Tom Hanks launched into a playful tirade on the “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast in which he took listeners through the long and winding road that is a movie’s reception. At one point, the two-time Oscar winner humorously referred to movie critics as “cocksuckers” as it’s ultimately time that is the decider of a movie’s value and not the reviewers. Case in point: Hanks’ 1996 directorial effort “That Thing You Do!,” which was dismissed by critics upon release before time turned into a beloved cult classic.

“All of this stuff lives. Now what has happened is that time has become one of the metrics for how these things matter, right?” Hanks said about a movie’s reputation. “Back in the day it was just a fistfight. It was every movie you had coming out, are you going to make the playoffs or not? Guess what? No, kid, you ain’t going nowhere. Or, you got a shot.”

“It used to be you had these Rubicons that you crossed,” the actor explained. “First of all, do you love it or not? That’s the first thing. I read this [script] and I love it. The next Rubicon you cross is when the movie is completely done a year and a half later and you see it for the first time, and you might like it. It doesn’t matter if it works or not. You look at it and say, ‘Hey, I think we acquitted ourselves pretty good.’ That’s Rubicon No. 2.”

“Then the critics weigh in, that’s Rubicon No. 3, and that’s always up or down: ‘We hate it, we like it. This is the worst thing. … Oh hey, Tom, I saw you in a movie. It was cute.’ That’s when you ask the wife, ‘Hey, honey, could you take the revolver out of the glove box and hide it somewhere, because I think…”

After the critics comes the box office, and “then a ton of time goes by when none of that stuff matters anymore,” Hanks said. Time ultimately trumps whatever critics had to say about the film.

“The movie just exists exactly as it is outside of loser or winner status or thumbs up, thumbs down,” Hanks continued. “And that’s when this stuff comes around, where it’s like that this thing that didn’t work back then kind of does work now, or just the opposite, a thing that was huge back then is a museum piece and doesn’t really speak to anything.”

O’Brien then brought up “That Thing You Do!,” to which Hanks responded: “Let me tell you something about these cocksuckers who write about movies. Can I say that?”

Hanks remembered a critic who originally dissed “That Thing You Do!” by writing: “Tom Hanks has to stop hanging around with veterans of TV, because this is just like the shot on TV and it’s not much of anything.” As the decades passed and the film became a cult classic, the same critic weighed in and loved the movie. “They said, ‘All you need is 20 years between now and then, and it ends up speaking some words,’” the actor remembered.

“But that’s the thing we all signed up for,” Hanks concluded. “That’s the carnival, that’s the contest. I got faith in that. That’s okay.”

Hanks has been making the press rounds in support of his new movie “Here,” which reunites him with “Forrest Gump” director Robert Zemeckis and co-star Robin Wright. Listen to Hanks’ full interview on the “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast here.

“Starring Jerry as Himself” can be filed under “truth is stranger than fiction.” But it’s part truth and part fiction, or at least part drama, so it’s a bit of a slippery movie, in terms of both classification and credibility. 

The main character is a businessman named Jerry (Jerry Hsu) who came to America from China decades ago and became one of those people that politicians of every stripe like to single out during speeches as examples of the promise of America fulfilled: successful businessman, successful family man with many children, pillar of his community. Then one day he gets a call telling him that his bank account is being used to launder money, and that he’s going to need to participate in a sting operation run by two cops working for the Chinese government, Officer Zhang (Haosong Yang) and Inspector Ou (Fang Du). 

You could call this movie a “subjective documentary” if all documentaries weren’t already subjective in some way. What it mostly “documents” is one family’s version of a bizarre thing that happened to them. It’s loosely based on a true story, and most of the participants play themselves in what feels rather like a low-budget indie movie version of one of those true crime stories that appear on American television all the time. (Most of the movie consists of re-enactments, and once it kicks into that mode, the camera adopts an ominous low angle most of the time, and the screen shape becomes CinemaScope dimension, the official visual shorthand for “this is cinematic” whether it actually is or isn’t.) 

There’s a tradition in various world cinemas of people playing a version of themselves in stories that were based on things that really happened (Iran in the 1990s was especially good at these sorts of projects), but this one isn’t exactly a work in that tradition. It feels more like an incredibly elaborate home movie but directed by somebody who’s not actually part of the onscreen family: New York-based filmmaker Law Chen, who was also born in China. 

I don’t think it entirely works because documentaries that mold themselves after existing fiction film genres don’t truly satisfy unless the story being told could organically fit into that mold. James Marsh’s “Man on Wire,” a film about Phillip Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers, is probably the most successful example, relying heavily on re-creations that were shot and edited like pieces of a long lost 1970s heist flick.

This one is a pretty widely praised movie, so I guess I’m an outlier in saying that the re-creations are more clever than insightful, and that about halfway through the (thankfully brief) 74-minute running time, the determination to make the story fit into a certain prefabricated mold started to grate on me, because you can figure out what’s actually going on pretty fast, and after that, I didn’t find the “everyday person gets drawn into a police action” movie to be as inherently engrossing as a hypothetical straight documentary interviewing the participants would have been. 

But just because the movie is overthinking things, in a way, doesn’t mean there hasn’t been a great deal of thought put into it. A densely packed and propulsively edited montage of home video from the family opens the movie and sets up the re-enactments, and as “Starring Jerry as Himself” unfolds, you do start to realize that the film opened that way for reasons other than the almost guaranteed nostalgia-bath of seeing low-resolution video footage of actual people existing in a long-gone era. This is as much a movie about memory, psychology, and trust as it is an account of an event that seems pretty strange at first glance, but becomes stranger, deeper and sadder once you get to the bottom of it all.

Hardcover fiction

1. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $29) Two grieving brothers come to terms with their history and the people they love.

2. The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny (Minotaur: $30) The 19th mystery in the Armand Gamache series.

3. Playground by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton & Co.: $30) The Pacific Ocean-set novel explores one of the last wild places we have yet to colonize.

4. The Waiting by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown & Co.: $30) LAPD Det. Renée Ballard tracks a serial rapist whose trail has gone cold.

5. James by Percival Everett (Doubleday: $28) An action-packed reimagining of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

6. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Scribner: $30) A seductive and cunning American woman infiltrates an anarchist collective in France.

7. Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout (Random House: $30) A return to the town of Crosby, Maine, and its colorful cast of characters.

8. All Fours by Miranda July (Riverhead Books: $29) A woman upends her domestic life in this irreverent and tender novel.

9. Karla’s Choice by Nick Harkaway (Viking: $30) A new novel set in the world of John le Carré’s most iconic spy, George Smiley.

10. Colored Television by Danzy Senna (Riverhead Books: $29) A novelist in L.A. gets the opportunity to cash in on her biracial background..

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Hardcover nonfiction

1. Be Ready When the Luck Happens by Ina Garten (Crown: $34) The Barefoot Contessa shares the story of her rise in the food world.

2. The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates (One World: $30) The National Book Award winner travels to three sites of conflict to explore how the stories we tell, and the ones we don’t, shape our realities.

3. Patriot by Alexei Navalny (Knopf $35) The memoir of a political opposition leader who paid the ultimate price for his beliefs.

4. Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (Little, Brown & Co.: $32) The bestselling author reframes the lessons of his first book 25 years later.

5. Sonny Boy by Al Pacino (Penguin Press: $35) The legendary actor opens up about his life and creative journey.

6. War by Bob Woodward (Simon & Schuster: $32) The Pulitzer winner’s account of one of the most tumultuous periods in presidential politics and American history.

7. Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari (Random House: $35) How the flow of information has shaped us and our world across the centuries.

8. Brothers by Alex Van Halen (Harper $32) The rock ’n’ roll drummer shares his personal story in a tribute to brother and bandmate Eddie.

9. Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: $27) A guide to living a more meaningful life.

10. The Small and the Mighty by Sharon McMahon (Thesus: $32) A portrait of 12 ordinary Americans whose courage formed the character of our country.

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Paperback fiction

1. The Vegetarian by Han Kang (Hogarth: $17)

2. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Vintage: $19)

3. Blackouts by Justin Torres (Picadors: $20)

4. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante (Europa Editions: $17)

5. North Woods by Daniel Mason (Random House Trade Paperbacks: $18)

6. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper Perennial: $22)

7. The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman (Penguin: $18)

8. The Secret History by Donna Tartt (Vintage: $18)

9. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong (Penguin: $18)

10. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelh (Harper One: $18)

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Paperback nonfiction

1. The Art Thief by Michael Finkel (Vintage: $18)

2. The Body Keeps Score by Bessel van der Kolk M.D. (Penguin: $19)

3. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (Harper Perennial: $26)

4. The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan (Knopf: $35)

5. STEM for All by Leena Bakshi McLean (Jossey-Bass: $30)

6. Sinéad O’Connor (Melville House: $20)

7. The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron (TarcherPerigree: $20)

8. All About Love by bell hooks (Morrow: $17)

9. Of Time and Turtles by Sy Montgomery, ill. by Matt Patterson (Mariner: $22)

10. Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer (Milkweed Editions: $20)