Nicolas Cage is a singular actor with a deep understanding of his craft and its history. He’s also made some pretty wild movies. Here are the best ones.

There never has been a movie star quite like Nicolas Cage. While obviously handsome and gifted with backlogs of charisma, beneath the surface there lies an unmistakable hunger, a sense of searching, and what some might even call a mania to take a role to its fullest extreme. Even when Cage is taking the “paycheck” parts, be it in glossy ‘90s Hollywood star vehicles or some of his lesser 2010s straight-to-digital efforts, the actor’s tangible desire to push boundaries and experiment is nothing short of riveting.

In a Reddit AMA, Cage once said the following about his craft: “I think many of the choices I’ve made have been inspired by film stars from the silent era, as well as cultural expression of performance like Kabuki and some of the Golden Age actors like [James] Cagney, so I don’t know how to say I’ve done something new because those elements are always on my mind.”

That sense of history, and desire to dabble in various styles of performance from that of the German Expressionists to a sometimes heightened, classical approach wherein Cage would raise his voice at the most counterintuitive of times, has created strange, disarming, and occasionally unforgettable performances. And the best movies he’s appeared in embrace that singularity as opposed to run from it. Below is in our estimation are those films.

The solitary time Cage partnered with director Ridley Scott did not make a big splash at the box office and has gone largely overlooked in the 20 years since it’s a release. That’s too bad since Cage’s maximalist instincts toward characterization nicely fill out Scott’s exacting, albeit sometimes cold, compositions. Together they built a quirky and irresistible energy in Matchstick Men, a con man movie where the biggest confidence game played by Cage’s Roy Waller is to pretend in public that he doesn’t have OCD.