In News of the World, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks), an 1870s equivalent of a travelling newscaster, is tasked with returning Johanna (Helena Zengel), a 10-year-old girl taken in by the Kiowa tribe six-years prior and raised as one of their own, to her biological family. In order to bring the girl back to her family homestead, the pair travel across the Texas wilderness, encountering a series of trials and tribulations that bring them closer together as they both attempt to return to the places of their past, haunted by the painful memories keeping them away. The film, an adaptation of the 2016 Paulette Jiles novel, offers up a series of vignettes of the tense encounters with the various hardscrabble characters of Reconstruction era Texas. Director Paul Greengrass maintains his typical hand-held style as cinematographer Dariusz Wolski presents a considered eye on the sweeping desert landscapes. Meanwhile, Hanks and Zengel play off of each other well in the charming unlikely friendship that develops. Overall, the narrative is familiar, though entertaining, with some tidy lessons on racial animosity, greed, and perversion of truth along the way that serve as an obvious parable for the unequal power dynamics at play in contemporary America.