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)
Universal/Everett Collection
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)
DreamWorks/Everett Collection
