News of the World

Peter McGinn 6/23/2021 3:58:55PM 8.4

This doesn’t happen very often, but I actually read their book this movie was based on. I enjoy both. There were a couple of changes I noticed, but I wasn’t offended by them. With one it seemed they had Captain Kidd escape a jam with a speech rather than an explosion, and it worked for me. This is a quirky western and, as such, often ridiculed by western movie fans. It isn’t a classic in my book, but if it came on while I was eating (we multi-task by combining meals with movies), I wouldn’t feel the need to lean down to pick the controller up off the floor to change channels. I would let it run. I wasn’t surprised to see a few racist reviews on IMDB, but one comment on this website raised my eyebrows. Signs of the times, I guess.

badelf 5/14/2026 9:33:34PM 8.4

Paul Greengrass's News of the World is a handsomely mounted Western that looks and sounds like it has something to say, but ultimately settles for surfaces. Tom Hanks stars as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a Civil War veteran who travels through post-Reconstruction Texas reading newspapers aloud to scattered townspeople. When he encounters Johanna (Helena Zengel), a 10-year-old girl taken and raised by the Kiowa, he agrees to return her to her remaining family. The journey that follows is beautifully shot, impeccably acted, and frustratingly thin, a film that gestures toward complexity but refuses to commit. Hanks delivers exactly what you'd expect: a reserved, accomplished performance that radiates decency and quiet authority. Captain Kidd is a man of principle in a lawless time, and Hanks plays him with the kind of understated integrity that has become his signature. There's nothing showy here, just the steady presence of a master craftsman doing what he does best. Opposite him, Helena Zengel is remarkable. She charts Johanna's slow acceptance of Kidd, and eventually her attachment to him, with a patience and precision unusual for such a young actress. The relationship between them is the film's emotional anchor, and both actors handle it with care. The production values are equally impressive. The cinematography captures the harsh beauty of the Texas plains, all dust and wide skies and unforgiving light. The production design evokes a world in transition, caught between the end of one brutal chapter and the uncertain beginning of another. Greengrass stages several tense set pieces with his characteristic kinetic energy, and the film never looks less than stunning. On a technical level, News of the World is everything you'd want from a prestige Western. But the script is paper thin. For a film set during Reconstruction, in a Texas still reeling from the Civil War and wrestling with its treatment of Indigenous peoples, News of the World has almost nothing to say. It skirts every controversial topic, avoids taking a stand on anything that might unsettle an audience. The racial tensions of the era, the violence of westward expansion, the politics of a fractured nation trying to rebuild itself—all of it is present in the margins, acknowledged but never engaged. The film is content to show us a broken world without interrogating how it broke or what it might cost to repair. What remains is the relationship between Kidd and Johanna, and while it's genuinely affecting, it's insufficient to carry a two-hour film. Their journey is a familiar one: the gruff loner and the wounded child, learning to trust each other, discovering they need each other. It's done well, but it's not enough. The film gestures toward larger themes — the power of storytelling, the search for belonging, the question of what home means when everything you knew has been taken — but it never digs beneath the surface. It's typical Hollywood caution, the kind that makes you understand why so many of us turn to independent and foreign films these days. There's craft here, but no courage. News of the World is a film that could have been something more. It has the talent, the budget, the setting, the historical moment. But it chooses safety over substance, and the result is a movie that looks impressive and feels exceptionally hollow. Hanks and Zengel deserve better. So do we.

CinemaSerf 8/16/2026 4:24:46AM 8.4

With the American Civil War itself a memory but it's aftermath still polarising the country, travelling newsman "Kidd" (Tom Hanks) makes a living by reading, and embellishing, a collection of newspaper stories from home and abroad to an eager public keen to learn what's going on in the world. It's a solitary existence but he does appear to have a general direction in which he is headed, so we can assume that there is a wartime backstory there somewhere. Along the way, he encounters a young girl whom he calls "Johanna" (Helena Zengel). He has to give her a name because she only speaks in the tongue of the Kiowa who had raised her since she was small and now in a state of shock, she needs proper care - a care which he doesn't think neither himself nor his lifestyle will accommodate. The army isn't interested in her, though, and with the Indian agent away for months it falls to him to get her to safety - and so now we set across some harsh and unforgiving territory. Hanks does fine here, but he isn't a natural in the role and if anything it just reminded me of just how tough it actually is to pull off a Western convincingly. He tries to present us with a hard-nosed yet decent man, but somehow it just never really worked amidst the almost soft-focus photography and after a while the uncomfortably one-sided dialogue started to create a bit of a character vacuum too as the pair's relationship began to develop in an all too predictable a fashion. There are a few scenes that bring it to life a little, and there are certainly a few odious individuals who cross their path but this is more of a considered travelogue than an adventure, is often quite glacially paced, and though a very good looking film, I didn't love it.