The EGOT director and the President of Movies are both about to have a banner year. GQ columnist Frazier Tharpe runs back a 2000s Spielberg/Cruise classic that still doesn’t get enough credit.
By Frazier Tharpe
March 25, 2026
To be The Movie Guy in any given group chat is to open yourself up to the vaguest of texts from your civilian friends: “give me a good movie to watch.” No genre, no reference point, no specifier of any kind—just “a good movie”. There are always unspoken qualifiers that come with this plea, though: nothing “dated” or “too old,” nothing too weird or challenging, but also nothing that’s so populist that it’s syndicated on TNT every other weekend. So when my homie Eliot, one of the biggest “I need a movie” texters in my phone, threw the Bat Signal up the other day, I knew he wanted something conventionally entertaining and ideally 10 years younger than us. I offered Out of Sight with a hard sell (“Trust me”) but he didn’t bite—two years too old to make his cutoff (I’ll get him there one day). My second pitch: Minority Report. Swing, hit, and two hours later, the home-run reply all good movie-recommenders eagerly await: “that was great.”
Eleven year-old me could never fathom that we’d get to a point where Minority Report was somehow underrated—a mid-thought if not an afterthought in the larger conversations and reverence around both Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise’s filmographies. Because as far as I’m concerned, it’s top 10 in both. This was a formative filmgoing experience for me, a 2002 trip to my local AMC—Clifton Commons on New Jersey Route 3, what’s good—that I still remember to this day (and given my age, quite possibly my first Tom Cruise film, but surely not my first Spielberg.) It’s so special to me that I decided to join Eliot spiritually from the opposite coast and fire it up myself; I was relieved, if not surprised, to see that it still holds up as strongly as it does in my memory.
For anyone who’s still woefully uninitiated, Minority Report is Spielberg in full Thriller Mode, delivering a whodunit, a dystopian sci-fi drama, and a chase film all under the umbrella of a loose Philip K. Dick adaptation chronicling a police force that uses psychic “precogs” to identify and stop murderers before they actually commit the crime. Cruise is John Anderton, the initiative’s top cop and a true believer in the program—until, on the eve of a vote to take the operation national, the system spits his name out as the next person thinking of committing murder and he goes on the run to clear his name.
Minority Report is full of flourishes you don’t really see Spielberg flex too often elsewhere, and finds the director indulging what I’ve always pegged as two of his best instincts: his dark sense of humor, and his fascination with horror. The chases that show off his penchant for blocking, choreography and pacing are here; a cat-and-mouse sequence near the mid-point evokes some of the creature-feature stuff from, say, The Lost World. But you’ve never seen a Spielberg blockbuster quite like this one; this film is as haunting as it is fun, two tones that would be at odds with each other in lesser hands.
Spiels somehow gets away with staging Anderton bumbling down a hallway chasing two bouncing eyeballs like slapstick, while making the mysterious, genuinely creepy footage of the murder of a random woman that Anderton keeps revisiting feel—thanks also to some of composer John Williams’ most unsettling music to date—as if we’re watching a snuff film. It’s a movie that has a lot to say about capitalist consumerism, civil liberties, and fate versus free will—so much so that it might feel preachy if Spielberg ever actually paused to let Cruise catch a breath.
And as for Cruise, it’s strange to rewatch this after having seen so much of his work before and after and find him playing a fairly passive character in much of the first half, until it clicks that this is a deliberate choice. John Anderton is a broken man, eternally scarred by a tragic event that happened to his child, which characters only reference in passing. But after the midway point, when Anderton’s nightmares flash back to give us the full picture, his raw nerves come exposed and Cruise explodes, with actual outbursts and tender notes of vulnerability.
It all comes together in a scene in the third act between Anderton and the awkward oracle he’s enlisted to help clear his name; it’s essentially a crushing Samantha Morton monologue that Cruise is supposed to react to, but it only works because Cruise is practically convulsing with tears by the end of it. That’s the Oscar-reel moment—but even Cruise’s delivery of “I am going to kill this man,” as if he’s both realizing the idea in real-time and resigning himself to it, lives in my head rent free. (If you haven’t seen it, that isn’t really a spoiler—this is about as airtight a plot as you can get in a genre movie, the kind where even if you call a twist right before it happens, it feels just as satisfying to see it click into place.)
This year will mark a return to form for both Spielberg and Cruise. The former is leaving Sondheim musicals and eight-figure therapy sessions behind for an extraterrestrial epic in the mold of the awe-inspiring blockbusters that helped make summer-movie season a thing in the first place; the latter, after a decade-plus of fashioning himself as our Last Action Hero, is set to return to the type of riskier dramatic fare he indulged in during the ‘90s and aughts with Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger, a film that (probably) won’t feature any explosions.
These are significant moments to look forward to, but personally, I was way more amped to see Spielberg on hand to support Cruise’s lifetime achievement moment at the Academy’s Governors Awards last fall. Seeing them sitting together, twenty years after their last movie and a rumored falling out, the prospect of these two finding their way back to each other professionally was even more exciting than the films in their respective futures. One can only hope. And if it doesn’t happen, we’ll always have this classic.
