Paul Greengrass slows his camera down for News of the World, a 2021 western that swaps the director's usual urban turbulence for the wide, empty plains of frontier Texas and hands the frame to Tom Hanks.
What is News of the World about?
Newspapers travel slowly in a country still stitching itself back together, so one Texan has turned that gap into a living. He rides from settlement to settlement with a satchel of papers, gathers whoever will listen, and reads them aloud what has been happening far beyond their town limits. On one of these circuits his routine collapses when he encounters a young girl who has been taken from the people raising her and now belongs nowhere. Reluctantly, he agrees to help return her to what family she has left. What follows is a long, dangerous crossing of open country in which the pair are tested by the land, by strangers whose intentions are rarely kind, and by the simple difficulty of two people from different worlds learning to travel together. The film is built as a journey story, one stop at a time, with each town revealing a different face of the West.
About the cast
Tom Hanks anchors the film and shares most of its running time with the young German actor Helena Zengel, whose performance carries much of the story without relying on dialogue. Around them, Fred Hechinger, Michael Angelo Covino, Thomas Francis Murphy, Elizabeth Marvel, Mare Winningham and Neil Sandilands populate the towns and trails along the route, several of them appearing for only a single sequence yet leaving a distinct mark on the journey.
Context & significance
Greengrass is best known for kinetic, handheld thrillers, so a period western marks a real change of register for him, and this is also his second collaboration with Hanks. The picture belongs to a strand of the genre that treats the frontier as a place of aftermath rather than conquest: the guns are still present, but the drama comes from how scattered communities absorb news, rumour and loss. Running just under two hours, it blends action and adventure beats with a quieter character drama at its centre, which is why the catalogue lists it across all four of those genres. It was released in 2021 as an American production.
Watching News of the World on Ktime
News of the World streams on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so viewers can choose between hearing the dialogue in Farsi or following the original English performances with translated text. The film page is open to everyone; pressing play requires signing in to a K-Time account. The interface is fully in Farsi, designed for Iranian viewers living outside Iran who want a comfortable, right-to-left home for their film nights.