Top 5 – Tom Hanks Movies

Tom Hanks is an American treasure.  A man of extraordinary talent and class, Hanks is always a pleasure to see on screen.  Through out his career, Hanks has taken on a number of diverse and challenging roles, making him one of the finest actors to ever grace the screen and making this list incredibly tough to make.  Though I ended up landing on these five, this list could have easily expanded to ten and maybe even beyond that.  Here are my picks for the best Tom Hanks movies.

This list is based on movie quality and the performance of Hanks himself.

5 -MICHAEL SULLIVAN in ROAD TO PERDITION (Sam Mendes, 2002)

Talk about a great 2002, right?  Road to Perdition is an incredibly underrated movie.  After the Oscar winning success of American Beauty (1999), director Sam Mendes followed it up with a depression-era gangster film about a father and son on the run from gangsters.  Hanks plays the father and it is a role we don’t generally see Hanks in; a bad guy.  Usually Hanks is playing a sweet, lovable character, but here, he plays a gangster who is on the run with his son after he made a mistake.  Hanks touts a Tommy gun and uses it often, robbing banks and taking care of the gangsters chasing him and his son.  This is a beautiful and intense film about family and redemption.  It features stellar performances by Hanks and Paul Newman and features stellar, Oscar-winning cinematography from the late Conrad L. Hall.  Road to Perdition is one of the finest gangster films of the 2000’s.

4 – FORREST GUMP in FORREST GUMP (Robert Zemeckis, 1994)

How do you follow an Oscar win as an actor?  If you’re Tom Hanks, you win another one.  Forrest Gump is a whimsical, epic, beautiful movie about a man who, even though not very intelligent, winds up in some of the most important events in American history while trying to be with the love of his life, Jenny (an excellent Robin Wright), even though she is on her own tragic path.  Hanks just steals your heart as Forrest.  He is a simple, loving man who loves running and always double-backs for his best good friends and will do anything for Jenny.  Hanks is funny, sweet, and heartbreaking, especially at the end, when his relationship with Jenny ends tragically.  Tom Hanks gives an iconic performance that will be remembered for years to come.

3 – FRED ROGERS in A BEAUTIFUL DAY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD (Marielle Heller, 2019)

Mariel Heller’s heartwarming A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Hanks plays Fred Rogers, the legendary, cardigan-wearing television host of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.  This is a man who touched the hearts and souls of every American who watched him, whether they were five-years-old or fifty-years-old.  Hanks looks nothing like Rogers, but that didn’t stop him from perfectly embodying who Rogers was.  Hanks brought the heart, sweetness, and warmth that so many people associated with Rogers.  But more than that, he gave us a layered portrait of a man who many deemed the personification of good a niceness and showed us that even he felt anger, frustration, and sadness.  It had been nearly twenty years since Hanks had been nominated for an Oscar, which is utterly absurd, and he rightly earned a nomination for this performance, which is one of the best of his career

2 – WOODY in THE TOY STORY TRILOGY (John Lasseter/Lee Unkrich/Josh Cooley, 1995/1999/2010/2019)

Great voice acting is something to behold.  From Robin Williams as Genie in Aladdin (1993) to Ellen Degeneres in Finding Nemo (2003), these performances elevate their respective movies from good to great.  One performance that belongs among the ranks of great voice work is Tom Hanks as our cowboy, Woody, in the Toy Story films.  I couldn’t pick just one film, so I cheated and put all three, because Woody is the heart and soul of this franchise.  His relationship with Andy and the other toys is what drives these films.  Woody is as rounded of a character as any live-action one and it is Hanks who conveys these emotions so perfectly from just his voice.  From the opening scene of rallying up the toys to the final good-bye to Andy to his journey’s with Forky, Woody is a character we grow and love and that wouldn’t have been possible without Hanks behind the mic.

1 – CHUCK NOLAND in CAST AWAY (Robert Zemeckis, 2000)

When thinking about important movies that shaped my life cinematically, Cast Away would be one that I could argue to make the top ten.  I remember my parents taking me and my siblings to see this movie in theaters and it was the first time I had ever seen a movie that was focused on nearly one actor for the entire film.  It takes a truly gifted actor to own the screen by themselves for almost two hours, but Hanks does it better than anyone before or after him.  This is Hanks’ best performance ever.  It is a performance that pushes Hanks both physically and mentally.  He fluctuated his weight, putting on a few pounds for the beginning of the film and then becoming painstakingly thin for the latter half of the movie.  Hanks also shows us a man who is stuck on a deserted island, yet never loses hope and makes the best of what he can, including befriending a volleyball named Wilson, which equates to the films most emotional scene.  The fact that Hanks can make us feel emotional about him and a volleyball is amazing in its own right.  Robbed of an Oscar in 2001, this is a legendary performance and one of the finest I’ve ever seen, which is why it lands at the top spot of Tom Hanks movies for me.

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