Tom Hanks at 70: The Essential Films

Tom Hanks turns seventy on 9 July 2026, and the occasion invites reflection on a career of remarkable breadth and consistency. For nearly half a century, he has moved between genres with an ease that few actors manage, and has done so while maintaining a grip on popular affection that feels almost inexplicable in an era when stardom is fragmented and short-lived. He arrived as a comic actor, pivoted decisively into drama, and has become something rarer still: a figure trusted by audiences across generational and demographic lines. At seventy, he remains not only working but central to the films he chooses, an actor who has earned the right to be selective, and largely has been.

What distinguishes Hanks's work is a kind of intelligent ordinariness. He does not play men transformed by circumstance so much as men who reveal themselves through circumstance. Whether his character is shrewd or simple, calculating or innocent, there is always a bedrock of American decency or at least American hope beneath the surface. This quality served him well in the 1980s comedies that made his name, and it has sustained him through decades of collaboration with major directors: Spielberg most prominently, but also Robert Zemeckis, Ron Howard, and the Coen brothers. He has narrated documentaries, produced television, and voiced an animated cowboy doll across more than two decades of films. The range is real, but it is not restless. Hanks seems genuinely interested in the particular moral or psychological problem each script offers him.

Among the films Macca has reviewed, the Toy Story films form a substantial subset of his work, and they reveal something essential about his craft. Toy Story (1995) and Toy Story 2 (1999) both earned four and a half stars, and Hanks's vocal performance as Woody carries considerable weight in both, anchoring the films' emotional logic with a character who is anxious, loyal, and trying to do right by his owner. The later entries, Toy Story 3 (2010), Toy Story 4 (2019), and the spin-offs, show a different kind of stamina: his voice and inflection remain constant even as the films aged and the emotional register shifted toward loss and acceptance. Away from animation, Forrest Gump (1994) earned four and a half stars and remains a marker of his dramatic facility, a film that could easily have tilted toward sentimentality but which Hanks grounds in a kind of patient authenticity. The Green Mile (1999) and Cast Away (2000), both four stars, demonstrate his capacity to carry a film emotionally without much external support: one a chamber piece about mortality, the other a extended meditation on solitude and survival. The Da Vinci Code (2006) and its sequels, Angels & Demons (2009) and Inferno (2016), show him in less distinguished material, though Macca's three-and-a-half stars for the first suggests a certain competence in franchise entertainment even when the script offers limited depth. Catch Me If You Can (2002), also three and a half stars, pairs him with Spielberg in a lighter register entirely, a film that finds humour and genuine affection in the cat-and-mouse game between con artist and FBI agent.

The films I've reviewed:

• Toy Story 2 (1999) ★★★★½
• Toy Story (1995) ★★★★½
• Forrest Gump (1994) ★★★★½
• The Green Mile (1999) ★★★★
• Cast Away (2000) ★★★★
• Toy Story 4 (2019) ★★★½
• The Da Vinci Code (2006) ★★★½
• Toy Story 3 (2010) ★★★½
• Catch Me If You Can (2002) ★★★½
• Partysaurus Rex (2012) ★★★
• Toy Story That Time Forgot (2014) ★★★
• Toy Story of Terror! (2013) ★★★
• A Hologram for the King (2016) ★★★
• Angels & Demons (2009) ★★½
• Inferno (2016) ★★

The significance of Hanks at seventy is partly statistical: two Academy Awards, three Golden Globes, a span of commercially successful films that few actors can match. But the more durable significance is tonal. He has made it possible to be a major film star without irony, without a sense of performance as performance. That may sound like a small thing, but in an era of knowing distance and fractured attention, it has proved valuable. He continues to work on projects that interest him, and those projects, for better or worse, continue to find audiences. At an age when many actors retreat or are pushed toward supporting roles, Hanks remains a man you go to see, not because of spectacle or novelty, but because his presence in a film suggests that someone thought the story was worth his time.

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