For the past year, it’s been tempting to try and parse every movie that’s hit theaters, reading each superhero origin story, goofy comedy, and earnest drama for signs of how it relates to or comments on the age of Trump. And there’s good reason for that — the endless bumbling, corruption, and lies of the […]
Tom Hanks
Posted inMovies
Film review: “A Hologram for the King”
In an adaptation of Dave Eggers’ 2012 novel, Tom Hanks stars as Alan Clay, a sadsack American consultant in the midst of an existential crisis.
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“Captain Phillips”
Based on an account by the title character and more important, on recent events, “Captain Phillips” confronts some compelling contemporary issues in both subject and method. To begin with, the picture belongs to that increasingly popular genre, the docudrama, which shows actual events in a somewhat fictionalized form, like the Iranian hostage crisis in “Argo” […]
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FILM: Cinema paradiso
It used to be that there was a sharp, clear-cut line dividing the popcorn-movie trifles of summer from the highbrow, cerebral films of the fall movie season. But over the past several years, it’s become virtually impossible to distinguish between the two. Sure, there are still plenty of brainy prestige pictures to be found at […]
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Another grail quest, in codes and ciphers
Like the book it is based on, The Da Vinci Code opens with a sequence showing the curator of the Louvre running through the museum, pursued by an albino assassin in a monk’s robe. As absurd as it sounds, that sequence, intercut with another of Professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) lecturing an attentive audience on […]
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1930s-style gangsters, without the pace or pulse
Paul Newman and Tom Hanks star in Sam Mendes’s “Road to Perdition.” Perhaps because it constitutes just about the only adult movie (in the old sense of the term) of the summer so far, Sam Mendes’s Road to Perdition has provoked almost as many raves as his previous hit, the wildly overpraised American Beauty. Mendes […]
