An ode to Tom Hanks' upper lip

It curls, it smirks, it has a sense of humor. And when it's obscured, as in Sully, something wonderful is lost.

Hanks' stache in Sully.
(Image credit: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures)

Sully is the kind of movie you ought to see in IMAX if you're going to see it at all. The new Clint Eastwood film about Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot who successfully landed United Flight 1549 in the Hudson River after a bird strike in 2009, has grand cinematography: When the airplane lands in the river, you'll feel it. You'll shiver as the passengers stand on the airplane's wings in the dead of winter, baffled and scared and freezing wet. IMAX is the medium for a spectacle of this scale.

Unfortunately, the cinematic catharsis of 155 people surviving a crash gets nearly neutralized by the outsize atrocity atop Tom Hanks' lip.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.