News of the World (2020)

garethmb December 24, 2020

Tom Hanks and Director Paul Greengrass have combined to create a truly moving and memorable western which is one of the best films of 2020. Hanks stars as Captain Kidd; a former Confederate Captain making his way in occupied Texas in the post-Civil-War era. Kidd travels from town to town reading various newspaper stories of interest to gathered locals who are too busy or unable to read the news and look forward to his lively interpretations of news of interest on a local and national level. On his way to his next location; Kidd comes upon a fair skinned blonde girl wearing Native American clothing and speaking a tribal dialect he does not understand. The fact that their cart has been overturned and a lone male is hanging from a tree leads Kidd to uncover the tragic history of the child. According to documents he discovers in the wreck; she was taken during a raid and her parents…

251Family January 20, 2021

★ 3/10

One of the MOST boring attempts at making a Western by a Top shelf actor to date.. Hollywood really needs to come to grips with fact they NO longer have what it takes to make these kind of films...and havnt for a few years now... Now continue on with the worlds dieing films, or Zombies, or female assassins, or better yet the ANTIFA genre of destroying neighborhoods and hating this country... The whole anti white male genre is a real boomer... but they need to stay away from Westerns... seriously.. For starters... your fresh out of masculine leading men that will work on a crappy script.... Ya this is one genre that is lost to the arts

Peter McGinn May 12, 2021

★ 9/10

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

badelf May 14, 2026

★ 6/10

Paul Greengrass's News of the World is a handsomely mounted Western that looks and sounds like it has something to say, but ultimately settles for surfaces. Tom Hanks stars as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a Civil War veteran who travels through post-Reconstruction Texas reading newspapers aloud to scattered townspeople. When he encounters Johanna (Helena Zengel), a 10-year-old girl taken and raised by the Kiowa, he agrees to return her to her remaining family. The journey that follows is beautifully shot, impeccably acted, and frustratingly thin, a film that gestures toward complexity but refuses to commit. Hanks delivers exactly what you'd expect: a reserved, accomplished performance that radiates decency and quiet authority. Captain Kidd is a man of principle in a lawless time, and Hanks plays him with the kind of understated integrity that has become his signature. There's nothing …

CinemaSerf August 16, 2026

★ 6/10

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 h…