5 Best Tom Hanks Movies: Tom Hanks somehow manages to make you feel like you already know the person he is playing, and that is perhaps his biggest superpower.
5 Best Tom Hanks Movies: Tom Hanks’ Filmography
Tom Hanks can be funny, sad, terrifying and unbelievably wholesome without making anything feel like a performance. His filmography is massive, stretching from Big and Sleepless in Seattle to Philadelphia, Apollo 13, Toy Story, Saving Private Ryan and Cast Away.
Tom Hanks began his acting career in 1977 on stage, with his first movie in 1980: He Knows You’re Alone. With over 80 films, Hanks’ performances have the kind of range actors dream of building. He can portray emotions without being loud about them.
Choosing only five Tom Hanks movies feels a little wrong, but if you are looking for the films that best capture what makes him Tom Hanks of the day, these are the ones we would keep on our list.
Big
Before Tom Hanks became the guy associated with emotionally devastating dramas, he was John Baskin, a little boy who wakes up in an adult body after making a wish at a carnival machine.
Big brought Hanks his first Oscar nomination for Best Actor while being a defining film from his early career. Big is funny, but under the jokes about adulthood, jobs and navigating New York as a child inside an adult body, there is something surprisingly tender.
Hanks portrays Josh as technically an adult, but never lets us forget the child behind the man. His excitement, confusion and complete lack of understanding of adult behaviour make the character lovable.
Big is not about wanting to grow up but about how strange growing up actually is.
The Green Mile
In The Green Mile, Tom Hanks plays Paul Edgecomb, a prison guard working on death row who encounters John Coffey, a physically imposing prisoner with a deeply mysterious gift.
Tom Hanks does not play some larger-than-life hero here as Paul Edgecomb. In this 1999 film, he is a man doing a difficult job, carrying the weight of what he witnesses every day. Hanks lets the movie breathe with no unnecessary theatrics in his performance. The emotion creeps in gradually, making the eventual heartbreak more difficult.
Cast Away
Cast Away makes Tom Hanks carry a huge chunk of the movie on his shoulders. He plays Chuck Noland, who is stranded on a deserted island after a plane crash.
Hanks makes the isolation feel like a conversation; goes through physical transformation, desperation, anger, grief and eventually the slow realisation that survival is not the same thing as living.
The movie is about time, about what happens when the world keeps moving without you, and about the terrifying possibility that even if you finally get home, it might not be waiting for you the same way. It does not just look at a survival movie about getting food, building shelter and escaping an island.
Hanks received a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Drama for his performance in this 2000 film.
Saving Private Ryan
In Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks is Captain John H Miller, a soldier leading a small group of men through World War II-era France to find Private James Ryan.
Steven Spielberg’s 1998 film does not romanticise the battlefield. It is brutal, frightening and exhausting and Hanks anchors all the chaos with a remarkably understated performance. Miller is not depicted as some action hero: he is tired, scared and above all, he is human.
It is one of Tom Hanks’ most commanding performances precisely because he never tries to command the screen.
Forrest Gump
Forrest Gump is the movie that feels impossible to be separated from Tom Hanks. He plays Forrest, a kind-hearted man whose life somehow intersects with some of the biggest moments of American history.
Hanks makes Forrest feel completely human by playing him with gentleness and giving Forrest sincerity without turning him into a joke.
Tom Hanks won the Best Actor Oscar for Forrest Gump, following his Oscar win for Philadelphia the previous year, giving him consecutive Best Actor victories.
The Tom Hanks Problem
The annoying thing about listing “5 best Tom Hanks movies” is that five films are nowhere near. Philadelphia, Apollo 13, Toy Story, Catch Me If You Can, Road to Perdition, The Terminal, A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, Even That Thing You Do! Also deserve to be a part of the conversation.
His filmography is basically one giant reminder that this man has refused to stay in one lane. But the five listed show the range well. Perhaps that is why his movies have staying power.
Tom Hanks rarely plays characters who feel unreachable; there is usually some tiny piece of ordinary humanity holding them together. That might be the Tom Hanks magic. He makes extraordinary people feel ordinary and ordinary people feel worth making a movie about.
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