Some of those tidbits are as grim as an outbreak of meningitis, while others are Tom Sawyer-like tales about men showing up to their own funerals and such. But Kidd is more Tom Hanks than Walter Cronkite, and so he tempers the political stuff that might enflame his agitated Confederate audiences with other morsels that might inspire a feeling of solidarity with their fellow man. Time is a flat circle that we tend to perceive as a straight line, but Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Hanks) is afraid of what might happen if he stops moving forward. Schlepping from one Texas border town to another like an old shark that’s outlived its appetite, the bearded journeyman travels around with a sheaf of newspapers in tow and reads their stories to whatever crowds he can find for 10 cents a head (roughly $2 at the current rate). It also doesn’t hurt that Greengrass hired director of photography Dariusz Wolski - a Ridley Scott regular - to steady his hand and help him find a happy medium between “Bloody Sunday” and “The Searchers.” “News of the World” might wagon over some rough terrain on its 400-mile odyssey from Wichita Falls to Castroville, but there’s no reason a nice Western starring dad mode Tom Hanks as a haunted Civil War vet should require a barf bag because of its camerawork. Lucky for we queasy sorts, the rest of this movie is also restrained in a way that allows for its potentially mawkish premise to unfold with easy grace, and for its unmissable commentary on today’s America to feel more inevitable than opportunistic. ‘Blue Beetle’ Review: At Least It’s Better than ‘Black Adam’?

But “ News of the World” isn’t much interested in telling a story about the way this country tends to burnish its bloodiest chapters into myth.Īdapted from Paulette Jiles’ novel of the same name, this weary and unvarnished road trip through Reconstruction-era Texas tells the story of two lost souls who are struggling to free themselves from their memories and find a way to become whole in a dusty nation that’s never been exactly generous with its healing. If Greengrass’ broadly entertaining (if gallingly relevant) film is a bit too soft and spread thin to hit with the emotional force that it could, so much of its simple power is owed to the grounded nature of the director’s approach, which allows these desperate characters to feel as if they’re trying to escape the very genre that threatens to define them forever. Known for the visceral, “shaky-cam” immediacy of a vérité style that’s proven bracingly chaotic in some movies (“Captain Phillips,” “United 93”) and utterly nauseating in others (“The Green Zone”), director Paul Greengrass might seem ill-suited to direct a Western - to work in that most sweeping and stoic of American genres.

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