Tom Hanks really is an amazing actor: after building a career on goofy romantic comedy, Hanks has gone on to successfully play an array of roles and genres so wide, and his portrayals are so convincing and embodying, that it is easy to forget it was actually HIM in Philadelphia, Forrest Gump, Apollo 13, the Toy Story movies, Saving Private Ryan, and Cast Away.

Last night on HBO, Hanks' two most recent performances were on display back-to-back, and while the two characters were similarly portly and humorless, they were at the opposite ends of the moral spectrum, and two more finely calibrated, distinctive, disappear-into-the-character performances by Hanks.

Stephen Spielberg's extremely entertaining, if somewhat breezy, 2002 film Catch Me If You Can, stars an excellent Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Abagnale Jr., the real-life imposter who, upon learning of his parent's separation, ran away from home at the age of 16 in the mid-'60s and within a four years had impersonated an airline pilot, a physician and emergency room supervisor, a lawyer and prosecutor, and had financed his globe-trotting and status-seeking by becoming an expert in bank fraud, passing $4 million worth of bad checks.

Hanks is almost unrecognizable as the paunchy, bespectacled, New England-accented FBI agent Carl Hanratty - an accountant with a badge - who pursued Abagnale with a singleness of purpose that never lost sight of his target's youth or his humanity. Some of the best scenes in the movie are the Christmas Eve phone calls between the lonely hunter and the hunted, who realize how much they share and how entertwined their lives are even as they pursue their diametrically opposed agendas.

The movie balances the energized giddyness of a caper flick with the moral imperative by which Hanratty is driven to bring Abagnale to justice, and the hole at bottom of the imposter's soul that drives him on to ever more audacious acts of impersonation and larceny. Over the course of their chase, Hanratty becomes an unlikely father figure to young Frank, providing him with the moral grounding his own father (Christopher Walken) could or would not.

The film reaches a very satisfying conclusion when Hanratty finally catches Abagnale in France (his mother's home), and after he is extradited to the U.S. and sentenced to twelve years in prison, Hanratty fights to get Abagnale released to his own custody in order to put his sparkling intelligence (he studied for the bar for two weeks and passed it legit) and unparalleled experience in check fraud to work for the good guys.