Captain Phillips

Tom Hanks is not really a favourite actor of mine,....he bored me rigid in the bloody awful Castaway a few years back, so I have not been drawn to anything he has been in ever since..... But in Paul Greengrass' hijack drama Captain Phillips , Hanks carries the entire film with some of the best acting I have seen in a long time.
Playing the title role, Hanks  portrays the  " ordinary man caught up in extra ordinary circumstances" which seems a favourite subject of Greengrass' who made the desperately harrowing United 93, which told the story of the 9/11 aircraft passengers and their fight with the al-Qaeda  hijackers.
In this film Phillips is the strict Captain of an American cargo ship who has to play a cat and mouse game with four poor Somali fishermen turned hijackers who board his vessel off the Somali coast.
The action zigzags from cargo ship to lifeboat as Philips is taken sole hostage and for over two hours Greengrass cranks up the tension almost unbearably at times before the faceless American forces arrive to save the day.
Hanks is the real heart of the film, and in the last ten minutes, where we see his unflinching and raw portrayal of a man in deep shock, he very nearly breaks your heart.