but the film isn't as good as the performance and Cruise somehow went relatively unnoticed. Tom Cruise has given cinema so much, but he still has so much more to give. His constantly safe film selection has hindered the chance of doing another film like Collateral or Magnolia, which to this day remains his best performance. Paul Thomas Anderson always gets the best out of his actors, and the self-parody image of Cruise in Magnolia is just genius: Cruise shows an atypical vulnerability in the film, and that's the most frustrating aspect of it all: he's capable of so much more than Knight and Day, War of the Worlds and Valkyrie. Give me the Tom Cruise of Magnolia over the Tom Cruise of Mission Impossible any day. What do you think? Did we miss any? Share your thoughts below.