'Here' Is Tom Hanks's Worst Movie
Tom Hanks made his big-screen debut in an unremarkable 1980 slasher cheapie called He Knows You’re Alone. And based on that inauspicious start, it’s safe to say that no one could have predicted that he would go on to become a two-time Best Actor Oscar-winner and the most beloved movie star on the planet. Hanks’s career is a long and winding one, full of unpredictable detours, bold choices, and indelible performances. He’s more than earned his place on everyone’s movie Mount Rushmore.
But with so many films on his resume, we wanted to know how they stacked up against one another. What was his peak decade? Who were the directors who brought out the very best in him? What were his most iconic moments in front of the camera? Since we love a mammoth undertaking as much as the next guy, we went back and rewatched—or, in a few cases, watched for the first time—all 54 of Hanks’ live-action films (we omitted his animated movies such as The Polar Express and the Toy Story instalments). With only a handful of exceptions, our deep dive into his filmography turned out to be time well spent. Now it’s your turn. See if you agree with our ultimate ranking of Hanks’ movies, from worst to best...
Here (2024)
It gives me no joy to say this, but Hanks’ latest reunion with Forrest Gump director Robert Zemeckis and costar Robin Wright is a colossal folly. Zemeckis has been dogpiled on before for using new technology before the kinks are worked out (see: the creepy uncanny valley of The Polar Express), so you’d think he would have learned his lesson. Nope. Hanks and Wright are both run through the same de-aging software that Martin Scorsese used in The Irishman, with far worse results. As for the overly gimmicky story, it chronicles the emotional ups and downs of several families who have all lived at the same address over the years, all from the same sitcom POV in the living room. Did I say years? I meant millennia. There’s an unintentionally hilarious Tree of Life interlude where dinosaurs run around on the same patch of land where Hanks and Wright will raise a family and grow old together. It’s the sort of sequence the Razzies were created for. And I suspect Here will clean up with that awards body. After all, there’s a fine line between artistically daring and just plain foolish. This disaster falls on the wrong side of that line.
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Pinocchio (2022)
We can debate whether the world really needed another version of Pinocchio, but there’s no arguing that Disney and director Robert Zemeckis could’ve done a hell of a lot better than this. The digital effects render every character into a creepy, dead-eyed visitor an uncanny valley far, far away. Hanks and Zemeckis’ reunion from The Polar Express is a dull and soulless exercise in nostalgia. The good news is that as the lonely old toy maker Geppetto, Hanks gets to punch out and disappear for long chunks of the film’s running time. Lucky him.
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Inferno (2016)
Tom Cruise has Mission: Impossible, Harrison Ford has Indiana Jones, and half of Hollywood’s leading men cash regular paychecks from Marvel. So why can’t a star of Hanks’s magnitude come up with a better franchise to guide than Dan Brown’s tepid Da Vinci-verse? (Yes, I know he also has the Toy Story movies, but for the sake of this list we’re only covering Hanks’s live-action films.) Watching the actor go through the motions as he runs through Florence trying to stop a madman from unleashing—checks notes…really, a computer virus?!—you not only get the sense that he deserves better, but that he knows he deserves better. He ain’t wrong.
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Ithaca (2015)
Look, I’m sure there were a ton of people praying for Hanks to reunite with Meg Ryan again. But I don’t think this sappy WWII melodrama is what they had in mind. Their fourth movie together (which Ryan also directed) is a slow and clunky series of missed opportunities as a sullen Hanks pops up in what amounts to an extended cameo playing Ryan’s plot device dead husband. Think of Ithaca as Ghost minus the pottery wheel.
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He Knows You’re Alone (1980)
Released in the wake of Halloween, when there seemed to be a fresh slasher flick every weekend, Hanks’s big-screen debut is whatever the opposite of auspicious is. Watching it now, you’d never peg the young actor with the mop of curls (partially hidden by a proto-hipster teenie-weenie beanie) as a future back-to-back Oscar winner. A seat filler sounds more likely. Shot in exotic Staten Island over 15 freezing days, He Knows You’re Alone was released two months before Hanks would get his big break on the sitcom Bosom Buddies. This dull slasher flick is what paying your dues looks like.
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The Man With One Red Shoe (1985)
To be clear: When people say that they wish that Hollywood would go back to making movies like they used to, this is not what they mean. A Hitchcock-played-for-laughs, wrong-man thriller in which Dabney Coleman (who single-handedly saved many bad movies during his lifetime) mistakes a mild-mannered classical musician (Hanks) for a cunning international spy. I’ll be honest, this is the longest 93 minutes I’ve experienced in a long time. And if you thought Hooch was Hanks’s least talented (and jowliest) costar, I submit Jim Belushi.
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Every Time We Say Goodbye (1986)
In the mid-‘80s, Hollywood was still having a hell of a time trying to figure out what lane Hanks belonged in. Was he a leading man or just the comic-relief second or third banana? Did he belong in low-brow laughers or high-brow dramas? Even he didn’t seem sure. Which helps to explain why the actor never looks even remotely comfortable in this schmaltzy WWII-era Casablanca wannabe set in Jerusalem.
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The Ladykillers (2004)
I’ll be honest: The Ladykillers is a tough one to rank. It’s a remake of a deliciously cruel Alec Guinness comedy from the ‘50s, but it’s probably also the least funny comedy that the Coen brothers ever made. With a frisky twinkle in his eye and an over-the-top Foghorn Leghorn accent, Hanks looks like he’s having a blast. And he probably is. But nothing about this movie works. At all. It’s like watching someone perform a stand-up routine at a wake.
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The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990)
As chronicled in Julie Salamon’s shiv-wielding, diaristic takedown, The Devil’s Candy, Brian De Palma’s take on Tom Wolfe’s zeitgeisty ‘80s bestseller was an endless series of bad decisions and confounding casting choices. Exhibit A: tapping Hanks to play the Wall Street Master of the Universe and embodiment of ‘80s cock-swinging greed, Sherman McCoy. Hanks’s appeal has always been his salt-of-the-earth decency, not his reptilian misanthropy, so everything about his casting feels off. Bonfire was doomed before the director even called "Action!"
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Larry Crowne (2011)
For a minute there, after the delightful bubblegum pop of That Thing You Do!, it actually looked like Hanks might join the ranks of fellow stars-turned-directors Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, and Kevin Costner. At least until his sophomore outing behind the camera, Larry Crowne. Piggybacking on the misery hangover sparked by the 2008 financial collapse, Hanks plays a regular guy who gets pink-slipped from his job and tries to rebuild a simpler life, including a romance with Julia Roberts (how relatable!). Hanks’s saccharine long-distance dedication to struggling, everyday Americans is not only hopelessly out of touch, it’s as thin as a communion wafer.
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Angels & Demons (2009)
Ugh, more Robert Langdon/Da Vinci Code sound-and-fury nonsense. This time around, the Vatican enlists the floppy-haired Professor Hanks to get to the bottom of some nefarious Illuminati shenanigans. Hanks is in full Basil Exposition mode here, delivering a nonstop barrage of lines that are absolute howlers. Still, if watching cuckoo clergy types go rogue is your thing, by all means have at it. You can take solace in the fact that it’s slightly better than Inferno.
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Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011)
It feels a little churlish to dogpile on a movie about a kid (Thomas Horne) who loses his father (Hanks) in 9/11 and tries to keep his memory alive by solving a mystery involving a key without a lock. But as well-intentioned as Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is, it’s just not very good. Dripping with sappy, for-your-consideration Hallmark-card self-importance, Stephen Daldry’s adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s bestselling novel is extremely cloying and incredibly manipulative. It’s also so determined to make you cry that it feels like it’s prying open your tear ducts with a crowbar.
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The Money Pit (1986)
After countless late-night viewings on HBO in the ‘80s, this Tom Hanks-Shelley Long screwball comedy about a pair of new homeowners at the mercy of a fixer-upper country house that refuses to be fixed up lives rent-free in my head. I’d love to figure out how to serve it with an eviction notice. While Hanks was undoubtedly a master of exasperated physical comedy during this chapter of his career (see the infinitely better Splash), the film’s gags have not aged very well. I don’t think I can do any better than Roger Ebert’s pan of this one, especially when he called it “a movie that contains one funny scene and 91 minutes of running time to kill.”
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Finch (2021)
With an admittedly small sample size, it seems like Hanks hasn’t quite figured out how he wants to navigate 2020s yet. I think we’d all like to see a star of his wattage carefully select one great film a year and knock it over the fence. But he’s been making some puzzling choices, like this post-apocalyptic trifle about a lonely survivor, his dog, and his annoying robot. There’s a version of this Apple TV+ movie that unspools like The Road-meets-Cast Away. But this ain’t that. Rather, this is a disappointingly, weirdly inert drama that aims to peddle uplift but just spins its sentimental wheels.
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The Great Buck Howard (2008)
Before sitting down to rewatch the Hanks filmography and tackle this list, I wouldn’t have guessed that we’d still be hip-deep in forgettable movies at No. 40. The actor’s highs are really high, but there are more lows than I remembered. In this harmless Broadway Danny Rose-esque trifle about a past-his-prime mentalist, John Malkovich and Colin Hanks get the bulk of the movie’s screen time. Hanks Sr. briefly swings by to lend a dose of his signature charisma and briefly sparks the film to life, but when he disappears so does any reason to keep on watching.
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A Man Called Otto (2022)
Some more aggressively mediocre 2020s amnesia-bait from Hanks (see The Great Buck Howard). Coming out of the pandemic, I don’t think anyone was especially psyched to see Hanks in cynical curmudgeon mode. But hey, you play with the cards you’re dealt. A remake of a 2015 Swedish import about a redeemable aging crank, this feels like some producer came in and pitched “a blander version of Jack Nicholson’s As Good as It Gets.” On those terms (and those terms only), it’s a resounding success.
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Dragnet (1987)
I must admit, I enjoyed this a lot more on my recent viewing than when it originally hit theaters. Back then, Hollywood was awash in Boomer TV adaptations and there was something that still felt cynical about Nick at Nite IP mining. Now, everything is mined IP, so it feels less objectionable. (How’s that for depressing logic?) Dan Aykroyd’s rat-a-tat riff on just-the-facts, deadpan detective Joe Friday works. And Hanks, as his sarcastic partner in investigating an LA pagan cult, adds comic crackle. It may only be a rung or two above the Police Academy movies, but sometimes just a rung or two makes all the difference.
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The ‘Burbs (1989)
There’s some strange shit afoot in suburbia, and Hanks heads up a pack of nosy neighbors trying to get to the bottom of it all. Look, you’re not going to get me to say anything bad about director Joe Dante, even if this broad satire about picket-fence propriety isn’t exactly tops on his highlight reel. There’s plenty here to keep you mildly entertained, including an only-in-the-‘80s Mad Libs supporting cast featuring Carrie Fisher, Bruce Dern, Corey Feldman, Rick Ducommun, and Henry Gibson.
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Turner & Hooch (1989)
I’m sure some ‘80s kids will think that this one should be ten slots higher and some will think that it should be ten slots lower, but No. 35 feels about right to me. In the glorious year of our lord, 1989, Hollywood coughed up two competing cop-partners-with-dog flicks. There was Jim Belushi’s K-9 (yup, him again) and this buddy comedy pairing Hanks with a slobbery French mastiff (real name: Beasley). Of the pair, this one remains the pick of the litter, thanks to Hanks’ wonderfully apoplectic and put-upon reaction shots. Is it dumb? Is the ending a downer? Yup. But if it comes on TV on a rainy Sunday afternoon, I’m putting down the remote until further notice.
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Nothing in Common (1986)
I’m not sure this one works entirely, but it is interesting. Hanks plays a caffeinated, high-powered ad exec who eventually comes to realise that he needs to connect with his ailing, cranky dad (Jackie Gleason) before it’s too late. As directed by the ever-schmaltzy Garry Marshall, the estranged father-and-son stuff is treacly and laid on with a trowel. It feels like the movie version of a Cat Stevens ballad. But at the time, it foreshadowed Hanks’ (mostly) seamless transition from comedy to drama.
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Punchline (1988)
The stand-up boom of the ‘80s got a weird big-screen close-up with this flick about a rising comic (Hanks) who helps a wannabe comedian (Mama Gump, Sally Field) break into the profession only to end up competing against her for a coveted TV spot. Neither as dark nor as desperate as The King of Comedy, this still has hints of the sort of spiky humor that makes people who tell jokes for a living such prickly, latently hostile characters. I’m not sure that I really agree with the casting of Field here (or the upbeat ending provided by the about-face of her disagreeable husband, John Goodman), but Hanks is solid. Still, Punchline remains a film about comedy that isn’t remotely funny.
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The Da Vinci Code (2006)
They say that the audience is never wrong. But how else to explain The Da Vinci Code performing solidly enough at the box office to justify a pair of sequels (come on, people!)? I’m a sucker for a good Illuminati scavenger hunt (if you haven’t read Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, do yourself a favour!), but this is a dumbed-down affair with high-brow aspirations. Hanks kicks off his Robert Langdon symbology cycle by cracking a ludicrous conspiracy like a bookish Indiana Jones with bad hair. And while there are certainly some thrills to be had along the way (unless, of course, the Vatican signs your paycheck), this is essentially a string of cryptic red herrings and preposterously convenient coincidences. Still, it’s the best of the lot.
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A Hologram for the King (2016)
This minor-key existential travelogue was adapted from another seemingly unadaptable Dave Eggers novel (see The Circle at No. 54…or, better yet, don’t). Hanks plays an American business consultant going through a mid-life crisis who travels to Saudi Arabia to pitch some new tech gizmo to the country’s elusive monarch. Directed by Tom Tykwer, the film possesses a tantalisingly absurd Waiting for Godot-in-the-Middle East vibe that works a lot better on screen than it did on the page. The main reason is because Hanks is able to add some of his Hanksian levity to an otherwise rambling, downbeat premise. His performance alone makes the movie worth checking out.
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Cloud Atlas (2012)
Say this much for the Wachowskis’ time-jumping sci-fi fantasia: it’s…ambitious. Hanks steps out of his movie-star comfort zone to play six different characters—he’s like a 21st century Peter Sellers! —only one whom, thankfully, speaks with a Cockney accent. There’s a long Hollywood tradition of A-list stars mustering enough courage to step out on the experimental high wire, and Hanks should be applauded for doing so without a net here. Adapted from David Mitchell’s novel of Big Ideas, Cloud Atlas has its passionate defenders. And even though I’m not one of them, it’s definitely a big swing.
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You’ve Got Mail (1998)
Reunited and it feels so…meh. Five years after Sleepless in Seattle, Hanks, Meg Ryan, and director Nora Ephron gamely attempt to recapture the earlier film’s lightning-in-a-bottle rom-com magic. The instinct was right, but the execution? Not so much. Hanks plays the CEO of a monolithic bookstore chain and Ryan is the quirky indie bookseller he’s about to put out of business. But hey, it’s the movies, so opposites must attract before the end credits roll. The set-up, of course, is cribbed from 1940’s The Shop Around the Corner and just about everything here feels equally derivative.
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The Terminal (2004)
Hanks and Steven Spielberg have made some great movies together. But this is the least of them. Still, if you’re looking for something light and whimsical, you could do a lot worse. Hanks plays an Eastern European tourist (with more than a pinch of Yakov Smirnoff) who gets stuck in a bureaucratic holding pattern at JFK Airport and ends up squatting there for an entire year. That’s a lot of Wetzel’s Pretzels! The Terminal is as well-made as you’d expect from a director of Spielberg’s caliber, but don’t go in expecting a story that will stick to your ribs.
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Elvis (2022)
I’ll confess that I’m not much of a Baz Luhrmann fan, but I admired the performances that the all-flash director was able to get out of Austin Butler as the King and Hanks as the Colonel. A calculating manipulator who helped shape Presley into one of the biggest pop-culture icons of the 20th century, Colonel Tom Parker was a Barnum-esque Svengali—and Hanks shoots the works (padding, prosthetics, that combover) trying to divine what made him tick. I’m not sure that Parker was as complex (or as interesting, frankly) as Hanks portrays him in Elvis, but it certainly makes this busy biopic more enjoyable.
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Volunteers (1985)
We’re officially halfway through the Hanks oeuvre. So, it seems like a good time to acknowledge this under appreciated, amiable mess of a comedy about a lock-jawed Yalie playboy who mistakenly joins the Peace Corps and wakes up in the jungles of Thailand alongside a pair of gung-ho, JFK-era go-getters (future wife Rita Wilson and John Candy as “Tom Tuttle from Tacoma, Washington”). A movie like Volunteers is precisely why lists like this are tough. No, I’m not going to try to convince you that this is a “better” movie than Spielberg’s The Terminal, but if I had to choose one of them to throw on right now, it’s not even a contest. This would be my choice, hands down.
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Bachelor Party (1984)
Is this ranked too generously? Probably. But I honestly believe that this is Hanks’s funniest performance. This naughty, proto-Hangover boys-will-be-boys comedy features the actor during a fascinating chapter of his career—a time when he could have steered things in one of two directions: in a radical, screeching U-turn into serious dramatic roles or continuing along this silly, R-rated path as a charismatic smartass sticking it to a bunch of snobs. The Oscars on his mantle are all the proof you need that he chose the correct route, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss the Hanks of Bachelor Party a little. Man, is he loooooose in this thing.
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That Thing You Do! (1996)
In which we are introduced to Hanks, the auteur. The actor’s directorial debut is a bubblegum-sweet nostalgia trip about a small-town, one-hit-wonder band navigating its first brush with pop stardom. That Thing You Do! has a ton of heart. Maybe too much at times. But Hanks, who also plays the band’s promoter, shows himself to be a canny cinematic manipulator, repeating the film’s catchy title song (written by Fountains of Wayne’s late-great Adam Schlesinger) so many times that it ends up putting down roots in your mind. Bonus points to Hanks for casting his Bosom Buddies costar, Peter Scolari.
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The Green Mile (1999)
As far as Frank Darabont-directed prison movies written by Stephen King go, this is easily the second best. Death row magical realism gives way to mawkish, three-hankie sentimentality. The predictably excellent Hanks brings his signature Everyman decency to the role of a maximum-security screw, Paul Edgecomb. But with its languorous 189-minute runtime, sitting through The Green Mile can a bit like serving your a life sentence.
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Asteroid City (2023)
A year later, Asteroid City feels like minor Wes Anderson. But Hanks proves that he belongs in the auteur’s overly art-directed diorama universe as Stanley Zak, the father-in-law of a grieving Jason Schwartzman. The role was reportedly intended for Bill Murray, but Hanks gives it his own top spin. It may be minor Anderson, but it’s in no way a minor performance.
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News of the World (2020)
Apart from Toy Story’s Woody, this is Hanks’ one and only performance in a Western. And despite News of the World’s thematic similarities with two classics of the genre, True Grit and The Searchers, Paul Greengrass’s film about a Civil War veteran who escorts a kidnapped 10-year-old girl (Helena Zengel) back home through treacherous Texas terrain never really resonated with audiences. That’s a shame. While hardly a masterpiece, News of the World is definitely well worth checking out, mainly for Hanks’s shattered, world-weary turn. In fact, this is probably the closest he’s come to revisiting his Captain Miller character in Saving Private Ryan.
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Road to Perdition (2002)
I always wish that I liked this movie more. There’s something about Hanks’s icy, emotional distance in the film and Sam Mendes’s suffocatingly somber colour palate that alienates me. It’s like Miller’s Crossing on sedatives. And yet, I recognise that it’s a “good” movie. Paul Newman gives a cheeky, lion-in-winter performance as a ruthless mobster (and Hanks’ employer) while Daniel Craig puts himself on the Hollywood map as his loose-cannon son. A picture that’s easier to admire from a distance than lose yourself in.
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Sully (2016)
If ever a movie was made to star Tom Hanks, it’s Clint Eastwood’s inspiring biopic of “Miracle on the Hudson” pilot, Chesley Sullenberger. Decency, competence, humility, composure, these are adjectives that fit the real-life character and the actor playing him.
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Greyhound (2020)
Apple TV+ probably should have just called this one Untitled Dad Movie. After all, it combines two of that demo’s most beloved ingredients: Hanks and WWII. Hanks wrote this one (or rather adapted it from a book by C.S. Forester) and it’s a rousingly square take on The Battle of the Atlantic with the star as a naval commander leading a convoy being pursued by a wolf pack of Nazi U-boats. Hanks’ attention to military detail is fetishistically precise if that’s your bag. There’s a reason why he is Hollywood’s greatest armchair historian.
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Saving Mr. Banks (2013)
Not a sequel to Saving Private Ryan, this disarmingly affecting psychobiography of P.L. Travers —the woman who wrote Mary Poppins—is a goddamn delight. Emma Thompson is exquisite as Travers and Hanks plays her long-spurned Hollywood suitor, Walt Disney, with a frisky twinkle in his eye that belies his folksy, backslapping charm.
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Philadelphia (1993)
Hanks won his first acting Oscar for this Jonathan Demme drama about a discrimination case involving a lawyer with AIDS (Hanks) and his homophobic attorney (Denzel Washington). It’s amazing that as late as 1993 this was still considered a ground-breaking movie exploring a hot-button topic. Americans came a long way as a result of Philadelphia, which can’t—and shouldn’t—be dismissed. And I think, in large part, that has to do with casting a performer as inherently likeable as Hanks as Andrew Beckett. Narratively, the deck is stacked mightily in favour of Beckett, but when it comes to changing people’s deepest prejudices, sometimes nuance has to take a backseat. Note: Bonus points have been added for the Springsteen theme song.
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Joe Versus the Volcano (1990)
If you think this one is way too high, good. I have your attention. Now if I can get just five more people to watch this under appreciated gem, then I will have done my work here. What can I say about Joe Versus the Volcano? It’s quite possibly Meg Ryan’s finest work (in multiple roles, no less). The plot is absolutely bonkers (a dying Hanks agrees to jump in a volcano to give his banal life meaning). It has a shopping-spree montage that makes Julia Roberts’s in Pretty Woman look lame. Dan Hedaya, Lloyd Bridges, and Ossie Davis deliver some of the best and most committed character-actor work you’ll ever see. And, oh yeah, Abe Vigoda plays the orange soda-drinking chief of a Pacific Island tribe called the Waponis! Remember, I just need five of you.
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A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019)
Honestly, who else are you going to cast as Mr. Rogers? This is pretty much as bespoke of an assignment as Hanks has ever gotten—or will ever get…and he hits the fucking cover off the ball.
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Sleepless in Seattle (1993)
Tom Hanks has always been a “nice guy.” Nothing wrong with that, but it can be a little limiting as an actor. When faced with a dilemma like this, you can react in one of two ways. Fight against it by playing some viciously cruel figure from history like Ivan the Terrible or Ted Bundy, or lean into it as Hanks does here. Nora Ephron’s decade-defining rom-com blockbuster about a widower who shares his lonelyheart tale on a radio call-in show only to have it act like catnip on Meg Ryan is an absolute charmer. You will laugh, you will definitely cry, and even the most cynical will be won over. Resistance is futile.
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Catch Me If You Can (2002)
Steven Spielberg reteams with his Saving Private Ryan leading man for a fizzy, ring-a-ding-ding caper starring Leonardo DiCaprio as a baby-faced counterfeiter and con man. Hanks, as the obsessed FBI agent who is constantly getting the slip, is in dogged supporting character mode here, but he gives the film stakes, preventing it from just being one long giddy crime spree. Hanks grounds what is an otherwise larky story and turns it into a terrifically acted cat-and-mouse game. This was Spielberg’s breeziest film in a long time.
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Charlie Wilson’s War (2007)
The other Tom Hanks movie with a character named Wilson. Director Mike Nichols really strains and struggles to nail the right tone in this true-life satire about a Texas playboy-congressman who gets swept up in the murky grey zone of Middle Eastern geopolitics, but Hanks knows exactly what he’s doing. You can see his eyes sparkle from the idea of playing such a lovable and unrepentant rogue. That said, the late, great Philip Seymour Hoffman steals the damn movie out from under everyone whenever he’s on camera.
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The Post (2017)
I suspect that journalists probably swooned for this one a lot more than the non-ink-stained general public, but this is a very, very good dramatic account of the Pentagon Papers scandal. As Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, Hanks picks up an intimidating gauntlet thrown down by Jason Robards, whose turn as Bradlee in All the President’s Men snagged him an Oscar. But Hanks more than rises to the challenge, infusing the newspaperman with his own bedrock integrity and sincerity while piling on a couple of additional layers: righteous First Amendment crusader and puckish merry prankster spoiling to speak truth to power. Welcome to the Top 10.
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A League of Their Own (1992)
Everyone knows Hanks’s “There’s no crying in baseball” scene by heart. But his character, Rockford Peaches coach Jimmy Dugan, is so much more than just one indelible line delivered through a splitting hangover. Because underneath his hard, grizzled, alcoholic shell there’s a soft, chewy centre. Hanks has been walking this bittersweet tightrope like one of the Flying Wallendas for four decades now. A League of Their Own has more than its fair share of sports movie clichés, but Hanks’ divinely grumpy performance is in a league of its own.
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Cast Away (2000)
I remember interviewing Hanks outside of London for a magazine profile when this movie came out. And he wanted to talk about his dramatic weight loss for the role about as much as he wanted to have an appendectomy. Still, it’s impossible to talk about Cast Away without mentioning how immersively the actor buried himself in the part of a plane crash survivor wasting away on a desert island with only a volleyball for company. This is a bravura one-man show. Yes, the ending is too corny by considering all that’s led up to it, but this should have given Hanks Oscar No. 3.
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Bridge of Spies (2015)
Hanks and Spielberg again. And further proof that this combo worked like peas and carrots (sorry, that’s from the next film on the list). A gripping Cold War prestige picture about a man of decency in way over his head. Hanks is a lawyer who takes on the case of an accused Russian spy (Mark Rylance). Whether Rylance is or isn’t is beside the point. The real message of the film is standing up for what’s right no matter the pressure that comes with it—a role that Hanks was born to play. Like The Post and Munich, this has Spielberg grappling with the intrigues of recent history and making the tale feel smart and urgent. Anchoring it all is Hanks, who plays his true-believer character, Jim Donovan, in the same key that Kevin Costner played JFK’s Jim Garrison (minus the grandstanding). He’s a man of conscience and moral clarity and the type of person we’d all like to be if we just had the guts.
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Forrest Gump (1994)
Would I have liked to see Pulp Fiction win the Oscar for Best Picture? Sure. But that binary, revisionist either-or game fails to take into account just how entertaining Forrest Gump is. It may not be a popular opinion, but Robert Zemeckis’ contemporary riff on Candide is a miracle of down-the-middle, mainstream studio filmmaking (which makes it all too easy to hate on). Movies this unapologetically sincere can be a tough sell, but with Hanks as the salesman, it soars. To quote Huey Lewis, sometimes it’s hip to be square.
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Splash (1983)
More than any other entry on Hanks’s lengthy résumé, Ron Howard's fish-out-of-water fairy tale about a guy who falls in love with a mermaid (Daryl Hannah) was the movie that showed the world that there was a lot more going on with the guy who dressed up like a woman on Bosom Buddies. There was heart, humour, and real pathos. But the real reason to go back and rewatch Splash tonight is the comic interplay between Hanks and his on-screen brother, John Candy. The two actors would reteam a couple years later in Volunteers (see No. 26), but watching them spark off one another here you can’t help but wish they’d made a dozen more movies together.
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Big (1988)
If the long arc of Hanks’s Hollywood career was a movie, Big would mark the triumphant finale of Act I. After all, if Splash hinted at the promise of an actor with greatness inside him waiting to be set free, Penny Marshall’s body-swap comedy showed Hanks making good on that promise. Here, he makes the leap from manic, quick-witted physical comedian to bona fide, thousand-watt movie star. A kid wishes on a vintage fortune-telling machine to be big. The next day, he wakes up in the body of Hanks. Normally, at this point, uninspired comic mayhem would ensue. But what starts off as a silly sitcom premise soon takes on real emotional depth and power thanks to Hanks’s inventive and unexpected performance. You never stop seeing he kid trapped inside of him. Comedy, drama, wish-fulfillment fantasy, existential nightmare, Big is one of the great movies of the ‘80s.
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Apollo 13 (1995)
“Houston, we have a problem.” Hanks’ obsession with the Greatest Generation first led him to WWII and Saving Private Ryan (hold on, we’ll get there!), and then the Golden Age of NASA with this Ron Howard true-life tick-tock procedural about three astronauts (played by Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon, and Hanks) reverse-engineering a life-threatening malfunction 200,000 miles from home. As flight leader Jim Lovell, Hanks gives an exceptionally unshowy performance, focusing instead on problem-solving, cool under pressure, and quiet heroism. We tend to hand out acting superlatives for flashy Method transformations. But in Apollo 13, Hanks gives a masterclass in the power of less is more.
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Captain Phillips
This is Hanks’s most quietly devastating performance. As containership captain Richard Phillips, the actor shows us the terror of being hijacked by hair-trigger Somali pirates in hostile waters half a world away from home. Paul Greengrass’s harrowing open-seas thriller is a tense, white-knuckle workout, highlighted by what are arguably the greatest two-and-a-half minutes of pure acting in Hanks’s long and extraordinary career.
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Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Steven Spielberg’s WWII epic famously kicks off with one of the most chaotic, surreal, and viscerally intense volleys of mayhem in the history of cinema—the D-Day assault on the beaches of Normandy. But as a filmmaker, where do you go from there? Spielberg, the master of the small, telling detail, places the camera in a position to show us the trembling hands of Hanks’s quietly heroic Captain John Miller. In that small and seemingly insignificant moment, we learn more about this character than his soldiers will ever know. In an absolute miracle of a performance, Hanks is constantly showing rather than telling. He’s a brave leader of men, sure. But he’s also terrified and scarred and human. That Everyman relatability, that life-size portrayal, is, was, and will always be Hanks’s greatest gift as an actor.
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