Movies starring Tom Hanks

It takes about ten seconds to identify Asteroid City as a “Wes Anderson movie” and that’s arguably the movie’s Achilles Heel. Anderson’s style and approach have become so baked-into his projects that they threaten to overwhelm the materi...

I’ve long since given up asking the question “Why?” when it comes to filmmakers turning to foreign language films for the storylines of new English-language films. Sometimes, in fact, the results can be quite satisfactory – take the 2022 r...

For all that the description implies, Elvis is well and truly a Baz Luhrmann film. At times frustrating and at times exuberant, the movie is ultimately effective in capturing both the triumph and tragedy of the title character’s life. It’s une...

News of the World, based on the 2016 novel by Paulette Jiles, is a road trip Western where the genre serves less as the focus than as a backdrop to the relationship between the paternalistic Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks) and the 10-y...

Greyhound is an atypical film: a World War II thriller that doesn’t aspire to be an epic. Most productions set during the early 1940s – even those made by blockbuster-minded directors – carry running times that are as bloated as their gr...

A case could be made that everything is made better with Mr. Rogers added to the mix. Take A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. A standard-order redemption/salvation drama about healing a poisoned father/son relationship, this story is leavene...

By nature, endings are sad. Therefore, it’s understandable if a few tears are shed when the final credits begin rolling at the conclusion of Toy Story 4. After all, according to everyone involved, this is reallytrulywepromisethistime the swa...

If one looks back at U.S. history during the 1970s, the importance of The Washington Post immediately becomes clear. The paper, which began the decade as just another local daily with little national prominence, concluded it as an important b...

Thematically, James Ponsoldt’s The Circle (based on the novel by Dave Eggers) takes its cues from George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Grand aspirations, to be sure, and ones that are never truly met. From its beginn...

One of the biggest mysteries about the Robert Langdon movies is why they don’t work. Dan Brown has a large, built-in fan base. There’s no lack of talent in the productions. The director is Oscar winner Ron Howard (who was near the zenith ...