Steven Spielberg delivers a classic platoon drama with a new mission in this Oscar-winning World War II epic set during the D-Day invasion.
Tag: Tom Hanks
Tom Hanks is ‘Larry Crowne’ on Amazon Prime
Larry Crowne (2011), directed and co-written by and starring Tom Hanks, just wants to be liked. Hanks plays a department store salesman who gets downsized in the economic climate and enrolls in community college to get a degree and a new start and he’s as sweet and unassuming and genuine a fellow as you’ll see […]
‘A Hologram for the King’ on Amazon Prime and Hulu
You could call A Hologram for the King (2016) a mid-life crisis drama, which is true enough, but it is really a crisis of purpose and identity for an old-school middle-aged businessman trying to remain relevant in the modern world. Tom Hanks is former golden boy executive Alan Clay, whose reputation went down in flames […]
‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ – Tom Hanks vs. the USSR on Amazon Prime
If you think it was Rambo who led the American support of Afghan rebels against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the early eighties, here’s a hilarious reality check. Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) is the story of an otherwise minor Texas congressman who worked behind the scenes to create a coalition of Arab states, secretly […]
Tom Hanks is ‘Big’ on Disney+
Big (1988) arrived in theaters amidst a spate of films about adults and children swapping bodies. There’s no swap involved in this story—an adolescent boy named Josh makes a wish that he was big on a midway fortune-telling machine and wakes up in the body of Tom Hanks—but this warm-hearted comedy was by far the […]
‘From the Earth to the Moon’ on HBO Now
The history of the American space race is presented in terms both reverential and mortal in From the Earth to the Moon(1998), the sweeping Tom Hanks produced mini-series made for HBO. The debut episode “Can We Do This?,” directed by Hanks, is a quick survey of the birth of the space program from behind the […]
‘Band of Brothers’ on Amazon Prime Video and HBO
After Saving Private Ryan in a single mission, Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks teamed up to produce a chronicle of the European theater of World War II from a soldier’s-eye view on a vast canvas. The resulting made-for-HBO ten-hour miniseries Band of Brothers (2001), based on the non-fiction book by historian Stephen Ambrose, takes us […]
‘Sully’ – American heroism without ego on HBO Now
Sully (2016) is a fittingly modest nickname for an unassuming career airline pilot who became an American hero in 2009. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger was piloting a routine flight from LaGuardia when his Airbus airliner was disabled over New York City mere minutes after take-off and he ditched in a water landing in the Hudson River […]