Avis des critiques

Not all of [the film's] themes are fully fleshed out, but “News of the World” stays together and stays entertaining because of its top-notch craft. It may feel like Greengrass’ most traditional film but there’s an energy to the direction here that’s not always apparent in a Western.

"News of the World" is hauntingly gorgeous, with vistas you can lose yourself in and a James Newton Howard score that lilts and quavers and sweeps. It feels odd to see a Western in 2020 that actually dares to be a Western, especially coming from a director who for so long specialized in urgent, high-tech, ripped-from-the-headlines thrillers.

“News of the World” works at the highest levels as a story of two lost souls who find one another, and as a crackling good, blood-spattered Western.

Hanks has built a career out of playing thoroughly decent men, so his casting here is entirely to type. But the soulfulness and sorrow, the innate compassion that ripple through his characterization make this an enormously pleasurable performance to watch, with new depths of both kindness and regret that keep revealing themselves.

Of course, this being a neo-Western, a gunfight is inevitable, but Greengrass' version is slow, inaccurate, tragic. This is where Greengrass' real purpose gently unfurls, in a complicated depiction of an America of divisions and strife, of Southerners resentful of what they see as unfair occupation by Northern forces, of petty local dictators that believe that only their news is fit to be repeated. It's not hard to see the metaphor but it's also not heavy-handed.

Like Hanks and Greengrass’s "Captain Philips," ["News of the World"] only excites — quite capably — when it needs to. Greengrass’ trademark efficiency as a storyteller is very much here. But more often the movie sticks to the contemplative: a moody character study with dashes of hillside danger and inner turmoil and post-war social conflict and all the rest — the allspice seasoning of the adult western genre.

In its bones, “News of the World” is a B western, lean and linear, its spare plot ornamented with efficient set pieces... But it can also feel a bit soft and puffed up. Too much true grit has been sanded off, too many hard truths of history nodded at and turned away from... This isn’t a bad movie. The problem is that it’s too nice a movie, too careful and compromised, as if its makers didn’t trust the audience to handle the real news of the world.

The news-reading and child-rescuing threads never quite come together in Greengrass and Luke Davies’ screenplay... but “News of the World” nestles comfortably not only in the canon of the Western but also among the films by European artists who make a movie in the United States and find themselves overwhelmed by all that space.

"News of the World" has no interest in subverting or updating classic Western formulas: It is content with its function as a handsomely-made studio picture, built ostensibly around Hanks but with plenty of room for its young star to make her mark. What modernizes the movie has more to do with context than content.

One of the most rewarding subtexts of the film is the theme of journalism — as a balm to dress the wounded provincialism of post-Civil War America. Kidd doesn’t report — or even write — the news, but he recognizes that, in telling stories, there are truths that can restore our humanity.

Greengrass is a terrific filmmaker but a decidedly contemporary one, smart enough to know that he’s working in a more conventional genre, and he thus (mostly) eschews his signature flourishes for a more classical style... Most importantly, he understands the political and emotional stakes of the setting, in a way that some Westerns don’t even acknowledge, nodding to the tensions of post-Civil War America, and how Kidd attempts, in some small way, to soothe them.

["News of the World"] seamlessly segues into a moving two-hander that explores the nature of family, language, spirituality, and purpose. At the center of it all is Hanks, our moral compass, our trembling hand, who has amazingly never headlined a Western in his four-decade career. Only his bearded, weary face could have brought such empathy and grace to a brutal portrait of rotting Manifest Destiny forever stuck in the mud.