Every Tom Hanks Movie, Ranked Worst to Best

Hanks was always being compared to Jimmy Stewart in his early movie-star years; here, he gets a crack at being a modern-day Gary Cooper. Clint Eastwood’s recounting of U.S. Airways Flight 1549’s miraculous landing on the Hudson River — and the pilot, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, whose expertise helped avert a major disaster — is partially a first-rate rescue docudrama, and partially an indictment of a system that would question the abilities of an honest-to-God American hero. You can practically feel Eastwood seething behind the camera every time a pencil-pusher mentions “computer simulations” or doubts Sully’s professionalism. Yet “doubt” is exactly what this pilot feels as well, plagued by thoughts of what might have happened; watch the character bristle every time someone calls him a “hero.” In prime silver-fox, stoic-masculinity mode, the star more than shows you Sully’s grace under pressure. But “the human factor” is what matters here — and that’s exactly what the actor brings to the table. If he’s channeling Cooper, it’s the anxious-yet-steadfast version we see in High Noon, and the conflict between those two emotions inspires one of the actor’s best late-career performances. Sullenberger was the right man for the job. So was Hanks.

The ol’ switcheroo comedy — in which a kid and adult change bodies, and both learn some valuable life lessons — was a bona fide subgenre by the time Penny Marshall’s tweaked take hit theaters in the late ’80s. What Big does to that whole notion of a child suddenly finding himself in a grown-up body and a grown-up world, however, is worth a month of freaky Fridays. And that is 100-percent because of Hanks. He milks the premise for all the comedic potential, and it helps that the actor still seems pretty connected to his fumbling, playful, manic inner 12-year-old. But he also plays the concept with a total commitment to realism: So what would happen if a prepubescent boy found himself turned into 30-year-old man overnight? He’d be giddy…but he’d also be scared, confused, sad, angry, and simply overwhelmed by a world built for adults. Hanks gives you all of that and more. No many times you watch the film’s greatest-hits reel — the baby corn eating, the reaction to Elizabeth Perkins asking about his feelings for her, the Shimmy Shimmy Cocoa Pop duet with his best friend, the “Chopsticks” rendition that launched a thousand headaches for FAO Schwartz employees — you never lose that feeling that you’re watching a genuinely great performance unfold right before your eyes. It garnered Hanks his first Oscar nomination and a whole new legion of fans. It gave moviegoers the sense that he might very well be capable of just about anything.

“Houston, we have a problem.” Ron Howard’s recounting of the near-disastrous 1970 NASA mission works like a disaster movie: Three men are launched into space. Something goes wrong. This trio of trained pilots, aided by dozens of folks on the ground, work to get themselves home safely. Anyone with access to a set of encyclopedias or the internet can find out what happens. What the movie does is put you in that floating tin can right beside the astronauts and get you invested in how it happens, and this is where Hanks comes in — he’s the mission leader in more ways than one here. Steady and grounded even when he’s thousands of miles away from Earth, his Jim Lovell is the epitome of cool and calm under pressure (save for the occasional snapping at the suits in HQ).But he’s also the eyes through which we see the ambition, accomplishments and agonies of the space-exploration program, as well as the hopes and dreams of those who would bravely go forth into the final frontier. That the star translates all of this via little more than glances and gestures isn’t surprising (it’s not a classically big, blustery turn); that he does all of this without forgetting Lovell is also a mortal who’s (sort of) like the rest of us is the balancing act that makes the film work. Hanks sets up the performance as an equation involving both intelligence and heart — you can practically see Lovell thinking in real time without feeling like you’re watching a brain in a jar.And the role lets Hanks demonstrate in full the qualities we’ve come to associate with him IRL: an innate sense of decency, humility, determination, kindness, integrity, and morality. He’s played holy fools, saintly authority figures, all-American heroes and goofballs, elevated everymen and martyrs. Apollo 13 is arguably the one time he’s played someone of note, however, and managed to become iconic in the process. It’s the way he says that “Houston” line that’s made it a catch-all quotable for worst-case scenarios. It’s his investment in another declaration, however, that seals the deal regarding Lovell being the quintessential Hanks role: “I’d like to go home.“