Collider has ranked the four greatest Val Kilmer movies that define his career, putting his performances back in the spotlight at a moment when his work still feels unusually present. The ranking leans on the same thing that made him hard to ignore on screen: Val Kilmer had a way of making viewers wait for his next look, next line, or next little shift in temperature.
That is part of why younger viewers found an emotional reintroduction to him through Top Gun: Maverick. The earlier Top Gun made Kilmer’s Tom “Iceman” Kazansky one of the key pressures on Tom Cruise’s Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, and the ranking treats that role as one of the defining turns of his career.
In Top Gun, Iceman is arrogant, but he is also correct more often than Maverick wants to admit. He flies clean, thinks clearly, trusts discipline, and sees that Maverick’s recklessness could get someone killed. Kilmer gives him something rarer than a smug rival: a standard. He turns Iceman into a man with actual judgment, not a cardboard obstacle for the hero to knock over.
The same instinct shows up in The Doors, where Oliver Stone’s film could have slipped into a messy greatest-hits pageant if Jim Morrison had felt like an impersonation. Instead, Kilmer plays Morrison with enough force that the part never shrinks into imitation. He reportedly did his own singing in many parts of the film, and the concert scenes carry sweat and threat in them, as if the performance might crack open at any moment.
That range is why the ranking matters beyond fandom. It puts Top Gun and The Doors side by side with Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, which the piece singles out as the Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. The film is about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality, a reminder that Kilmer’s career can be measured not only by star turns but by the kinds of worlds those turns helped hold together.
The friction in Kilmer’s screen image is what makes the list land. He could play dangerous without turning the word into a pose, and he could make a scene feel lived in even when the role was built to oppose someone else. The open question is not whether his career has defining films; it is which one the ranking left out when it stopped at four.
