Director Clint Eastwood goes from flying first class (Sully) to riding the rails in unreserved coach for another real-life tale of transitory heroism. And this time, instead of relying on Oscar-winner Tom Hanks to land his Airbus in the freezing waters of the Hudson River, he turns to the actual …
It’s possible that the eight- to ten-year-old set has not been sufficiently exposed to Lady Gaga. This should fix that. It’s also possible that comedian David Cross was not yet bereft of human dignity. This should fix that, too. And in case you’d forgotten how much you loved Tom Hanks …
Although the Dan Brown novel was written before The Da Vinci Code, the screen adaptation of it (directed again by Ron Howard) takes care to situate itself afterwards with a reference or two to the returning hero’s “recent involvement with, shall we say, Church mysteries” and his consequent strained relations …
Tom Hanks, who needs no incitement to act immature, is here given carte blanche: a runty twelve-year-old, towered over by the cute blonde in his class, makes a wish to be "big" and has it granted overnight by a coin-operated fairground wizard. (Technically, he not only gets bigger, but older …
Tom Wolfe's fat novel of New York City, of high finance, low politics, racial conflict, manipulated media, the whole ball of wax. Brian De Palma's adaptation of this avoids the pieties of the Problem Picture by turning it instead into an impious comic strip, with healthy doses of cynicism and …
Call it Mr. Donovan goes to East Berlin. Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks team up for a handsome piece of very pointed nostalgia (with help from the Coen Brothers and Matt Charman, who handled the script, and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, lens set to "stately."). Hanks is private citizen and shrewd …
A satire, one supposes, on the average American suburb, with the targets drawn so broad as to be all but unmissable -- and so broad, too, as to be all but unrecognizable. A double-twist ending cancels out the last-minute moralizing after first cancelling out the endless-minutes storyline. Tom Hanks, Bruce …
History, sentiment, and inventiveness intertwine in this stylishly crafted love letter to the children of inventor Christopher Latham Sholes. You never forget your first. Mine was a beat up Royal originally owned by Millie, the young college student whose bedroom sat opposite me in the courtyard. For years, I fell …
If you can get past the bombastic score and the wavering, seasick camera and what is perhaps the hackiest, laziest opening-scene conversation of the year, you might find something remarkable in Captain Phillips: a quietly scathing critique of American exceptionalism, wrapped in a story of American survival. Captain Richard Phillips …
Lightweight Spielberg (as compared, say, with the immediately preceding Minority Report, never mind Schindler's List or Amistad), an admiring, even envying portrait of a real-life teenage imposter and check forger in the late 1960s, Frank Abagnale, Jr. His excuse: his father's financial woes, his move to a new school, his …
Didactic poli-sci lesson on How the System Works, entertainingly illustrated by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director Mike Nichols. The titular war is the one between the Soviets and the Afghans in the Reagan era, and Charlie Wilson is a nonfictional Texas congressman (played with supreme complacency by Tom Hanks) who, …
The trailer for The Circle jerked audiences in the direction of a paranoid thriller of universal proportion, but all director James Ponsoldt (Smashed, The Spectacular Now) could make good on was a wormhole of narcissism down which he could make his latest film spiral. Mae (Emma Watson) won the lottery …
The Wachowski Manifesto, or maybe just their apologia. Together with co-director Tom Tykwer, the W siblings have taken David Mitchell's multi-story, mutli-genre novel and made it into one (very) long and earnest plea for individual freedom and dignity in the face of oppression, whether it's gays oppressed by polite society, …