The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent has yet to receive its wide release, but it's already the best-reviewed film of Nicolas Cage's career.
At the time of this writing, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent has an impressive 100% on Rotten Tomatoes after 19 reviews. The movie screened at SXSW but is slated to hit theaters in April.
To put this in perspective, Cage's IMDb page shows a whopping 109 acting credits. Other high-rated films featuring Cage include Red Rock West (97%), Pig (96%), Moonstruck (94%) and Face/Off (92%), among others.
The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent stars Cage as a down-on-his-luck version of himself, who tries to land a part in a Quentin Tarantino movie. However, he winds up in the middle of a CIA operation to take down a billionaire drug lord in the process. The film is directed by Tom Gormican, and Cage is joined by the likes of Pedro Pascal, Demi Moore, Neil Patrick Harris and Tiffany Haddish.
Cage's acting career has seen some notoriously high highs and some even more notoriously low lows, and the actor recently explained how starring in the lamented Ghost Rider film helped convince him to part ways with mainstream Hollywood. "I started reading a lot of philosophy. I stopped being interested in going to awards shows and selling myself. I made a decision to pursue a life of contemplation," he said. "And simultaneously, I had movies like Sorcerer’s Apprentice and Ghost Rider and Drive Angry -- three in a row that didn’t work out. There was this marginalization that happened while I was also more interested in philosophy and meditating. So those two things happened at once."
Of course, Cage hasn't completely given up on mainstream pictures, as he voiced Spider-Man Noir in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Gug in The Croods 2: A New Age and he's playing Dracula in Universal Pictures' Renfield. Cage also fulfilled his lifelong dream of playing Superman by voicing the character in 2018's Teen Titans GO! To the Movies.The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent arrives in theaters April 22.