Another Oscar for Hanks? Captain Phillips a Winner

Tom Hanks is getting raves for his title role in Captain Phillips, which tells the true 2009 story of a US ship taken captive by Somali pirates. Critics think director Paul Greengrass has a winner on his hands.

• The movie "shakes you up first with its style and then with its ideas," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. The film "begins as something of a procedural about men at work and morphs into a jittery thriller," she writes, "even as it also deepens, brilliantly, unexpectedly, into an unsettling look at global capitalism and American privilege and power."

• At Slate, Dana Stevens sees another Oscar for Tom Hanks. Though she takes issue with the film's pacing, a closing scene offers "compassion and truthfulness that sets this movie apart from your run-of-the-mill maritime action thriller."
• "With his irrepressibly kinetic style, Greengrass could probably make the opening of a cereal box exciting," writes Todd McCarthy in the Hollywood Reporter. The "immaculately made" movie "rips right along and never relinquishes its grip."
• Not everyone, however, is on board. In Time, Richard Corliss calls the film an "overly muscled docudrama that is more pounding than truly gripping"; for him, Captain Phillips is "lacking in suspense."

(More Tom Hanks stories.)