I think Cruise has been brilliant in a number of movies:
Eyes Wide Shut
The Last Samurai
Vanilla Sky
Magnolia
Top Gun (yes, it's a good movie and he's good in it)
Born on the Fourth of July
A Few Good Men
Minority Report
Tropic Thunder
Edge of Tomorrow
I think Cruise is fashionable to bash on and a weird cultural zeitgeist of hating on him has found solid footing in rationalization. It's the same for DiCaprio, who is one of the finest actors of our times but he gets shit on for no good reason.
Cruise not being to someone's liking, I can understand. I've heard people say Sonequa Martin-Green is a good actress but I fucking hate her method, her mannerisms, her glaring and the way her head shakes when she's emoting distress and sorrow.
At any rate...
Alpha
It's really good but it takes a while to get going. The first 30-45 minutes is all world building and set up to establish the long journey ahead of Keda (the protagonist) to get back home. It's very well filmed and the director, Albert Hughes, understands the importance of showing the unsullied, undeveloped and uncultivated land as equal parts vast, beautiful and mortally dangerous. Although I'm sure many liberties were taken with its prehistorical interpretation of humanity's struggle, the film effectively conveys their tenuous grip on life, forced to rely on their ingenuity to make up for their physical frailty as they were.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Keda's budding relationship with the wolf he names Alpha, which is the entire point of the film and when things really start to get interesting. It's really a movie about discovery and reinventing one's self in order to survive and prosper, whether you be a human being or a canine mammal. The world takes away, but it also meets you half way. Oddly enough, the movie almost unintentionally carries a message of tolerance and acceptance of others, a natural byproduct of its events. This, I find, is the only way for such stories to be told without feeling like a lecture. The performances aren't anything to write home about except for Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, who plays Keda's (played with serviceable chops by Cody Smit-McPhee) father, Tau. For what little time he has on the screen, he's incredibly emotive and sympathetic.
If you choose to see it, iMax is the best way; this movie was meant to be experienced in this fashion.
Rating: 4/5