Rolling Stone
‘News of the World’ Wants to be a New Classic Western
Tom Hanks, the Henry Fonda of our moment, clears the hurdles in director Paul Greengrass’ movie set in post-Civil War America
By
Bruce W. Talamon/Universal Pictures
A solid, staid, Saturday-afternoon kind of western starring Tom Hanks as an equally solid, stand-up guy on a mission: Sounds about right. The more surprising thing about the movie in question,
News of the World, is that it was directed by Paul Greengrass, whose
Bourne movies set the template for a decade-plus of ecstatically hyper-visual thrillers and procedurals. That’s not the Greengrass we get in this movie, whose films played like Energizer Bunnies manifest. This movie, like Hanks and Greengrass’s