Because the best Tom Hanks movies rarely feature him jumping off cliffs or clinging to the sides of airplanes, you might forget that Tom Hanks had a decade-plus run at the box office, throughout the ‘90s and into the ‘00s, that was nearly as impressive as the legendary streak of that other Tom. Honestly, maybe more so; when Tom Cruise made great, risky pictures like Magnolia and Eyes Wide Shut, they didn’t make as much money as less immediately commercial Hanks projects like Philadelphia or even The Terminal did. And when his drawing power dwindled in the mid-2000s, Hanks never seemed like he was doing damage control. He followed his muse, and continued to make movies that by and large seemed like stuff Hanks himself would want to see. Sometimes millions of others joined him. Sometimes they didn’t. As such, moreso than most stars, distinguishing between the best Tom Hanks performances, the best Tom Hanks movies, and great movies that happen to feature Tom Hanks can be difficult. Despite his rock-solid presence, he’s been present and accounted for during several filmmakers’ creative low points—and, confusing matters further, he's sometimes given great performances in those films. The Ladykillers is widely considered to be the Coen Brothers' worst movie, but Hanks is hilarious as a loquacious Southern-dandy criminal mastermind. And while Hanks did great work with Ron Howard on Splash and Apollo 13, they mutually found some career-worst common ground for their trilogy of Dan Brown adaptations. For that matter, Hanks is remarkable in Forrest Gump, a Robert Zemeckis movie whose Boomer-centric picaresque of the 20th century has aged pretty poorly. Gump is one of several signature movies for Hanks that may be more culturally important or central to his career than they are actually, y'know, good. How, then, to truly determine the best Tom Hanks movies? Maybe by choosing the ones that seem to best embody the spirit of Hanks’ old-fashioned appeal—not just his much-remarked-upon innate decency (though there is that), but his plainspoken way with Americana and quiet appreciation of craft—while sometimes pushing that appeal in bold and novel new directions. Some of the canonized classics are here; others, we’ve let drop in favor of some odder suggestions, while recognizing that any Tom Hanks list can’t ignore the big, beloved hits entirely. There are simply too damn many of them. 17. A Hologram for the King (2016) That said, let’s start with an obscurity. A few years before this Tom Twyker adaptation of a Dave Eggers novel, Hanks received universal acclaim for his work in the multi-Oscar-nominated Captain Phillips. A few years later, he was Oscar-nominated himself for playing Fred Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Those are both very good films, and Hanks is better than very good in both of them. Why on earth, then, would I choose to instead spotlight the little-seen, little-loved A Hologram for the King? It’s because Hanks has played the steady but secretly terrified rock in a disaster before, and arguably just as well; same goes for him as a figure of avuncular gentleness. But Hologram speaks to a type of role Hanks clearly enjoys but maybe hadn’t quite nailed before this one: a regular-guy employee trying to keep his balance in a world that’s shifting beneath him. Hanks likes this premise so much that he wrote and directed a movie of his own about it: Larry Crowne, one of his worst. But A Hologram for the King, where Hanks plays a salesman charged with pitching a holographic teleconference system to the Saudi Arabian government, isn’t attempting to also function as a crowd-pleasing mid-life rom-com, and so its absurdities, frustrations, and loneliness all feel more authentic, even though being semi-marooned in Saudi Arabia shouldn’t be as relatable as being laid off from a job. Maybe that’s just down to Twyker being a better director than Hanks himself (though That Thing You Do! Is quite good, and only misses this list by the virtue of not actually having that much Hanks in it). 16. The ‘Burbs (1989) The Hanks ‘80s comedies are a vital part of his career; though many of the movies he made between Bosom Buddies and the onset of the 1990s are negligible, they gave him a proving ground as a leading man. Perhaps more importantly, their constant cable-system circulation made him a fixture, bolstering his everyman cred even when the movies themselves were as silly as, say, his 1987 Dragnet adaptation. The go-to ‘80s Hanks for most is probably Splash, where he falls in love with mermaid Daryl Hannah, or his Oscar-nominated turn in Big, where he plays a 13-year-old boy in an adult body (who also, let’s face it, acts more like an 11-year-old). No disrespect to either of those (or, for that matter, to Dragnet, a childhood fave of mine), but The ‘Burbs feels more like a bridge between stuff like The Money Pit and his eventual status as America’s Dad. Hanks plays a regular guy on a weeklong staycation who becomes obsessed with his new neighbors on an idyllic-looking but vaguely dysfunctional suburban cul-de-sac. It’s basically a cross between an HOA Rear Window and those sitcom episodes that riff on Rear Window, and with Joe Dante at the helm, it’s never as redundant or dopey as that might sound. Hanks in particular captures the way so many suburbanites can try to position themselves above the fray of their wacky neighborhoods while still managing to descend right into it. He’s often been compared to Jimmy Stewart, and while that might have been a superficial analogy in plenty of cases, here it feels apt, particularly to Stewart’s Hitchcock period, an era that complicated his upstanding nice-guy image. 15. Road to Perdition (2002) Speaking of Hanks’ nice-guy image: The big deal here was supposed to be Tom going bad, playing a dour hitman in Sam Mendes’ follow-up to the Oscar-winning American Beauty. But of course, there’s not a whole lot of mustache-twirling evil in this mournful crime picture, where Michael Sullivan (Hanks) kills a hell of a lot of people, yes, but largely to protect his young son after the rest of his family is murdered by his Irish-mafia father figure (Paul Newman, in his final on-screen performance!). In the rush to understandably disown American Beauty and sneer at the later-period likes of Empire of Light, this Mendes film has been somewhat lost in the shuffle, considered a mild awards-prospect disappointment at the time despite six Oscar noms (and a win for Best Cinematography). Like a lot of Mendes pictures, it’s probably a little more surface-level handsome than deep-down profound, but the acting is an all-around pleasure, mostly for its great actors relishing the chance to get a little grotesque: Newman in soul, Jude Law (as another hitman) in appearance, and a young Daniel Craig in rotten attitude. At the center of all that is Hanks, giving a rock-solid class in gangster-movie stoicism that also smartly riffs on his growing dad-core image. 14. Here (2024) The most recent big Hanks project reunites the major creative team from Forrest Gump, but you’ve seen Forrest Gump by now, and (as was the case with that one back in 1994) you haven’t seen anything quite like Here. Director Robert Zemeckis, working from graphic novel source material, fixes his camera in position on a living-room proscenium and observes that space over the course of decades—millennia, really, if you count the brief appearance of some dinosaurs. Mostly, though, he’s focused on 20th century Americana, including Hanks (digitally de-aged for much of the picture) and Robin Wright as a couple inhabiting the house from 1950s into the 2000s. Anyone fearing another Baby Boomer victory lap should steel themselves for something far more regretful, complicated, and often downbeat. Yes, it’s sometimes stagy and corny, too. It’s also a beguiling proof of how expensive technical innovations can still be used for genuine experiments—and a tribute to Hanks’ ongoing willingness to participate in those experiments at a time when he could be resting on his laurels, or doing whatever the more civic-minded version of ‘90s has-been DTV movies might be. 13. The Post (2017) The most recent Hanks-Spielberg joint is more of a Meryl Streep showcase than a trademark Hanks role. (It’s one of several parts where you think: Wait, did he take this job just to get close to all those typewriters?) But boy, is it fun to see him whip out a gravely newspaper-man voice as Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, adding just the merest hint of Hanksian mischief to the noble-journalist gravitas as the paper navigates the controversy of the Pentagon Papers. Weird to think that 20 years earlier, this movie would have grossed $160 million and netted Hanks an Oscar nomination. Honestly, the fact that it made half that in 2017 into 2018 speaks to Hanks as a consistent box office draw for a certain demographic. 12. Apollo 13 (1995) A work-the-problem docudrama from a director who equally loves large ensembles and observing those people in their professional element, Apollo 13 isn’t necessarily the best Ron Howard movie; I’d go with The Paper or Parenthood. But it certainly represents the apex of a certain type of Howard picture, at the center of which floats a no-nonsense Hanks as astronaut Jim Lovell, whose dreams of going to the moon are dashed when an oxygen malfunction aboard his ship forces the three-man crew into an emergency return to Earth. Immersing the audience in a level of jargon that seems unthinkable today (at least for a top-grossing summer blockbuster), Howard pays earnest tribute to the wonders and miracles of the space program, which along with World War II became a signature Hanks topic, even if he’s never directly revisited it on film. (He later produced the HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon.) Hanks did not receive a third Best Actor Oscar (or even a nomination!) in a row for this rock-solid performance, and in that sense it anticipates much of his career throughout the later 2000s and 2010s: He serves the director and his co-stars and the movie. He works the problem. 11. Joe Versus the Volcano (1990) Like his more traditionally dashing counterpart Tom Cruise, Hanks seems like he would have been a romantic lead, but only fulfilled those obligations under pretty specific circumstances. (For Cruise, they usually involved either roaring engines, his real-life wife, or some combination of the two.) Famously, he made three movies with on-screen soulmate Meg Ryan—or rather, he famously made two, the Nora Ephron-directed Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail, after the pair first worked together on the stranger, loopier Joe Versus the Volcano. (Which, like The ‘Burbs, made a decent amount of money for something that must have puzzled most audiences who turned up for it.) Now, this is nothing against Ephron, whose Hanks/Ryan movies are among her best; You’ve Got Mail is particularly charming, because they actually share more than a few fleeting scenes. But Joe is something else entirely, a John Patrick Shanley comedy where Ryan plays three different roles opposite Hanks as a vaguely depressed working man who receives a dire diagnosis and agrees to be paid to serve as a human sacrifice during his last few months. If Sleepless in Seattle is besotted with old-fashioned romantic-drama weepies and You’ve Got Mail is a gentler take on old screwball rom-coms, Joe Versus the Volcano actually is something rarer and only now retro: a very early-’90s gloss on the romantic comedy, less concerned with its influences than its own delirious version of modern love and its intersection with ‘80s-hangover ennui. 10. Cloud Atlas (2012) After a few late-2000s/early-2010s box office and/or artistic disappointments, it wasn’t entirely clear whether Hanks was going to cling to his leading-man status as he approached 60. In retrospect, Cloud Atlas—for which he plays multiple, centuries-spanning roles in an adaptation shepherded by the Wachowski Sisters and Tom Twyker—was his assurance that he would be playing well (and weird) with others going forward. Of course, Hanks has always been a generous ensemble member. But to throw himself into half a dozen different roles in service of a cross-cut sci-fi epic takes that ethos to the next level, and offers plenty of technical challenges, too. (Is there any other context where we might see Hanks play a Cockney gangster?) 9. Elvis (2022) In his biggest swing of the 2020s so far, Hanks plays the eminently unlikable Colonel Tom Parker, the not-actually-colonel who managed and mismanaged the career of one Elvis Presley, played here in a career-making turn by Austin Butler. Hanks, meanwhile, arguably goes further as he’s tasked with introducing and shepherding Baz Luhrmann’s phantasmagoric biopic in a near-death fugue state; his performance will also live forever in GIF form as he exclaims with malevolent excitement, “He’s white!” upon learning of the bluesy Presley’s potential for acceptance in a racist country. In a career full of tributes to midcentury touchstones, from the heroes of WWII to the astronauts of the peak-era space program to the dumb-luckiest fucking Baby Boomers, it’s wonderfully ghoulish that Hanks would participate in a pop-star biography by playing the grotesque villain of the piece. It’s his most surprising and whacked-out performance since The Ladykillers, and a much better movie than that one. 8. Philadelphia (1993) Oscar bait doesn't usually age well, and initially, it felt like Hanks’ first Best Actor win was the lesser of his two, thanks to the combination of the Tom Cruise-in-Rain Man principle (in Philadelphia, the Tom Cruise is Denzel Washington, who's playing the character who goes through the greater change/awakening and may actually be giving the better performance) and Hanks being so endearing and convincing in Forrest Gump a year later, without the awards-season benefit of quite so much suffering. But while Philadelphia does still come across as an earnest message movie, time has also been kind to Jonathan Demme’s courtroom drama about lawyer Andrew Beckett (Hanks) who has clearly been fired for being a gay man with AIDS. Hanks’ performance as a man all too aware of his mortality, fighting for himself as his remaining time wanes, is delicately heartbreaking—until that famous opera scene where Hanks explains his identification with his favorite piece, when the floodgates open. He still doesn’t wallow, but the effect is an overwhelming emotional climax to the supposedly noble suffering that Hanks underplays so well for so long. 7. Cast Away (2000) For a sizable chunk of this Robert Zemeckis survival drama, Tom Hanks acts opposite no one but a blood-spattered volleyball and, later, a CG whale. For a lot of performances, this could have served as a showcase for boundless ego. For Hanks, it’s an unassuming movie-star flex—a casual reminder that yeah, a lot of people would be up for just watching him go about the sometimes grueling, sometimes funny, sometimes quietly lonely business of being alive, alone, and making a lot of tough decisions. The star and director, frequent collaborators with some mixed-ass results (remember that Hanks was in a terrible version of Pinocchio at Zemeckis’ behest?!) are in perfect sync here, serving up special-effects showcases and also the old-fashioned non-illusion of time’s passage: Filming paused for six months, during which Zemeckis made a whole other movie and Hanks got gaunt and beardy enough to play a man who’s been stranded on an island for years. Again, this never feels like a stunt; it feels like an extension of Hanks knowing the value of avoiding obvious over-emoting and just existing in the moment, letting the perseverance come to him. 6. Toy Story (1995) This could be a stand-in for all of the Toy Story movies, which are terrific; personally, I’d give the edge to the hilarious and deeply moving Toy Story 2. But in terms of Hanks’ vocal performance, it’s hard to beat his first go-round as Sheriff Woody, because, actually, of just how dark America’s Dad goes while voicing a child’s plaything in a G-rated cartoon that still serves as countless kids’ first real movie. Woody rules the roost as the most beloved toy in the orbit of cowboy-obsessed kid Andy, until much fancier space toy Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) appears and challenges his dominance (all without even appreciating it, being a toy who thinks he’s the “real” Buzz Lightyear—guess he could have used that timeless Chris Evans clarification). Before they become unlikely allies, Woody is about ready to kill Buzz in a fit of desperation and frustration over potentially losing his spot as Andy’s favorite. Is Woody the angriest character Hanks has ever played? At very least, he’s close, and Hanks getting apoplectically furious is an underrated specialty in his toolkit. 5. Bridge of Spies (2015) In signing on for the Cold War espionage drama Bridge of Spies, Hanks had a stealth Coen Brothers reunion nested within another Spielberg collaboration. Joel and Ethan did a draft of the movie’s smart, sometimes mordantly funny screenplay about a lawyer who defends a Soviet spy (Mark Rylance) in U.S. court and eventually accompanies him on a possible prisoner exchange in Berlin, around the time of the Berlin Wall’s construction. The film captures the murky realities and sometimes the dark humor of Cold War espionage, with the Hanks character amusingly literalizing the Cold War by nursing a constant case of the sniffles during the Berlin sojourn. Quietly, without as much surface flash as his World War II movies, this is one of Spielberg’s most morally shaded and beautifully made history projects, and Hanks has ample opportunity for All-American values (insisting on the spy’s right to a vigorous defense) and everyman relatability (he’s not necessarily cut out for coded skullduggery). It was Mark Rylance who won an Oscar for the film, but his wonderful, assured performance would lose a hell of a lot of traction without Hanks as his scene partner. 4. Saving Private Ryan (1998) As good as he is in both Forrest Gump and Philadelphia, this might be the movie for which Hanks most deserved to win Best Actor at the Oscars. (Naturally, he was never the favorite, and lost to Roberto Benigni.) He plays Captain Miller, the leader of a group dispatched, post-Normandy, to track down Private Ryan, whose three brothers have all been killed in World War II and who will be sent home to spare his family further pain. The movie itself has become divisive in hardcore film circles—does it defy the truism about the impossibility of making an anti-war movie, or does it more or less prove it true?—but there’s no denying the power of the Hanks performance, as steady as Captain Miller’s hands are shaky. It’s a plot point that the men don’t know much about Miller, which pays off in a scene where he defuses a standoff between two of them by finally revealing his background. It’s a little monologue that could have fit right into a war picture from 40 or 50 years earlier, and Hanks, of course, absolutely nails it, pulling it off in a contemporary-made movie (even one set in 1944) without so much as a flinch of hesitation. 3. Catch Me If You Can (2002) And one more Spielberg for good measure—maybe not the best Hanks performance in a Spielberg film, but arguably their most purely delightful (and Hanksian) collaboration. It’s a second-lead role, sorta-opposite Leonardo DiCaprio in full boyish-charmer mode; he’s Frank Abagnale, a young con man passing bad checks and disguising himself with various fake IDs, while Hanks plays the brusque Bostonian FBI agent hot on his trail. He’s another Hanks guy who’s Just Doing His Job, a straight-arrow both flummoxed and fascinated by the zig-zagging lies of this bold little bastard. His gradual substitution as Frank’s father figure might be hokey in other hands; the give-and-take feels genuine here. Also, he gets to tell a good joke. 2. Asteroid City (2023) Hanks doesn’t necessarily seem like a natural fit for the stylized world of Wes Anderson (apart from, yes, the increased chances of him copping a vintage typewriter on set; I don’t know why I’ve refashioned Hanks not just as a typewriter collector but a globe-spanning thief, but it’s my unfounded mental picture and I’m sticking with it). More often than not, he’s an unfussy and straight-from-the-shoulder actor, and while he’s got the right voice and manner for deadpan, “unfussy” is not exactly the word anyone would use to describe Anderson. But Hanks turns out to be a perfect fit as one of Anderson’s trademark gruff-dad figures, a man whose daughter has died, leaving behind some unruly grandchildren and a son-in-law (Jason Schwartzman) he doesn’t necessarily care much for. He lays out as much in a split-screen telephone call early in the picture, and it turns out, Hanks is perfectly suited for Anderson’s emotional temperature, the way he can coax a world of grief out of just a few lines of dialogue. Beyond the performance itself, it means something extra to have Hanks on hand for a movie so steeped in midcentury culture, particularly space-race sci-fi; like so much of Anderson’s ensemble, it turns the intentional fakeness into its own believable reality (even as the movie is telling you outright that it’s fake). 1. A League of Their Own (1992) This should have been something of a comfort-zone project for Hanks—reteaming with his Big director Penny Marshall for a schticky supporting role in an inspirational comedy about the women who stepped up to play professional baseball during World War II, when it seemed as if the MLB might not be able to sustain wartime attrition. His Jimmy Dugan is an ultra-familiar type: The once-great athlete felled by his drinking problem (this is the kind of movie where it’s a drinking problem, not alcoholism) who reluctantly accepts what turns out to be a shot at redemption. If he were the main character in League, the movie might be insufferable. But Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis), a no-nonsense catcher, is the lead here, so Hanks gets to sneak up on the movie, starting with a bunch of comic business, proceeding through a gradual revelation of cranky decency, and finally arriving at a speech about baseball (“The hard… is what makes it good”) that I’m not sure many other actors could sell with quite so much conviction. Everyone cites the famous “no crying in baseball” scene, and it’s indeed a classic, but maybe even funnier is the moment later in the film when Jimmy fights the urge to chew out the same player for making the same mistake during the World Series—literally quaking with rage as he keeps a lid on his rougher instincts. This might be the ultimate Hanks movie because, like so many of his best projects, it’s weirdly feasible that a version of this film could have emerged decades earlier; he’s great at keeping his films true to their classicism without making fusty throwbacks. (Admittedly, long-term creative relationships with Spielberg, Zemeckis, and now Anderson help.) Hanks’ performance here is also the perfect transition point between his early career as a comic leading man and later dramatic work; it’s hard to make the case that they’re equally important (at this point, he’s been a “serious” actor for about three times as long as he was a comic lead), but they’re equal parts of his lasting appeal. Whatever position he’s playing, he makes the hard stuff look easy.