Nicolas Cage's 13 Favorite Movies Of All Time Include Disney, Kung Fu, Oscar Winners & More

Nicolas Cage is one of our most impressive living actors, and a big part of that is because of his intense love of cinema. He's a true student of the craft, with an obsession for older films that has led him to an extensive knowledge of all the medium has to offer. Cage's passion for his projects has led to him becoming the subject of many memes, mostly using his most over-the-top performances, but the man really knows his stuff. So, when Rotten Tomatoes asked Cage for his five favorite films of all time, he came a little over-prepared, offering his top 13 favorite films instead. He said that he simply couldn't narrow it down to five because "there's different movies for different reasons in different lifetimes," which is the most Nicolas Cage thing he could have said.

The actor often looks back to older cinema for inspiration and compares his acting philosophy to "mixed martial arts," as he draws from different acting styles and different eras of Hollywood to help inform each performance. Each of the 13 films he named had some impact on him, and there are a few that even directly inspired his work, but it's an incredibly eclectic list.

Cage's list doesn't include any films from after 1979, but he also noted that most of the ones he picked were formative for him in some way, and many were among his earliest movie-going experiences. One of those early movies was "Citizen Kane," which he said his father took him to see when he was eight years old or so, and it left a serious impression on his young mind. He also credits "The Wizard of Oz" and Disney's 1940 animated "Pinocchio" with helping him first really discover the magic of movies, as they were able to bring fantastical worlds to life on the big screen. Other early, fantastical entries included the 1963 comedy "The Nutty Professor," the 1966 Japanese sci-fi horror kaiju film "War of the Gargantuas," the 1965 Federico Fellini comedic fantasy "Juliet of the Spirits," and the 1946 Jean Cocteau adaptation of "Beauty and the Beast." On the more serious side of these early films, he named Elia Kazan's adaptation of John Steinbeck's "East of Eden" and François Truffaut's drama about a rebellious youth, "The 400 Blows." 

One film that was no surprise to see on Cage's list was "Once Upon a Time in the West," the Sergio Leone Western that he has said more than once is among his favorite films. In fact, Cage told /Film in 2023 that Charles Bronson's performance as Harmonica is "arguably one of my top five favorite performances ever," so the classic spaghetti Western made an impact on the actor in more ways than one. What's really funny, though, is how much one Stanley Kubrick classic meant to Cage as a teenager.

Among Cage's favorites was Kubrick's controversial 1971 movie "A Clockwork Orange," based on the Anthony Burgess novel of the same name, which he said he saw as a teenager. Apparently he liked it so much that he imitated the unusual style of the movie's protagonist, the violent criminal Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell). Unfortunately, his dad wasn't as much of a fan:

"'A Clockwork Orange,' of course, was like the ultimate film for an adolescent to see. I watched [Malcolm McDowell's] performance in that, and it had such an impact on me that I would glue an eyelash on my eye and then go to school with one eyelash. My father really lost his patience with that one. He said, 'You gotta take that eyelash off. You're not going to school like that.'"

A young Cage also idolized Bruce Lee, and he named the 1973 kung fu classic "Enter the Dragon" among his favorite films because "it was like watching a superhero come to life." He credits Lee for inspiring some of his acting decisions in his action work, particularly "Face/Off" and "Mandy," but the performance that perhaps impacted him the most was Dennis Hopper in "Apocalypse Now." Cage got to see the film with the cast because his uncle Francis Ford Coppola directed it, and he was "blown away" by the film and especially Hopper's "off the rails" performance. He said that watching Hopper impacted him because it helped him scale his own performances, and it's pretty wild to think that Nicolas Cage's scale of acting intensity is based upon Dennis freaking Hopper. They're two of cinema's greatest performers, especially when it comes to playing over-the-top characters, so that also kind of rules. Cage has a lot of incredible influences in his favorite film list, but his connection to Hopper is probably the most fascinating.