News of the World

There is something inherently comforting about Tom Hanks in a waistcoat. He’s our collective cinematic father figure, and in News of the World, he leans into that "America’s Dad" energy with the weight of a man who has seen too many battlefields. I first caught this one during the long, gray winter of 2020, tucked under a weighted blanket while my radiator hissed and clanked like a ghost trying to escape a Victorian boiler room. At the time, the film felt like a strange mirror; here was a movie about a man traveling from town to town just to tell people what was happening in the world, released at a moment when we were all trapped in our houses, refreshing news feeds with shaky hands.

Directed by Paul Greengrass, a man usually associated with the caffeinated, shaky-cam chaos of the Bourne franchise (like The Bourne Supremacy), News of the World is a startlingly patient film. It’s a classic Western in the vein of The Searchers, but it swaps out the typical six-shooter nihilism for something more fragile: the desperate need for human connection and the power of a shared story.

A Different Kind of Gunslinger

The setup is simple, almost elemental. Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks) is a veteran of the Civil War who now makes a meager living reading newspapers to illiterate townspeople across North Texas. He’s essentially a 19th-century podcast, curated for people who have nothing but dust and hard labor. His life takes a sharp turn when he encounters a wrecked wagon and a young girl, Johanna (Helena Zengel), who was taken years ago by the Kiowa people and raised as one of their own.

Kidd finds himself tasked with transporting her across hundreds of miles of lawless territory to her surviving biological relatives. If that sounds like a retread of every "grumpy old man protects a child" trope you’ve seen since Logan or The Last of Us, you aren't wrong. However, the chemistry between Hanks and Zengel saves it from feeling like a formulaic chore. Zengel, who was incredible in the German film System Crasher, is a revelation here. She holds her own against Hanks by saying almost nothing, communicating through wary glances and a fierce, feral posture. The kid has more screen presence in a single stare than most A-listers have in a three-minute monologue.

Beauty in the Barren

Visually, the film is a feast, which makes its lackluster box office performance even more tragic. This was a movie designed for the biggest screen possible, yet most of us saw it on our TVs because of the pandemic theatrical blackout. Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski—who has lensed everything from The Martian to Prometheus—captures the Texas landscape with a dusty, golden reverence. There’s a shootout on a rocky hillside midway through the film that is a masterclass in tension and geography. You know exactly where every character is, how many bullets they have left, and just how much the wind is whistling through the scrubbrush.

What struck me most, though, was the score by James Newton Howard. It doesn’t lean on the bombastic "yee-haw" tropes of the genre. Instead, it’s mournful and atmospheric, emphasizing the isolation of the frontier. It’s the kind of music that makes you feel the grit in your teeth. I actually went out and bought the vinyl afterward, mostly because it’s the perfect background noise for staring out a window and pretending to be a brooding pioneer.

The Pandemic's Lost Child

In the grander scheme of contemporary cinema, News of the World feels like a bit of an outlier. We are living in an era of franchise saturation and "Legacy Sequels," yet here is a $38 million mid-budget adult drama that doesn't have a single post-credits scene or a superhero in sight. It’s the kind of movie studios are increasingly terrified to make for theaters, preferring to dump them onto streaming services where they can be consumed between TikTok scrolls.

Universal eventually sold the international rights to Netflix, which is how most of the world found it. It’s a shame, because the film’s central theme—the healing of a fractured nation—deserved a communal theatrical experience. Kidd is trying to stitch a divided post-Civil War Texas back together with words, at a time when nobody wants to hear the truth. It’s basically 'The Searchers' if John Wayne had a soul and a subscription to The New York Times. It’s remarkably relevant to our current polarized climate without being preachy or "message-heavy."

Interestingly, the production had to deal with the harsh realities of the New Mexico climate, which stood in for Texas. The crew reportedly dealt with flash floods and dust storms that were so intense they actually made it into the final cut of the film. That "authentic" grit isn't CGI; it's the result of Tom Hanks actually breathing in a significant portion of the American Southwest.

The film doesn't reinvent the Western wheel, and its ending is perhaps a bit more "Hollywood" than the rest of its gritty runtime suggests it should be. But in a landscape of loud, fast, and cynical movies, News of the World is a quiet, soulful reminder of why we tell stories in the first place. It’s a film about finding where you belong, even when the world feels like it’s falling apart at the seams. If you missed it during the 2020 chaos, it’s well worth a quiet evening on the couch—just make sure your radiator isn't making too much noise.