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Drama, Western, Adventure 118 min PG-13
Rotten Tomatoes88%Metacritic73IMDb
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A Texan traveling across the wild West bringing the news of the world to local townspeople, agrees to help rescue a young girl who was kidnapped.
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Effortless, meticulous, intimate and contemplative.
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Written by TMDB members; each links to the original. Not part of Taste Buds's numbers.
With the American Civil War itself a memory but it's aftermath still polarising the country, travelling newsman "Kidd" (Tom Hanks) makes a living by reading, and embellishing, a collection of newspaper stories from home and abroad to an eager public keen to learn what's going on in the world. It's a solitary existence but he does appear to have a general direction in which he is headed, so we can assume that there is a wartime backstory there somewhere. Along the way, he encounters a young girl whom he calls "Johanna" (Helena Zengel). He has to give her a name because she only speaks in the tongue of the Kiowa who had raised her since she was small and now in a state of shock, she needs proper care - a care which he doesn't think neither himself nor his lifestyle will accommodate. The army isn't interested in her, though, and with the Indian agent away for months it falls to him to get her to safety - and so now we set across some harsh and unforgiving territory. Hanks does fine here, but he isn't a natural in the role and if anything it just reminded me of just how tough it actually is to pull off a Western convincingly. He tries to present us with a hard-nosed yet decent man, but
Read the whole review on TMDBPaul Greengrass's News of the World is a handsomely mounted Western that looks and sounds like it has something to say, but ultimately settles for surfaces. Tom Hanks stars as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a Civil War veteran who travels through post-Reconstruction Texas reading newspapers aloud to scattered townspeople. When he encounters Johanna (Helena Zengel), a 10-year-old girl taken and raised by the Kiowa, he agrees to return her to her remaining family. The journey that follows is beautifully shot, impeccably acted, and frustratingly thin, a film that gestures toward complexity but refuses to commit. Hanks delivers exactly what you'd expect: a reserved, accomplished performance that radiates decency and quiet authority. Captain Kidd is a man of principle in a lawless time, and Hanks plays him with the kind of understated integrity that has become his signature. There's nothing showy here, just the steady presence of a master craftsman doing what he does best. Opposite him, Helena Zengel is remarkable. She charts Johanna's slow acceptance of Kidd, and eventually her attachment to him, with a patience and precision unusual for such a young actress. The relationship between the
Read the whole review on TMDBThis doesn’t happen very often, but I actually read their book this movie was based on. I enjoy both. There were a couple of changes I noticed, but I wasn’t offended by them. With one it seemed they had Captain Kidd escape a jam with a speech rather than an explosion, and it worked for me. This is a quirky western and, as such, often ridiculed by western movie fans. It isn’t a classic in my book, but if it came on while I was eating (we multi-task by combining meals with movies), I wouldn’t feel the need to lean down to pick the controller up off the floor to change channels. I would let it run. I wasn’t surprised to see a few racist reviews on IMDB, but one comment on this website raised my eyebrows. Signs of the times, I guess.
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“Is Tom Hanks the best thing in News of the World?”
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“Does it romanticize the West?”
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