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There’s an old-fashioned aesthetic in “News of the World” that might make it easy to dismiss as a “dad movie," something that plays on TNT in regular rotation for the next decade (which it almost certainly will), but this kind of finely-calibrated genre film is harder to pull off than it looks. There’s an attention to detail in every corner of this movie, including not just the period recreation but everything from James Newton Howard ’s lovely score to Tom Hanks ’ subtle performance. There’s something comforting about giving yourself over to an undeniably talented group of artists for two hours and just letting them tell you a story. That’s what this will be for many this holiday season. Yes, it’s relatively predictable and arguably a little thin in terms of ambition, but it’s also refined and nuanced in ways that these films often aren’t. Everyone here is at the top of their craft from the character actors who populate the ensemble to the two leads at its center to everyone behind the camera, and you can feel that from first frame to last.

Hanks reunites with his “ Captain Phillips ” director Paul Greengrass to play a very different kind of Captain in Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a traveler in Texas in 1870, not long after the end of the Civil War. Kidd is a newsreader, someone who travels from town to town and literally gets paid to read the news to the locals. Home delivery wasn’t a thing 150 years ago and many people in these small towns couldn’t even read, so they relied on people like Kidd to tell them what’s going on in the world. The chosen profession has made him something of an isolated wanderer, but it's also imbued a deep humanity in Kidd that has given him the air of an old-fashioned storyteller. He’s an entertainer as much as an informer, choosing what to read and how to present it. His travels and encounters also mean he can read people better than most, which will be essential for the next chapter of his life.

That starts when he comes across the scene of a murder. A Black driver has been hanged from a tree and a blonde girl looks at Kidd from the woods nearby. Kidd decides to take the girl he names Johanna (the excellent Helena Zengel ) to safety, even though she speaks no English and appears to have spent much of her young life in the captivity of Native Americans. She comes from German lineage but speaks Kiowa, and she was being taken to the authorities after the tribe who raised her was killed. Kidd realizes he will have to find this orphan a home.

These early scenes may be simple in narrative structure but Greengrass, Hanks, and the team behind the film add so much grace and nuance to them. Hanks has become such a subtle actor over the years, finding the little beats to define Kidd at every turn but never feeling showy. He’s so completely in the moment in this film, responding to each situation believably instead of sinking into the bland protagonist that could have hampered this film. It’s yet another recent turn of his that feels like it won’t get enough attention because he makes it look so easy (see also “Captain Phillips,” “ Bridge of Spies ” and “ Sully ,” among others).

“News of the World” becomes a road movie of sorts for Kidd and Johanna, with new encounters across the unstable landscape. (After the end of the Civil War, Texas was not exactly the safest place in the country.) Greengrass structures it in an episodic way that kind of detracts from the midsection, where the film sags a bit as it jumps from encounter to encounter. The set-up is so well done that watching the movie settle into a road trip may be a bit disappointing, although Greengrass brings out some of his action movie direction skills when they’re needed, such as in a tense shoot-out with some scumbags who try to buy Johanna. However, there’s a better version of “News of the World” that has slightly higher stakes. As difficult as the journey is, neither Kidd nor Johanna have a bruise or scar to show, even after jumping from a runaway horse and cart.

Greengrass is also smart enough to imbue his 1870 Western with some 2020 ideas. Kidd finds his way to Erath County, where the atmosphere is one of isolation and, sorry, fake news. The most prominent figure in the area, Mr. Farley ( Thomas Francis Murphy ) insists that Kidd read his propaganda newspaper about pushing out everyone from the area but the white people, and connections to disinformation in the modern age are not hard to make. And the idea of a man trying to bring a fractured nation back together through knowledge and decency has some relevance in 2020 too.

Not all of these themes are fully fleshed out, but “News of the World” stays together and stays entertaining because of its top-notch craft. It may feel like Greengrass’ most traditional film but there’s an energy to the direction here that’s not always apparent in a Western. It helps that it’s arguably the director’s most aesthetically striking film, with gorgeous vistas captured by Darius Wolski and one of the best scores of the year from James Newton Howard. And it’s so great to see so many wonderful faces filling out the cast like Ray McKinnon , Elizabeth Marvel , and Bill Camp . On paper, this simple tale well-told may not seem like it amounts to much, but, at the end of a year in which comfort was hard to find, this movie sometimes feels like a gift.

In theaters on Christmas Day .

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

News of the World (2020)

Rated PG-13 for violence, disturbing images, thematic material and some language.

118 minutes

Tom Hanks as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd

Helena Zengel as Johanna Leonberger

Fred Hechinger

Michael Angelo Covino

Thomas Francis Murphy as Merritt Farley

Elizabeth Marvel as Gannett

Mare Winningham as Jane

Neil Sandilands as Wilhelm Leonberger

Chukwudi Iwuji as Charles Edgefield

Paul Greengrass

Writer (based on the novel by)

Paulette Jiles
Luke Davies

Cinematographer

Dariusz Wolski
William Goldenberg
James Newton Howard

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News of the World Reviews

News Of The World doesn't do anything radically different than what we might come to expect from the Western but it is a well-directed, gorgeously shot film that gets the best out of its two stars at polar opposite stages in their careers.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 19, 2023

Shows the ingredients of a country at birth, against the backdrop of a newspaper mural that reports sins that are still happening in the second decade of the twentieth century, and this gives the film a spectacular pertinency. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Oct 11, 2022

News of the World, while mildly entertaining, needed a bit more grit and less preaching.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Sep 9, 2022

News of the World is a leisurely lark that showcases sturdy studio filmmaking, with a pair of powerful performances from Tom Hanks and Helena Zengel.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 1, 2022

“News of the World” simmers with current day relevancy, but it very much looks and feels like a classic Hollywood Western...

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 24, 2022

For the 1870s setting, the film is thoroughly modern.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 12, 2022

News Of The World is a quietly intriguing film, told at a gentle pace.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 1, 2022

News of the World is so straightforward that it could have been made by anyone, which is to say the craft is mostly invisible.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 17, 2022

Helena Zengel is an actress with a great future. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Nov 4, 2021

A frontier picaresque with gorgeous photography, two excellent lead performances, and a not-so-subtle jab at modern media manipulation.

Full Review | Sep 13, 2021

The reteaming once again works to create a satisfying movie that urges audiences to look beyond expected frailties and find reward in possibilities.

Full Review | Jul 16, 2021

News of the World is a triumph, and a reminder that Tom Hanks still has so much greatness left to give us.

Full Review | Jun 29, 2021

"News of the World" is an unconventional western. But regardless of your genre preference, Hanks and Zengel will win you over.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jun 22, 2021

While News of the World undoubtedly fails in some respects, it also succeeds in delivering the cathartic, contradictory pleasures of traditional, old-school Western, albeit with a modern, self-aware spin ...

Full Review | Jun 8, 2021

Coming at the end of a tumultuous 2020, it's never been clearer how dangerously naïve such generic 'hope and change' messaging actually is.

Full Review | Jun 5, 2021

A western drama that, in my opinion, is tepid and somewhat irregular when it presents the journey of a character who follows to the letter the stereotype of the upright and honest cowboy. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | May 12, 2021

It's a classic western, but an anti-western... It's beautifully done.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 10, 2021

Hanks is as watchable as ever and Helena Zengel terrific as the girl. Highly recommended.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 2, 2021

While Hanks is our hero, Helena Zengel steals the spotlight. This thirteen-year-old German actress shines in this role.

Full Review | Mar 26, 2021

Hanks is great, Zengel is a revelation and Greengrass provides incredible vistas and a heartwarming story.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Mar 25, 2021

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‘news of the world’: film review.

Tom Hanks and German discovery Helena Zengel star in 'News of the World,' a Western odyssey from Paul Greengrass about two broken people finding unity, set in Texas soon after the Civil War.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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The balm of the storyteller is central to the work of Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd, an ex-infantryman who travels from town to town in Texas five years after the Civil War, for a modest fee reading lively accounts of events from both nearby and far afield to people in need of healing. That same spirit informs Paul Greengrass ‘ News of the World , an epic Western with an intimate gaze that recalls The Searchers and True Grit , providing Tom Hanks with one of his best roles since the same director’s Captain Phillips .

In many ways the Universal release is a venture into more conventionally handsome, stately, even old-fashioned prestige-picture territory for a director better known for his propulsive, viscerally charged action. But that doesn’t make the textured canvas of evocative Americana any less affecting. Essentially a two-hander though enlivened by incisive secondary character turns along the way, it’s a drama made with tremendous feeling, an unhurried, contemplative tale peppered with nail-biting set-pieces. Despite its setting 150 years ago, it carries soothing resonance at a time of bitter national divisions, when cultural otherness has been demonized and the value of news reporting under attack.

Release date: Dec 25, 2020

Adapted by Greengrass and Luke Davies ( Lion ) from the 2016 novel by Paulette Jiles, the story is one of strangers finding communion and mutual comfort, two people whose families have been torn apart by conflict, bound together by circumstance and then by a growing trust as their shared sense of loss becomes apparent. It benefits immeasurably from the constantly shifting dynamic between Hanks’ Captain Kidd and Helena Zengel, the young discovery from last year’s System Crasher , as 10-year-old Johanna, a German immigrant raised by the Kiowa people since her parents were killed six years earlier.

One of the news stories read by the captain from his traveling case full of papers concerns the Pacific Railroad’s decision to open a new line from the Kansas border all the way to Galveston, marking the first train to pass through what were then called Indian reservations. The rugged landscape of dusty plains and hill country was shot in New Mexico by Dariusz Wolski in spare, striking widescreen compositions with a painterly eye, in contrast to the gritty hand-held agility of the town scenes. The expansive vistas are a mostly empty space, serene at times, at others exposed to dangers both human and elemental. Those threats are magnified for Captain Kidd when he finds himself in the unaccustomed position of caring for a child.

A somber man in his 60s, the captain is fastidious about his appearance for his live readings, taking his role seriously as a service-provider to hard-working people still struggling to grasp the losses of the war, figure out where they stand in the new America and accept the federal mandate that they do their part in the recovery effort. Kidd is an empathetic voice who tries to soothe their rancor. “We’re all hurting,” he tells the crowd.

Hanks has built a career out of playing thoroughly decent men, so his casting here is entirely to type. But the soulfulness and sorrow, the innate compassion that ripple through his characterization make this an enormously pleasurable performance to watch, with new depths of both kindness and regret that keep revealing themselves.

Riding out from Wichita Falls in 1870, he follows a trail of blood to a tree where a Black man has been lynched, a handbill tacked to the dead man’s shirt reading, “Texas Says No! This is White Man’s Country.” He chases down the terrified Johanna not far from the scene. Retrieving government paperwork from the wrecked wagon on which she was traveling, Kidd learns she is being taken, against her will, to live with her biological aunt and uncle on their farm near San Antonio. Passing lawmen shrug off responsibility for the girl, instructing the captain to take her to the Indian Agency representative at Red River.

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Tom Hanks rides to the rescue in unhurried Western News of the World : Review

Nearly everything about News of the World follows the contours of a classic true-grit Western — hardscrabble characters, pioneer vistas, taciturn script. But Paul Greengrass ’s sparse, raw-boned drama (in theaters Dec. 25) also feels like something else beneath the pearl-handled pistols and prairie dust: not so much a war movie as a post-war one, its whole psychology colored by the collective trauma of a young country still torn and battle-sore.

To carry those multitudes, the film has the steady, mournful squint of Tom Hanks as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, now several years without his troops and traversing Texas as a news reader — a sort of one-man analog CNN, bringing the headlines of the day to any small town or settlement with enough residents to drop a few coins in his collection bowl.

It’s on one of those rounds in 1870 just outside Wichita Falls that he comes across a terrified girl (Helena Zengel) alone in an overturned wagon, her Black chaperone hung by unknown marauders. She only speaks Kiowa and a few snatches of her birth parents’ native German, but the official letter she carries lets Kidd fill in the blanks: Separated from her family in a raid and raised by her Native American captors, then reclaimed again by the government, she’s now effectively twice orphaned and due to be sent to living relatives further down South.

Kidd is not a man looking for a small companion, though the brusque indifference of the local bureaucracy doesn’t leave him much choice. Rather than abandon her to her fate at a way station clearly not designed for unaccompanied minors, he decides to deliver the girl himself. Those good intentions launch the pair on their quixotic journey — possibly a fool’s errand, part endurance test and part obstacle course — across the treacherous plains of 19 th -century Texas.

Greengrass, the British filmmaker who seems to toggle steadily between the broody international action of multiple Bourne movies and starker verité experiments like United 93 and 22 July , has worked with Hanks once before, on 2013’s Captain Phillips . And he frames his star in scene after scene of austere beauty, though his bare screenplay, co-penned with Luke Davies ( Lion ) from the 2016 novel of the same name by Paulette Giles, often isn’t much more than stations of the cross for its two main characters; a series of hurdles and hardships to overcome.

That’s where the requisite Hanks-ian gifts come in, the soul and heft of the 64-year-old actor’s presence imbuing every line and all the long silences in between. Berlin native Zengel, too, is remarkable, her fierce, lucid performance almost entirely contained in non-verbal cues and gestures. As two people stripped of home and human comforts and in some sense of hope, it’s inevitable that the storyline will cement their bond. In that, the movie offers few surprises and even less alacrity; and yet there's a cumulative weight to World that feels, if hardly new, still worth sitting through. Grade: B+

‘News of the World’ Review: ‘True Grit’ Meets ‘The Searchers’ in Dry Tom Hanks Western

Favoring scenery over incident, Paul Greengrass and Tom Hanks reunite for a long, slow road movie across the state of Texas, co-starring a 10-year-old girl who barely speaks.

By Peter Debruge

Peter Debruge

Chief Film Critic

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Tom Hanks is the kind of actor about whom we accept the aphorism that he could read the phone book and make it sound great. Reuniting Hanks with “Captain Phillips” director Paul Greengrass , laconic Western “ News of the World ” tests that theory by casting the star as a news reader, a Civil War veteran who travels across Texas to deliver the nation’s headlines to small-town residents hungry for updates from afar — and the result, while gorgeous to behold, is only slightly more exciting than the phone book option might have been.

For a dime a head, crowds congregate to hear Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Hanks) recite stories culled from various broadsheets — news that ranges from Reconstruction policies to miners’ strikes. It’s a fascinating occupation, especially in light of where attitudes toward “the media” stand today, reflective of a time when the public didn’t take 24/7 news coverage for granted, and when it wasn’t nearly so skeptical of whatever political agenda might be lurking in the publishers’ hearts.

But “News of the World” doesn’t dwell much on Capt. Kidd’s job. Adapted by Greengrass and Luke Davies (“Lion”) from Paulette Jiles’ 2016 novel, this is a straightforward road movie more concerned with Hanks’ uncommon travel companion — call it “Captain Kidd and the Kid.” Very early in the film, Hanks’ character comes across Johanna (Helena Zengel), a young German girl, hardly 10 years old, who had been kidnapped by the Kiowa and is now due to be escorted to her only surviving kin, an aunt and uncle down in Castroville. “An orphan twice over,” Johanna doesn’t speak, doesn’t remember even the basics of her upbringing (fork and knife are as foreign to her as the English language) and doesn’t have any interest in traveling for days to meet these relatives.

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What we have here is a cross between two classic John Wayne movies: “The Searchers” and “True Grit.” In the former, Wayne played a Civil War vet determined to rescue Natalie Wood from Comanche, only to discover that she’s experiencing a form of Stockholm syndrome, reluctant to return to white society. In the latter, the Duke embodied ornery, eye-patched U.S. marshal Rooster Cogburn, who accompanies an orphaned farm girl as she avenges her parents’ murder.

These are promising reference points, although Hanks doesn’t fill the boots of the frontier scalawag in quite the way Wayne did. He’s too likable a star from the outset, practically genteel in his comportment, whereas the film’s arc asks us to accept him as a damaged loner, grouchy about being saddled with such a responsibility as this uncommunicative and seemingly ungrateful child. For this dynamic to work, we have to believe that both parties would rather not be sharing one another’s company. Zengel is convincingly obstinate (if no fun to be around), whereas Hanks comes across as an adoptive father figure from the get-go.

Director Sam Mendes attempted such against-type casting with Hanks 18 years ago on “Road to Perdition,” featuring him as a hired gun on the run with his son, and it was tough buying the actor in that capacity there too (although that film offered more action). In “News of the World,” Capt. Kidd and Johanna need to get from point A to point B without getting killed, and we can be fairly certain that one of two things will happen: Either one of them will die en route, or they’ll reach the drop-off and realize they actually belong together.

Suspense is not the film’s strong suit, and while the trek in between needn’t be dull, Greengrass has made it curiously unengaging. The road genre is episodic by its very nature, and yet, apart from a showdown with a man named Almay (Michael Angelo Covino, so great in “The Climb”) who wants to “buy” Johanna for purposes of prostitution, this quest is disappointingly incident deficient — which is to say, boring.

Young actor Zengel projects a wonderfully defiant attitude, though the scenery proves consistently more satisfying than what’s happening in the foreground as Capt. Kidd spouts exposition to a character who doesn’t understand English. On the open plains, they compare vocabulary, which is about as thrilling as it sounds.

Things pick up during the Almay segment, inspiring a high-speed chase on horses that abruptly cuts from late night to the following day, suggesting miles and miles of pursuit. It’s one of the more impressive passages of the book as well, as Jiles describes the shrewd survivalist instincts that allow Capt. Kidd and Johanna to outwit the bandits who outnumber them. In the film, Greengrass and Davies invent a situation in which the two characters work together to defend themselves, including a clever bit where Johanna turns a can full of dimes into a deadly weapon.

The movie could have used more such scenes, or a bit more meat to this one. As presented, the shootout feels clipped and unnecessarily brutal, shocking in its violence, yet clearly of the mind that it would be unseemly to linger on the carnage. Characters die in a spray of blood, and the movie moves on right away — conceived as a sign of good taste, and yet, the stark split-second image of someone dying (or later, Kidd’s horse tumbling down a hill) somehow feels more exploitative than staring might have been.

As Capt. Kidd says of this altercation in the book, “Some people were born unsupplied with a human conscience and those people needed killing.” Proud as Jiles must be of this judgment, it’s not a sentiment we can easily imagine Hanks uttering, which suggests the gap between the author’s image of the character and the one Greengrass and Hanks have created. Beats me why the pair felt compelled to make this movie. Unless they’re “The Wild Bunch” bloody (à la “Django Unchained” and the Coens’ “True Grit” remake), Westerns do notoriously poor business with contemporary audiences. And if it’s a genre that appeals to Greengrass and Hanks, there are countless better novels from which to draw.

Greengrass, best known for the jittery, immersive approach he brought to the “Bourne” sequels, has slipped back into a more classical mode here. The film’s stately aesthetic no doubt owes in part to working with DP Dariusz Wolski, a regular Ridley Scott collaborator who delivers crisp, high-definition widescreen vistas (lensed in New Mexico, doubling for Texas), some of them downright painterly, amid all that golden dirt.

It all builds to a big dust storm, which would have been the showstopper, had it not been upstaged by the relatively low-budget “Dreamland” earlier in the fall. “News of the World” may work for those who find themselves invested in the relationship between this wounded officer and his feral charge, but as the story of a man who reads the news to “anyone with 10 cents and the time to hear it,” your time and your dime might be better invested somewhere else.

Reviewed online, Los Angeles, Nov. 30, 2020. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 118 MIN.

Production: A Universal Pictures release and presentation of a Playtone, Pretty Pictures production. Producers: Gary Goetzman, Gail Mutrux, Gregory Goodman. Executive producers: Steven Shareshian, Tore Schmidt.
Crew: Director: Paul Greengrass. Screenplay: Paul Greengrass, Luke Davies, based on the novel by Paulette Jiles. Camera: Dariusz Wolski. Editor: William Goldenberg. Music: James Newton Howard.
With: Tom Hanks, Helena Zengel, Elizabeth Marvel, Michael Angelo Covino, Fred Hechinger, Thomas Francis Murphy.

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Cast & crew
User reviews

News of the World

A Civil War veteran agrees to deliver a girl taken by the Kiowa people years ago to her aunt and uncle against her will. They travel hundreds of miles and face grave dangers as they search f... Read all A Civil War veteran agrees to deliver a girl taken by the Kiowa people years ago to her aunt and uncle against her will. They travel hundreds of miles and face grave dangers as they search for a place that either can call home. A Civil War veteran agrees to deliver a girl taken by the Kiowa people years ago to her aunt and uncle against her will. They travel hundreds of miles and face grave dangers as they search for a place that either can call home.

Paul Greengrass
Luke Davies
Paulette Jiles
Helena Zengel
714 User reviews
247 Critic reviews
73 Metascore
5 wins & 80 nominations total

Captain Kidd

Cavalry Lieutenant
Cavalry Rider
(as John Travis Johnson)

Union Duty Officer

Simon Boudlin

Doris Boudlin
Red River Heckler

Federal Soldier

Young Progressive Speaker
(as Brenden Wedner)

Mrs. Gannett

Almay's Man

Dallas Federal Officer

Dallas Federal Soldier
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

Trivia Paul Greengrass said in an interview in the New York Times on 12/30/2020 how this movie "is the first film I made with a child actor at the heart of it" and he thought that it would be very difficult to cast the role of Johanna but when he saw Helena Zengel 's audition, he said she "was the only person I really had to look at" and that it "was the easiest decision in the film".
Goofs John Calley calls the Central Texas area "Kiowa country" when he splits from Kidd and Johanna. However, in 1870 that area was unquestionably Comanche territory ("Comanchería"). The Kiowa roamed further north.

Captain Kidd : See all those words printed in a line one after the other? Put 'em all together and you have a story.

Connections Featured in The Graham Norton Show: Tom Hanks/Jessica Chastain/Emily Blunt/Jamie Dornan/Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall/Nish Kumar/Sophie Ellis-Baxtor (2020)
Soundtracks Prairie Dog Song Traditional

User reviews 714

bastille-852-731547
Dec 28, 2020
How long is News of the World? Powered by Alexa
If you are reluctant to attend a cinema release of this movie, are there any alternatives?
When Captain Kidd first meets Johanna he also finds an official document that has her background story, including her birth name. Where did that information come from? Even if there was a missing person report filed several years earlier, how could anyone make the connection that the little girl they found with the Kiowa was the little girl who had been taken several years earlier?
December 25, 2020 (United States)
United States
Official Facebook
Official Instagram
North American Indian
Chuyến Đi Định Mệnh
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
Perfect World Pictures
Pretty Pictures
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$38,000,000 (estimated)
$12,668,325
Dec 27, 2020

Technical specs

Runtime 1 hour 58 minutes
Dolby Atmos
Dolby Digital
Dolby Surround 7.1

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News Of The World Review

01 Jan 2021

News Of The World

A word cloud describing filmmaker Paul Greengrass , director of the best Bourne flicks, United 93 and Captain Phillips , would surely include “intense”, “political”, “shakycam” and “immediate”. What you wouldn’t expect to find is “stately”. But for News Of The World , based on the novel by Paulette Giles, Greengrass has made his most stylistically conventional, aesthetically beautiful flick to date, a Western that pitches the director’s Captain Phillips compadre Tom Hanks , America’s dad, as a surrogate parent shepherding a nearly mute pre-teen across rugged, perilous terrain. Swapping handheld edginess for gorgeous sweeping drone shots and James Newton Howard’s colourful score, it’s less immersive and gripping than his best work but it’s more expansive, perfectly played, and packs a helluva punch when it finally (and quietly) drops its emotional motherlode.

The latest entry in Hanks’ platoon of Captains is Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, an ex-infantryman who moves from town to town in Texas in 1870 (five years after the Civil War), reading the news to enrapt audiences. A kind of Huw Edwards on horseback, Kidd delivers stories ranging from a meningitis outbreak to the Pacific Railroad building new train tracks through “Indian reservations” to tall tales about men who come back from the dead. Playing a man obsessed with stories so he doesn’t have to deal with his own, Hanks relishes spinning current affairs, to the extent you wish Kidd would host Newsnight . En route between towns, Kidd comes across a lynched Black man hanging from a tree that leads him to an abandoned pre-teen girl, Johanna (Helena Zengel), of German origin but raised by the Kiowa tribe, being taken to her biological aunt and uncle on their farm in San Antonio. When Kidd is unable to offload the child, he makes the decision to take the child himself. “A little girl is lost. She needs to go home,” might be the most Tom Hanks-y dialogue ever.

As much as _News Of The World_ is about America in the 1870s, it also dovetails seamlessly into the 21st century.

So begins an odd-couple odyssey, with Kidd trying to bond with Johanna over the thousand-mile journey. Greengrass and co-writer Luke Davies ( Lion ) don’t make life easy for Kidd or themselves by making the language barrier insurmountable. An innkeeper ( Elizabeth Marvel ) speaks Kiowa and ekes out a little of Johanna’s backstory; with her German immigrant parents killed by the Kiowa people, then her new Native American family killed by soldiers, she is “an orphan twice over”. What follows are charming, if familiar, scenes as Kidd tries to ‘civilise’ Johanna (wearing a dress, eating with cutlery, teaching her English) while Johanna teaches him songs, slowly opening him up.

As much as News Of The World is about America in the 1870s, it also dovetails seamlessly into the 21st century. This is very much a disunited States of America, the post-Civil War Reconstruction era serving up a landscape of racism run amok, where difference has been demonised and the notion of news has been devalued. This idea emerges as Kidd and Johanna run into Farley (Thomas Francis Murphy), the governor of a lawless camp of renegades. With obvious Trumpian parallels, Farley insists that Kidd read out a doctored, self-aggrandising version of his story, which the newsman distorts in an upbeat way but with dangerous results. Made extra eerie by the skinned buffalos lying around the settlement, it’s a portrayal of proud boys who have driven away Native Americans, Mexicans and Black people that feels horrifyingly relevant.

Between the modern-day parallels Greengrass doesn’t skimp on classic Wild West spectacle. The best set-piece is a sustained sequence of cat and mouse as Kidd and Johanna are chased by a trio looking to buy Johanna for nefarious purposes that ends up in a shootout in a rocky hillside. This isn’t movie-movie gun-play. Instead, it’s about how difficult it is to actually shoot someone, with Johanna’s street smarts bolstering Kidd’s cool logic. Other action licks include a runaway cart and that most modern of natural disasters: the badly CG’d dust cloud (to be fair to Greengrass, he renders Kidd caught in the melee almost as abstract animation). A breakout star from excellent German drama System Crasher , Zengel doesn’t overplay the feral kid routine, instead, almost entirely through facial expressions, imbuing Johanna with toughness mixed with an earned vulnerability. Without a shred of sentimentality, Hanks invests Kidd, a man away from his wife for five years due to the war, trying to process the horrors he has seen, with dignity and compassion but perhaps in a more sombre, tortured register than we are used to — a coda provides huge emotional wallop wrapped in a velvet glove.

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Review: news of the world with tom hanks.

Bob Mondello

Tom Hanks travels from town to town in the Texas frontier a few years after the Civil War, reading newspapers to settlers. When he comes across a young girl who was kidnapped, his life changes.

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clock This article was published more than 3 years ago

Tom Hanks stars in the broad-minded, bighearted western ‘News of the World’

The backdrop against which the action of “News of the World” unfolds is a Texas in transition. Set during Reconstruction, and starring Tom Hanks as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd — an itinerant Confederate veteran who makes his meager living reading a curated selection of newspaper articles aloud to audiences for a dime a head — this broad-minded, bighearted western tale takes place in a frontier (emblematic of a whole country, really) that is undergoing awkward and sometimes violent growing pains.

Don’t-tread-on-me Texans, Native Americans, new European immigrants, Mexicans, Blacks freed from slavery — but still subject to lynching, as the film’s opening makes clear — mix uncomfortably with Northern Blues, the Union soldiers struggling to maintain an uneasy peace.

It’s a wild, wild West, but not precisely the kind you may be used to from a diet of cinematic Cowboys-and-Indians.

That’s the stage on which a decidedly smaller, but ultimately extraordinarily moving drama unfolds: Kidd, in his wanderings to bring stories that expand the narrow horizons of his listeners, comes across a child (Helena Zengel) whose parents, German settlers, had been killed years ago by Kiowa raiders, who have raised her. En route to relatives after being freed, the almost feral orphan once again finds herself alone after her military escort is killed. When no one else is available to take her to an aunt and uncle all the way on the other side of the state — through Kiowa country and a small town run by a tinpot potentate — Kidd reluctantly agrees to do so.

Based on Paulette Jiles’s 2016 novel, “News” is, in its broadest contours, a story akin to “True Grit,” although the girl, named Johanna, doesn’t really want to accompany her older protector at all. Despite hair so blond it’s almost white, she’s Kiowa, as far as Johanna can remember, and orphaned twice over. (She tells Kidd her name is “Cicada,” in a rudimentary communication, which involves pantomime, Kiowa and primitive English. The relationship is just as prickly and stumbling, on both sides. )

‘News of the World’ book review: Can a 10-year-old girl ever recover from years in captivity?

That changes when Kidd and Johanna have a run-in with a disreputable sort (Michael Angelo Covino) who means to “buy” Johanna, presumably for child prostitution. She’s smart enough to know a bad guy when she sees one, and to come to accept Kidd, who will have none of it, as the hero he is. In that sense, “News” is like almost every other western. Still, it works.

As an increasingly tender bond develops between Kidd and Johanna, it becomes clear that each of them is as broken as the other. Kidd’s painful backstory of loss and healing, which only comes out over time, is, like Johanna’s, a metaphor for a nation in need of mending.

One of the most rewarding subtexts of the film is the theme of journalism — as a balm to dress the wounded provincialism of post-Civil War America. Kidd doesn’t report — or even write — the news, but he recognizes that, in telling stories, there are truths that can restore our humanity.

That’s the beating heart of Jiles’s story. It’s one that director Paul Greengrass, assisted by his leading man from “Captain Phillips” and his co-writer Luke Davies, have deftly transplanted to the screen, no matter how large or small the one you end up watching on may be.

PG-13. At area theaters on Dec. 25. Contains violence, disturbing images, mature thematic material and some strong language. 118 minutes.

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The Gorgeous, Moving News of the World Features Tom Hanks at His Best

This review originally ran in December 2020. We are republishing the piece on the occasion of the film’s release on demand.

News of the World might be set in post-Civil War Texas, but it opens with mention of a meningitis outbreak and ends with mention of a cholera outbreak — a subtle (or maybe not-so-subtle) reminder from director Paul Greengrass that even when he makes movies set at a fixed point in the past they’re ultimately about the way things are now. Based on Paulette Jiles’s 2016’s excellent novel, News of the World follows Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks), a former captain in the Confederate army, as he attempts to transport Johanna (Helena Zengel), a 10-year-old German girl raised by the Kiowa, back to what remains of her family. In another era — back when the Western genre was a vessel for all sorts of myths about white settlement and civilization — the film might have been about the return of a lost, wild soul to the comforts of an imagined community. News of the World has the elegiac mood and epic look of a classic Western, but its vision of civilization is a lot more complicated. No place in this movie feels like home, for either Kidd or Johanna. The stops on their journey seem increasingly stifling, empty, violent, hellish. These two are nomads both practically and spiritually.

Kidd’s job is to go from town to town reading newspapers from around the world to the public. He mixes bits of current events with evocative tales from distant lands, half-performing his narratives to heighten the crowd’s interest. In her novel, Jiles makes it clear that this dead-end job is all that this former printer could get. The film version of Kidd invests him with a bit more nobility and power: He understands the effect that his stories can have on his audience, and over the course of the movie, he learns to wield that power more pointedly. His tales speak of mysterious occurrences, wondrous inventions, political happenings — and they all serve to open up the world and maybe even place the listener somewhere in it. As Kidd reads and his audiences respond, we feel like we’re watching the start of something strange, new, and fearsome: the beginnings of a connected, self-aware society.

Kidd and Johanna, like many of Greengrass’s characters, straddle different tribes during a time of enormous change. He’s a defeated, reluctant soldier from an army that no longer exists, with bad memories of a gruesome war, but he also charges his stories with a sense of wonder and optimism that feels genuine. Hanks brings his usual affability and understated authority to the part, but he also brings weariness and melancholy: News of the World feels like the first real Old Man Tom Hanks movie, and it’s the most moving he’s been in years. (I’d argue it’s his best work since his last collaboration with Greengrass, Captain Phillips .) Johanna, meanwhile, has been torn from two different families — one German, one Kiowa — right at the point when she’s supposed to be developing her identity. The film’s most heartbreaking moment finds her on the edge of a river, standing on a cliff in the pouring rain, crying and begging for a migrating Native American tribe half-visible across the water to take her back to her Kiowa family.

Meanwhile, all around our two rootless protagonists stretches the failed state of Texas, which Greengrass shoots with the wide-eyed immersiveness he brought in previous films to war-torn Northern Ireland and post-U.S. invasion Baghdad. It’s a land alternating between immense spaces and crowded towns that seethe with division and menace, broken places filled with broken people. But this time, the director opts to forgo the unhinged, handheld “shaky-cam” aesthetic that started to become a punchline in some of his films. News of the World is hauntingly gorgeous, with vistas you can lose yourself in and a James Newton Howard score that lilts and quavers and sweeps. It feels odd to see a Western in 2020 that actually dares to be a Western, especially coming from a director who for so long specialized in urgent, high-tech, ripped-from-the-headlines thrillers. But maybe that’s not so odd a combination. News of the World has the trappings of an old-fashioned epic, but it also has a restless, modern soul.

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‘News of the World’ Review: Tom Hanks Is the Captain Again in Paul Greengrass’ Modest Western

David ehrlich.

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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. 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.

Adapted 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.

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.

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). 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.

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. Telling other people’s stories prevents him from having to confront his own, and Kidd’s silence on the matter leaves us to guess at the horrors he saw (and likely perpetuated) in the Civil War and draw certain assumptions about why he’s not with his wife in San Antonio. It’s hard for a man to find peace in a country that refuses to stop fighting with itself, or to heal in a country that can’t help but pick at its scabs.

It can be just as hard for a pre-teen girl to do the same, though Cicada (“System Crasher” star Helena Zengel) is one of the only 10-year-olds who might be able to recognize Kidd’s demons. They meet by chance on a dirt road somewhere, as Kidd comes across the lynched body of a Black serviceman left behind as a warning for other former slaves and any Northerners who might be sympathetic to their cause; the only Black character in a movie that’s narrowly focused on nice white people who don’t identify with their own kind.

Cicada — a headstrong beanpole known as Johanna Leonberger before the fair-skinned blonde was taken in by the Kiowa tribe who killed her German immigrant birth parents — certainly falls into that category. Cicada’s identity is as complicated and unsettled as that of the country around her, and her past stained with so much of its violence. She’s an orphan twice over by the time Kidd reluctantly agrees to pick up where the murdered serviceman left off and deliver the girl to her aunt and uncle. He doesn’t know it yet, but they’re both going in the same direction.

It goes without saying that Hanks — peerless as ever, and the captain now once more — is excellent at playing Kidd’s tortured dignity, and so indivisibly humane that it’s hard to recognize the role he served in the Confederacy (a shot of Hanks squinting into a periwinkle sunset or blowing dust off an old cup is all it takes for Kidd’s heartache to resonate as if it were your own). The movie needs you to take it for granted that Kidd rejected slavery even as he slaughtered innocent men to defend it, and you do, but the character is so palpably cursed and unable to forgive himself that it doesn’t quite feel as if Greengrass and Luke Davies’ script is letting him off the hook that easy.

Cicada, or Johanna, or whatever it’s ultimately right to call her threads a similar needle between archetype and specificity. The girl only speaks Kiowa, and she behaves according to the customs of her adoptive tribe, but the movie never mistakes her differences for “wildness” in the way that some of its duller characters might. Zengel isn’t feral, even when she’s playing afraid; her performance is smart and heartsick from the very beginning, and the language barrier doesn’t blunt our sense that she longs to reunite with the Kiowa despite understanding that she could never be one of them (less certain is Greengrass’ decision to keep the indigenous people at a ghostly remove, like the elves migrating towards the Undying Lands in “The Lord of the Rings”).

Hanks and Zengel inhabit their characters with such mottled clarity that “News of the World” can speed through a lot of the cringe-worthy cliches that such a mismatched pair must survive on their way to becoming friends (or family). At an all-too-recognizable time when everyone in America seems to be scared of each other, Kidd and Cicada tap into a mutual rootlessness; they’re both looking for a home they can keep, even if they can’t speak to what that might entail. The bond between them is limited by the narrow road it travels, but at least there aren’t any painfully drawn-out scenes of Cicada trying to run away or anything like that, while the obligatory gun fight that bonds them together is so drawn-out and well-staged that it transcends the raw utility of its place in this story (it’s enough to overlook the dreadful CGI boulder that rolls through the middle of the sequence).

“News of the World” travels fast — fast enough that you can literally see the wheels coming off Kidd’s wagon — and the A1 story it tells on the way there seldom digs much deeper than a good headline. While the detours offer a more complete picture of a country divided against itself (brace for the lengthy pitstop in a town ruled by a self-appointed business king who publishes his own newspapers), the film only moves forward on the strength of its moral velocity, and it lacks the muscle needed to reach the end of the journey without getting tired.

The bumpy road back to themselves finds Kidd and Cicada forging an uneven path through some new memories — a path draped in the dull colors of real life and potholed by actors with great faces, all of whom get to shine for a scene or two before the movie rolls along. The best of these cameos belongs to the great Bill Camp , who Greengrass saves the latter for a third act scene that shows how two great performers can elevate an exposition dump into an emotional gut-punch. These are the moments where “News of the World” is at its most urgent — when this bittersweet but richly sentimental Western pauses to reflect on the double-edged power of the stories we tell ourselves, and the power that telling them to each other gives us to change what happens in the next chapter. Everything else is just copy.

Universal Pictures will release “News of the World” in theaters on Christmas Day.

As new movies open in theaters during the COVID-19 pandemic, IndieWire will continue to review them whenever possible. We encourage readers to follow the safety precautions provided by CDC and health authorities. Additionally, our coverage will provide alternative viewing options whenever they are available.

News of the World review – Tom Hanks rides straight down the middle

Hanks’s former Confederate captain tries to help Helena Zengel’s terrified orphan across lawless post-civil war Texas in this Paul Greengrass western that rarely comes alive

T om Hanks leads this handsomely shot but stolid and blandly self-satisfied western, based on the 2016 novel by Paulette Jiles; it’s directed by Paul Greengrass (who co-wrote the screenplay with Luke Davies) but mostly without the dynamism and visceral action he’s known for. Hanks plays Kidd, a former Confederate captain with a secret sadness in his heart, making a living in the troubled and lawless state of Texas after the civil war, travelling around like a huckster or a preacher, reading aloud stories from the newspapers to the mostly illiterate townsfolk for 10 cents a head. One hot afternoon, he chances across the body of a hanged black man who has evidently had the charge of a terrified and now mute little white girl that Kidd finds cowering nearby. This is Johanna, whose German migrant pioneer family were slaughtered by Kiowa Native American warriors, who took Johanna away and renamed her “Cicada” but who were then slaughtered in their turn by white marauders. Lonely, rueful Kidd makes it his business to take Johanna to her German aunt and uncle, who must be persuaded to take her in. They are reasonably near San Antonio – where he can also finally make a reckoning with his own demons. As for Johanna, or Cicada, she sometimes speaks Kiowa and sometimes German but mostly nothing at all. Yet she has certain warrior skills which are to be vital for their survival. Johanna is played by the fierce young child actor Helena Zengel who made such an amazingly strong impression in the recent German drama System Crasher , in which she played a troubled nine-year-old problem child whose anarchic energy brings the social services to breaking point. Sadly, this script and this movie don’t allow her to let rip in anything like the same way.

Zengel and Hanks trot along together, sort of like Mattie Ross and Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, or even Mowgli and Baloo in The Jungle Book: an odd couple who never really have a falling out, or even that much of a falling in. Tom Hanks’s own nice-guy persona encompasses the movie’s unspoken accommodations and triangulations: Kidd is a former Confederate soldier (bad) but now a mild campaigner in the cause of peace and reconciliation (good). Johanna/Cicada has seen her white kin murdered by Native Americans and then her adoptive Native American kin murdered by white bandits. So she is steered straight down the middle path of 21st-century victimhood equivalence. The one moment where the movie really comes alive, and when something really seems to be at stake, is when three deeply unpleasant men come to Kidd’s news-reading and take a vicious interest in the little blond child. They ask Kidd how much he wants for her, sneering that they could just as well take her by force. A very tense chase ensues, with Kidd all too well aware that, although he has a pistol, his shotgun is filled only with useless birdshot. This is one moment where Hanks’s risk-free decency is sensationally tested. Here are vicious murderous sex trafficker paedophiles, and Kidd must kill or be killed. It’s a powerful scene, where Greengrass’s action expertise suddenly flares up. And the rest of the time? Well, the movie is presented to us like the unexceptionable news stories that Kidd reads aloud to his crowd with a liberal message, and – disconcertingly – the liveliest news-reading scene is saved for the very end, almost happening over the closing credits. I found myself thinking of Hanks’s other “Southern” role: the sinister dandy and criminal mastermind Goldthwaite Higginson Dorr in the Coens’ ill-starred remake of the Ealing classic The Ladykillers. Not a great movie, or indeed a great role for Hanks who doesn’t quite suit villains, however tongue-in-cheek they’re supposed to be. But there was a point, or an edge, to that character. His persona here is equable and easy-going, qualities which are of course necessary to his sympathetic brand identity, but he doesn’t plausibly change in any dramatic way. This is a slow news day.

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News of the World

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DVD & Streaming

News of the World

Drama , Western

Content Caution

Tom Hanks and a little girl ride across 1800s Texas in News of the World.

In Theaters

December 25, 2020
Tom Hanks as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd; Helena Zengel as Johanna Leonberger; Elizabeth Marvel as Mrs. Gannett

Home Release Date

January 15, 2021
Paul Greengrass

Distributor

Universal Pictures

Movie Review

Captain Jefferson Kidd reads the world in black and white: line by line, graph by graph.

He travels the dusty roads of 1870 Texas with his pile of newspapers and tells stories of places far away, as exotic and ethereal as Shangri La: Chicago. Philadelphia. London. He’s not been to most of those places himself. But dressed in his finest suit and squinting through a monocle, the captain might as well be Marco Polo—an ambassador-adventurer, doling out strange stories for the price of a dime.

But Texas has its share of strange, too.

One day as he travels between towns, the Captain comes across a man, lynched, hanging from a tree. Near the corpse cowers a girl, perhaps 10 years old. She’s blond, but she wears a telltale deerskin dress and a terrified look. And when she speaks, the Captain can’t understand a word.

“I don’t speak Kiowa,” he tells her, knowing the girl won’t understand, either.

Near the wreckage of a wagon—the one the dead man was driving, most likely—he finds some papers that explain the girl. Seems she was abducted by the Kiowa when she was about 4 years old after they killed her family. She was discovered when the Calvary raided the Kiowa in turn. Her nearest surviving kin lives down in Castroville, near San Antonio. The man was bringing her home.

But the girl—Johanna, the papers say—doesn’t want this home. The only home she remembers is with the Kiowa, the only parents she knew were Turning Water and Three Spotted. And they’re dead.

The Captain takes her into a small town nearby—his next stop to read the news, anyway. As for the girl, well, he’ll leave her in the care of the government. The Bureau of Indian Affairs will ensure her safe return.

But it turns out the Indian agent is off on assignment, and he won’t be back for three months. This corner of Texas has no orphanages or kindly foster parents to leave Johanna with for the next 90 days. And even if there were, those folks likely wouldn’t be prepared to deal with this wild little girl who eats chili with her fingers and screams at the thought of a bath.

So the Captain changes his travel plans. “I’ll take her,” he says, even though the man’s old and the road to Castroville is dangerous. He can’t leave this child to the wilds of civilization. He’ll bring her safely home, he promises, if God so wills it—even though he knows God’s will can be a hard thing itself.

Captain Kidd brings his stories from town to town, the world in black and white. But if he and the girl survive this trip, he’ll have his own story to tell.

Positive Elements

Captain Kidd is as kindly a man as you’ll ever find in this harsh, only partly settled country. The fact that he’s willing to risk his life and livelihood for this girl—a youngster who deeply resents being taken away from her Kiowa family—is evidence enough of that. He shows a great deal of patience with her, and he understands her hardships better than most along the road. He begins to teach her (or, perhaps, re -teach her) English, and he tries to begin the process of “civilizing” her—showing her how to use silverware and why not to swallow a whole tin of sugar in one go.

Initially, perhaps, Captain Kidd may have thought of Johanna as a little blond anchor in his life—threatening to drag him under the water. But Johanna proves to be a different sort of anchor, too. Captain Kidd, in his own way, is also lost—traveling Texas with just his newspapers for company, and running from a past he rarely speaks of. The twice-orphaned girl gives him the closest family he’s known for years, and she teaches him one or two valuable life lessons of her own.

Johanna’s pretty resourceful. And while the Captain saves the girl’s life a time or two, she saves his, too.

Spiritual Elements

Captain Kidd is Christian, and we learn that he was a preacher once. When he comes across the lynched man, Kidd takes the man down and buries him and marks his grave with a makeshift cross. Kidd also bows his head solemnly in silent prayer.

[ Spoiler Warning ] But Kidd has a complicated history with God. Near the end of the movie, we learn that a family tragedy shook his faith, and he came to see that tragedy as a divine curse. “It was judgment, for all I had seen, and all I had done,” the former Confederate officer says. A friend reassures him that it wasn’t judgment: “It’s what we had to face—carry for the rest of our days.” The Captain seems to accept that. And when he visits a churchyard grave (again, marked by a cross), he takes off his hat and says another apparent prayer, weeping as he does so.

We hear a few references to literal curses and metaphorical demons.

Sexual Content

Kidd carries a picture of his wife, a woman whom he says he “left” in San Antonio. We’re meant to believe that she and the Captain had a falling out, it seems. But whatever happened, it certainly doesn’t prevent a dalliance with a woman in Dallas whom we know as Mrs. Garrett: She lies in bed in her modest undies (one wide strap of her underthings falls off her shoulder) as Kidd ties his tie for a news reading. She makes mention of Kidd’s wife to him, though, and suggests he really ought to go to San Antonio and grapple with his past.

Most folks would see Johanna as a nuisance. But some see her as a horrific business opportunity. A man named Almay offers to buy the girl from Captain Kidd, offering as much as $100. He says that she’ll be paid for her work; her “pretty skin” guarantees that. When the Captain refuses, Almay and his associates say that they’ll just have to take her instead.

Violent Content

Almay and his two goons do try to take Johanna away from Captain Kidd in the Texas wastelands. It makes for a tense shootout, and some die (though not particularly messily). The most blood we see is that which trickles from a wound in Captain Kidd’s head.

Two other people are shot and killed in a riot in one rough-and-tumble settlement. As mentioned in the intro, the corpse of a man hangs from a tree. Buffalo carcasses lay in the sun, stripped of their hides while the muscles and meat beneath lay exposed. A wagon and two horses fall off a steep embankment, spelling the end of both animals. (One must be shot to put it out of its whinnying agony.) Someone is beaten badly and is nearly killed.

We hear Captain Kidd read about fatal tragedies in other parts of the world, while he and others talk vaguely about the Civil War. A paper includes some fanciful illustrations of a man chasing and killing Native Americans. A sandstorm nearly spells doom for a pair of travelers. We hear about the practice of “scalping.”

Johanna, we learn, has been orphaned twice over. We don’t hear details of how her Kiowa parents were killed, only that they were. But someone goes into detail as to what happened with Johanna’s German-heritage parents: Her mother’s throat was cut, and Johanna’s baby sister had her “brains bashed out.” We see the settlement where Johanna’s family was killed, as well—the sight of which the girl clearly remembers.

Crude or Profane Language

One s-word and a few other milder profanities, such as “d–n,” “h—” and “p–s.” God’s name is misused five times, four of them with the word “d–n.”

Drug and Alcohol Content

Some people drink in the background.

Other Negative Elements

The Civil War didn’t do much to dampen racism in much of Texas; tensions among whites, blacks and Native Americans are clearly strong.

The man whom Kidd finds hanging from a tree is black, and he finds a flier that says “This is a white man’s country.” A whole Texas county has become something of a one-man fiefdom, with the man in charge making it clear that “Mexicans, blacks and Indians” aren’t welcome there. Many of Captain Kidd’s listeners are seething with anger—toward races they consider inferior to their own, and toward the Federal troops now making life difficult for them. Kidd tries to soothe tensions by simply saying, “We’re all hurting. All of us. … These are difficult times.”

Johanna is seen by many as a savage little girl, and indeed her manners are not particularly good at first. She treats many of the adults around her with disrespect. (But you might be a little fearful, too, if your parents had been murdered in front of you and those same people took you to a strange land with unfamiliar customs.) She also tries to run away, we’re told—leading someone to tether her to a pole in the ground as if she were a dog.

Based on a 2016 book of the same name by Paulette Jiles, News of the World departs from its source material at times, adding new peril—and problems—to the story. In the book, Kidd and Mrs. Garrett chastely hint at their mutual attraction instead of diving into bed together. The casualty count, both for man and beast, is higher here. Profanity sees an uptick, too.

It’s a measure of the book’s own pristine prose that, even with so much added, the movie is still as clean as it is.

News of the World is, in some ways, the story of two worlds coming together to the benefit of both. It gives us an honest-to-goodness hero in Captain Kidd—a man willing to fight for the innocent in every way imaginable, preaching kindness and patience to those who can hear him and brandishing a gun at those who won’t.

But most importantly, it’s a love story.

Captain Kidd and Johanna don’t understand each other at first. Johanna might as well be from Mars, as much as the Captain understands her. To Johanna, the Captain is just part of the system that killed the only parents she ever knew. I wonder how many foster parents may sometimes feel like the Captain? I wonder how many foster kids might feel like Johanna?

But slowly, and through their shared pain and the dangers they face together, the Captain earns Johanna’s trust. And as Kidd opens Johanna’s eyes to his world, she opens his to hers. They learn each other’s language, share each other’s philosophies and—mile by mile along this hard, dusty road—they learn to trust each other. And, yes, love each other.

News of the World speaks to the difficulties of relationship , of crossing cultural boundaries to truly meet people and earn their trust. And, as such, I think it holds lessons for all of us. Building those relationships takes time. It takes patience. It takes not just a desire to talk, but a willingness to listen. But when we walk that road together—day after day, mile after mile—we slowly earn one another’s trust. We learn one another’s stories.

And, as Captain Kidd would tell you, stories have power. He knows it better than most.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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News of the World Review: A Well-Acted, But Predictable Tom Hanks Western

A former Confederate soldier (Tom Hanks) returns a kidnapped girl (Helena Zengel) in News of the World.

Tom Hanks returns to theaters in a well-acted, but predictable and tone deaf western. News of the World is adapted from the Paulette Jiles novel by British writer/director Paul Greengrass. It is the story of a former Confederate soldier returning a girl kidnapped by the Kiowa in Reconstruction era Texas. The film is beautifully shot and hearkens back to genre classics like The Searchers . It suffers the same critique by being too myopic. American Indians and freed slaves, ruthlessly subjugated after the Civil War, are integral to the narrative, but vaguely addressed on screen.

News of the World opens in 1870 Wichita Falls, Texas, five years after the Civil War. On a rainy night in front of a spellbound crowd, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd ( Tom Hanks ) reads an assortment of newspapers with flourish. The former Confederate soldier travels from town to town reading the news for a modest living. A quiet and unassuming man, Captain Kidd rides into a brutal aftermath the following day. He finds a lynched black man, and a young white girl (Helena Zengel) in a buckskin dress, hiding in the nearby woods.

Captain Kidd recovers the dead man's diary. He was tasked by the Union to return the child to her family in Southern Texas. Johanna Leonberger was taken by the Kiowa tribe after they killed her family. She was raised as an Indian, doesn't speak English, and is fearful of white men. Union soldiers found her when they forced the Kiowa off their lands. Captain Kidd takes Johanna to the garrison on the Red River, but they deny responsibility for the girl. Refusing to abandon her, the captain resolves to take Johanna back to her relatives; four hundred miles south through dangerous territory.

News of the World is an engrossing character drama . Tom Hanks and German actress Helena Zengel play off each other to great effect. Captain Kidd has been physically and emotionally scarred by the war. Johanna has lost two families to bloody violence. She is frightened, but not timid or weak. They share the burdens of a tragic past. The girl has a fierce spirit, but is still a defenseless child. Captain Kidd is forced to defend Johanna against ruffians who want to assault her. Paul Greengrass ( United 93 , The Bourne Supremacy ) does not shy away from the horrors a girl faced in the old west.

News of the World has superb cinematography , but it's used stylistically to marginalize the American Indians depicted in the film. Let's start with the good. Polish cinematographer Dariusz Wolski ( Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, The Martian ) is expert on establishing vivid color schemes. He and Paul Greengrass depict Texas as brown and dusty with a muted palette. It's a captivating look that draws the viewer in. My issue is that the Kiowa are never really seen. The Indians are portrayed as silhouettes throughout the film. They are relegated to background and distant shots. This makes zero sense when their presence is crucial to the story. News of the World falls prey to the cultural insensitivity that has plagued Hollywood from start. Don't even show the Kiowa if you're just going to use them as props.

My feelings regarding News of the World are decidedly mixed. On one hand, the film works as a character piece with solid lead performances. But I'm sorely disappointed in the way Greengrass represents the Kiowa and the film's sole black character. I'm no bell ringer for political correctness. But we need accuracy and correct representation, especially in a film with Tom Hanks star power. Fans of the western genre will like this movie, so it does warrant a begrudging recommendation. News of the World is a production of Playtone and Pretty Pictures. It will be released theatrically in the United States on Christmas Day by Universal Pictures .

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6 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

Whether you’re a casual moviegoer or an avid buff, our reviewers think these films are worth knowing about.

By The New York Times

CRITIC’S PICK

Going ape for another ‘Apes’ movie.

Two apes and a woman with serious looks stand near a body of water.

‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’

The latest in this sci-fi series follows a group of rebels as they face off against an authoritarian ruler who has twisted the peaceful teachings of a previous leader.

From our review:

There’s a knowing sense that all this has happened before, and all this will happen again. That’s what makes “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” powerful, in the end. It probes how the act of co-opting idealisms and converting them to dogmas has occurred many times over. What’s more, it points directly at the immense danger of romanticizing the past, imagining that if we could only reclaim and reframe and resurrect history, our present problems would be solved.

In theaters. Read the full review .

A thermal thriller that’s hot and cold.

‘aggro dr1ft’.

This hallucinatory romp directed by Harmony Korine conveys the journey of an assassin entirely through thermal imaging with added digital effects.

Whether it’s the thermal imaging or the augmentation, the visual style renders eyes practically invisible, leaving the actors without an important means of communication. … That absence might account for why “Aggro Dr1ft” is so unengaging on a narrative level, but the monotony might also have to have something to do with the protagonist, a hit man extraordinaire who is also (gasp) a family man. The world’s greatest assassin has been saddled with the world’s most sophomoric internal monologue. “I am a solitary hero. I am alone. I am a solitary hero. Alone,” he mumbles.

Think ‘On the Road,’ but for Gen-Z.

‘gasoline rainbow’.

Five teenagers embark on a road trip to a “party at the end of the world” and encounter many fellow misfits along the way in the latest from filmmakers Bill and Turner Ross.

There’s an uncommon sweetness to this film, which is less about running away from something and more about discovering the road of life is littered with goodness, if you know where to look. There’s a loose, languorous quality to “Gasoline Rainbow,” which the Rosses shot using a mostly improvised format, a collaboration between actors and filmmakers. It feels like a home movie, or a documentary — a capture of a slice of life in which there’s no plot other than whatever happens on the road ahead.

A destination wedding that goes nowhere.

‘mother of the bride’.

At a surprise last-minute wedding, the mother of the bride (Lana, played by Brooke Shields) gets another surprise when she discovers that her daughter is engaged to the son of her ex-beau, Will (Benjamin Bratt).

“Mother of the Bride” is directed by Mark Waters (“Mean Girls”) with an apparent allergy to verisimilitude. Early on, we are told that the opulent Thai ceremony will be bankrolled by Emma’s company (she’s an intern) and livestreamed to “millions of eyes.” These fantasies of pomp and circumstance often serve to make Lana and Will’s budding romance feel like a B-story to the action — although that may be a blessing when the best screwball gag this movie can muster is a pickleball shot to the groin.

Watch on Netflix . Read the full review .

Chris Pine goes off the deep end.

In Chris Pine’s directorial debut, he plays a pool cleaner who is enlisted to help uncover a mysterious water heist.

The sure-why-not plot, modeled on the California water grab in “Chinatown,” is less interesting than the charismatic cast that rambles along with Pine on his excellent adventure. Pine’s yarn was savaged when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, but the sour response is a bit like getting mad at a golden retriever for rolling around in the grass.

Small drama, big stars.

Seeking asylum, a young Nigerian woman (Letitia Wright of “Black Panther”) navigates the complications of applying for permanent residency in Ireland in this drama from writer-director Frank Berry. Josh O’Connor of “Challengers” also stars.

At the beauty salon where she works, Aisha’s rightly cagey as she listens to her customers. But at the shelter, she turns warm, when she gives makeovers to fellow immigrants. As he did for his award-winning prison film, “Michael Inside,” Berry used nonprofessional actors with intimate experience of the system — here, Ireland’s International Protection Office, which processes asylum applications — he wanted to depict. It’s a gesture that keeps the film from lapsing into melodrama.

Bonus review: A rural throuple

It’s not immediately apparent how courtly intrigue figures in “A Prince” (in theaters) , Pierre Creton’s spellbinding French pastoral drama, though sex, death and domination hang palpably in the film’s crisp, Normandy air.

Creton looks to the divine powers and chivalric codes that fuel swords-and-shields epics like “Game of Thrones,” but whittles these elements down to a mysterious essence. Eventually, the film shifts into explicitly sexual and mythological terrain with a B.D.S.M. edge.

The story is slippery by design, loosely tracking the gay coming-of-age of an apprentice gardener, Pierre-Joseph. Throughout the film, a series of wordless and seductively austere tableaux, he forms bonds with various individuals in his rural community. Multiple narrators speak in retrospect, as if looking back from the afterlife at the characters onscreen.

Pierre-Joseph eventually comes to form a throuple with Alberto and Adrien, his mentors. The naked bodies of these much older gentleman appear suggestively weathered next to their younger lover’s sprightly form. Yet there is no mention of taboo. That passion could bloom in such spontaneous and unexpected forms is part of this enigmatic film’s potency.

The Sweet East is an odyssey through America's extreme right, left and everything in-between

A film still of The Sweet East, where Talia Ryder's face is reflected back in a mirror.

There's misdirection, and then there are The Sweet East's opening scenes: grainy, intimate, near-vérité home footage of a group of South Carolinian high schoolers running amok on a trip to Washington DC.

A big bad world awaits (emphasis on bad) of Pizzagate conspiracists, white supremacists, Antifa-esque "artivists", asinine New York filmmakers and militant Muslims with a love of trance music in this twisted, provocatively off-colour road movie.

But first, blank-faced teen Lillian (Talia Ryder, of Never Rarely Sometimes Always ) is bored and desperate to stand out. While everyone else on the trip wears matching yellow T-shirts, she's in oversized Aerosmith merch and barely glances up from her phone when people talk to her, let alone to take in landmarks. At a karaoke-pizza bar, her disdain reaches a peak: She hides in the bathroom to vape before singing a twee song about a cat, while staring at the audience through the mirror.

This familiar indie flick, the gentle coming-of-age about the misanthropic teenager, is cut short as an armed conspiracist raids the pizza place, demanding to see the basement where elites abuse children.

The Sweet East film still, of Ryder and Elordi's characters stone-faced in a diner booth, opposite Harris and Edebiri.

Lillian escapes quickly with help from Caleb (Earl Cave), a trust-fund revolutionary in a studded jacket who leads her through the secret basement, a labyrinth of dark halls littered with tricycles, dolls and other kids' toys. "Huh, it seems so much bigger than when I was a kid," he says with absent-minded curiosity, rather than a voice weighed down by trauma. And The Sweet East's "odd-yssey" has begun.

The film is written by critic Nick Pinkerton and marks the directorial debut of Sean Price Williams, a celebrated cinematographer who has helped shape the look of American independent film since the mid-00s, working with the Safdie brothers, Alex Ross Perry and more left-of-field filmmakers.

The Sweet East could be considered the indie counterpoint to Alex Garland's recent blockbuster Civil War — also a road movie through a United States torn apart (albeit far more literally). It's a dream-like, occasionally magical carnival ride through the country's conspiratorial right and left, as Lillian follows whoever expresses interest in her.

Much like Garland's controversial film, Williams's debut defies immediate political interpretation. Like its protagonist, The Sweet East is wryly mocking but attracted to the figures Lillian meets, each sinister and deranged in their own way.

The film could be seen as sympathetic to some of the repulsive views it portrays — particularly those of Lawrence (Simon Rex; Red Rocket ), a clean-cut, charming American romantics professor she encounters at a white supremacist meet-up. He hides his beliefs of white "racial consciousness" at work, noting it'd be a different story if he was attending transgender communist meet-ups.

Lawrence uses much more offensive language to make his point, of course, as do many characters. Lillian often drops a slur for intellectually disabled people to describe anything she doesn't like — a quirk beholden to New York's Dimes Square, the micro-neighbourhood where Williams runs in a loosely defined, much-analysed grouping of contrarian artists and creatives.

The Sweet East is eager to provoke. Lawrence's racism hides its inherent violence in his intellectual airs and timid presence, best represented by the twee quilt cover in his spare room, adorned with cottagecore baby blue swastikas. As Lillian moves in with him, claiming she's escaping an abusive ex, he keeps his distance and dresses her in coquette dresses and bows while he pontificates endlessly about Edgar Allan Poe and America's "degraded culture", which includes reality TV and To Kill a Mockingbird.

A still from The Sweet East of Simon Red and Talia Ryder on a couch, both looking bored.

Despite his reprehensible views, he is perhaps Lillian's sweetest encounter, with Rex's charisma rendering Lawrence's loneliness as something to be pitied.

It's an intentionally messy film, both ideologically and visually. Williams's trademark graininess is combined, in scenes of chaos, with juddering unsteady shots, out of focus as if narrative and meaning are struggling to keep up with Lillian's through-the-looking-glass adventure.

Settings, like Caleb's commune, are filled with an overwhelming amount of detail — artworks, fascinating mohawked figures — that Williams's camera barely captures, suggesting we're only scratching the surface. That's not to suggest it's visually ugly: The Sweet East is bright and rich, shot on 16mm film and boldly mixing film references from the 1910s and 70s, despite Lillian's distinctly 2024 encounters.

The soundtrack recalls the foreboding dark, despondent synths of porn composer Patrick Cowley or Greek composer Vangelis. Meanwhile, the film is split up by interstitials echoing those seen in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, the influential 1915 silent film that portrays the Ku Klux Klan as the heroes of America's nationhood.

The Sweet East appears to be creating its own patchwork quilt of modern America — one that is quietly empathetic for the economic and cultural circumstances that lead people to bizarre, hateful lives.

Of the film's many sections, its midway point is the most electric, where Lillian meets two frenetic filmmakers on the streets of New York, played with great relish by Ayo Edebiri ( The Bear ; Bottoms) and Zola screenwriter Jeremy O. Harris.

The two cast her in their Ivory Merchant-inspired period drama, opposite a heart-throb of the moment (Jacob Elordi, in a small but memorable role). Here, Lillian thrives, becoming an overnight "it girl", quickly adapting to a world of tabloid attention, free designer clothing and acid-tongued flirtations.

Two people with afros in bright clothing look forward from a casting table adorned with notes.

These are some of The Sweet East's funniest scenes, a pastiche of drug-fuelled pretension that points out art isn't as revolutionary or important as those creating it believe. By effectively undercutting their own life's work, Pinkerton and Williams establish that The Sweet East isn't above the America it mocks, but merely another attempt to make sense of chaos.

At the film's end, text pops up offering the final message: "Everything will happen." The Sweet East offers no thesis on what everything means but, when put like that, how could it?

Instead, this movie is exhilaratingly bizarre and daring, avoiding moral messaging to instead try to capture our increasingly incomprehensible world.

The Sweet East is in cinemas now.

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Anne Hathaway's The Idea of You is ripe with steamy romps, but is it any good?

A film still of Nicholas Galitzine, 29, and Anne Hathaway, 41, who is smiling brightly. They're boarding a private plane.

From Elisabeth Moss as a British spy to a jet-black cringe comedy — the best new shows out now

Elisabeth Moss looking very serious, a mobile phone to her ear

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COMMENTS

News of the World movie review (2020)
Advertisement. "News of the World" becomes a road movie of sorts for Kidd and Johanna, with new encounters across the unstable landscape. (After the end of the Civil War, Texas was not exactly the safest place in the country.) Greengrass structures it in an episodic way that kind of detracts from the midsection, where the film sags a bit as ...
'News of the World' Review: Tom Hanks Does the Strong, Silent Type
The musical score, by James Newton Howard, is obtrusively important, and contributes to a sense that the scale isn't quite right. This isn't a bad movie. The problem is that it's too nice a ...
News of the World
[Full review in Spanish] Oct 11, 2022 Full Review M.N. Miller Ready Steady Cut News of the World, while mildly entertaining, needed a bit more grit and less preaching. Rated: 2.5/5 Sep 9, 2022 ...
News of the World
News of the World, while mildly entertaining, needed a bit more grit and less preaching. Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Sep 9, 2022. Zoë Rose Bryant Loud and Clear Reviews. News of the ...
Tom Hanks fights fake news in the wild west
News of the World review - Tom Hanks fights fake news in the wild west. Paul Greengrass's hybrid western has depth, beauty, topical resonance - and a mesmerising rising star. Mark Kermode ...
'News of the World': Film Review
Tom Hanks and German discovery Helena Zengel star in 'News of the World,' a Western odyssey from Paul Greengrass about two broken people finding unity, set in Texas soon after the Civil War.
News of the World review: Tom Hanks rides to the rescue in unhurried
In that, the movie offers few surprises and even less alacrity; and yet there's a cumulative weight to World that feels, if hardly new, still worth sitting through. Paul Greengrass's sparse, raw ...
'News of the World' Review: 'True Grit' Meets 'The Searchers'
Editor: William Goldenberg. Music: James Newton Howard. With: Tom Hanks, Helena Zengel, Elizabeth Marvel, Michael Angelo Covino, Fred Hechinger, Thomas Francis Murphy. Comments are closed. Paul ...
News of the World (2020)
News of the World: Directed by Paul Greengrass. With Tom Hanks, Helena Zengel, Tom Astor, Travis Johnson. A Civil War veteran agrees to deliver a girl taken by the Kiowa people years ago to her aunt and uncle against her will. They travel hundreds of miles and face grave dangers as they search for a place that either can call home.
News Of The World Review
News Of The World Review. 1870 Texas. Ex-infantryman Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks) makes a living roaming Dallas telling assembled throngs the news stories of the day. Yet when he runs ...
Review: News Of The World With Tom Hanks : NPR
Transcript. Tom Hanks travels from town to town in the Texas frontier a few years after the Civil War, reading newspapers to settlers. When he comes across a young girl who was kidnapped, his life ...
News of the World (film)
News of the World is a 2020 American Western film co-written and directed by Paul Greengrass, based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Paulette Jiles, and starring Tom Hanks and introducing Helena Zengel in her international film debut. The film follows an aging Civil War veteran who must return a young girl who was taken in by the Kiowa, and raised as one of them, to her last remaining family.
"News of the World" review: Tom Hanks stars in the bighearted western
The backdrop against which the action of "News of the World" unfolds is a Texas in transition. Set during Reconstruction, and starring Tom Hanks as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd — an itinerant ...
Movie Review: News of the World, a Western with Tom Hanks
News of the World has the elegiac mood and epic look of a classic Western, but its vision of civilization is a lot more complicated. No place in this movie feels like home, for either Kidd or ...
News of the World Review: Tom Hanks Leads a Modest Western
December 11, 2020 12:00 pm. "News of the World". Universal. Known for the visceral, "shaky-cam" immediacy of a vérité style that's proven bracingly chaotic in some movies ("Captain ...
News of the World review
Hanks's former Confederate captain tries to help Helena Zengel's terrified orphan across lawless post-civil war Texas in this Paul Greengrass western that rarely comes alive. T om Hanks leads ...
News of the World
Five years after the end of the Civil War, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks), a veteran of three wars, now moves from town to town as a non-fiction storyteller, sharing the news of presidents and queens, glorious feuds, devastating catastrophes, and gripping adventures from the far reaches of the globe. In the plains of Texas, he crosses paths with Johanna (Helena Zengel), a 10-year-old ...
News of the World
Movie Review. Captain Jefferson Kidd reads the world in black and white: line by line, graph by graph. He travels the dusty roads of 1870 Texas with his pile of newspapers and tells stories of places far away, as exotic and ethereal as Shangri La: Chicago. Philadelphia. London. He's not been to most of those places himself.
News of the World Review: A Well-Acted, But Predictable Tom ...
News of the World is an engrossing character drama. Tom Hanks and German actress Helena Zengel play off each other to great effect. Captain Kidd has been physically and emotionally scarred by the ...
6 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week
Chris Pine goes off the deep end. From left, Diane (Annette Bening), Darren (Chris Pine) and Jack (Danny DeVito) in "Poolman," directed by Pine. Darren Michaels/Vertical. 'Poolman'. In ...
The Sweet East is an odyssey through America's extreme right, left and
Starring: Talia Ryder, Simon Rex, Jeremy O. Harris, Ayo Edebiri, Jacob Elordi. When: In cinemas now. Likely to make you feel: Incredulous, confused, giddy, potentially offended. A big bad world ...

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Reviewed online, Los Angeles, Nov. 30, 2020. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 118 MIN.

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