We live in an age of star quantity, when actors bulk up and become icons. Watching Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger from film to film, moviegoers follow their new, improved musculature like twists in a plot of enlightened egotism. They are comic-book heroes -- impossibly perfect, way too perfect -- in 3-D. They are their own apotheoses, their own parodies.
So it's a pleasure to find a movie star, like Tom Cruise, who radiates old- fashioned star quality. Onscreen Cruise looks life-size or a little less; his body is not so much beefy as blocky; when he laughs, his prominent nose...
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