News of the World
Dir: Paul Greengrass (1hr 58mins) (12A)
★★★
Tom Hanks is at his “twinkliest and crinkliest” in this old-fashioned Western, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph. He plays Captain Jefferson Kidd, a veteran of the Civil War’s losing side who now makes a living by travelling around Texas reading news stories to the illiterate masses. On the trail he comes across an abandoned, mute white girl, Johanna (Helena Zengel). Her German parents had been killed years earlier, by the Kiowa tribe, who raised her – until they were themselves killed by white settlers. At this point, Kidd decides to take her on the road, in order to deliver her to her closest living relatives, an aunt and uncle on the far side of the state.
“That’s the film: two people, a wagon and two horses against a gang of outlaws, treacherous cliffs, lost wheels and a dust storm that turns the landscape into a fiery, red underworld,” said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. I thought it was “superb”, with a “spare, windchapped visual style” that you can “feel” as much as see, a “quietly piercing performance” from the young Zengel, and the sort of “minimalist” approach from Hanks that marks him out as one of the greatest film actors in history. Oh dear, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, I’m afraid I found it “stolid and blandly self-satisfied”. Hanks is his usual easygoing self, but his character doesn’t develop significantly, and with its dull liberal message, the film feels as “unexceptionable” as one of the news stories Kidd reads to his crowd: we miss the “dynamism and visceral action” of Greengrass’s best work.
Available on Netflix.
in The Independent. Instead, this deliberately low-key disaster film is “laced with a palpable sense of fear”. Butler plays an Atlanta-based engineer, John Garrity, who – when asteroids start pounding Earth – must get himself and his family to a US government bunker near the North Pole. But with his estranged wife Allison (Morena Baccarin) and diabetic son, Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd), he gets caught up in the social chaos that inevitably unfolds: traffic jams, failing phone signals and trips to the chemist for Nathan’s medication all become panic-inducing matters of life and death.
There is none of the spectacular “apocalypse porn” of previous, bigger budget killer-comet movies, said Chris Hewitt in Empire: we glimpse the large-scale devastation only in news reports, while our focus stays tightly on the family, making for “compelling” drama. Butler is on fine form here, said Kevin Maher in The Times: it’s possibly the most “empathetic” performance of his career. Abandoning his normal “cardboard Californian twang”, he speaks in his “original brogue”, and seems more real for it. He’s physically “weatherbeaten” and a bit overweight (a source of jokes in the film), and his character is “useless at fighting”. It’s small touches such as these that make seem surprisingly “inventive”, and even “strangely cathartic”, amid the current gloom and doom.
Greenland
on Amazon Prime.
Available