News of the World (12A)
Verdict: Hanks for the memory
Malcolm & Marie (15)
Verdict: Almost unendurable
Rating: 
Director Paul Greengrass has made some terrific feature films about dark real-life events, such as United 93, Bloody Sunday, 22 July and, for television, The Murder Of Stephen Lawrence.
So a British audience might assume that his latest drama, News Of The World, has something to do with phone-hacking and the demise of a popular Sunday newspaper.
Not a bit of it. It’s a western, starring Tom Hanks (who also teamed up with Greengrass in the 2013 hit Captain Phillips).
This makes it a departure not only for co-writer Greengrass but also for Hanks; amazingly, unless you count Toy Story’s Woody, he is a newcomer to one of cinema’s most venerable genres.
Of course, newcomers in westerns come in two forms. There’s the unsmiling, dangerous killer type and there’s the paragon of virtue. To which category does the Hanks character belong? As if you need to be told.
Despite his lengthy and illustrious career, Tom Hanks (pictured as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd with Johanna Leonberger played by Helena Zengel) is a newcomer to the Hollywood Western
He plays Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a Civil War veteran who, by 1870, is making a living by travelling through Texas reading the latest federal and regional news to often illiterate townsfolk — a mobile Huw Edwards, if you will.
It’s a noble-minded and also decidedly solitary endeavour until he encounters a ten-year-old white girl, Johanna (the excellent Helena Zengel, nominated this week for a Golden Globe), alone and scared in a wood.
Johanna, it seems, was abducted from German settlers and then raised by the Kiowa tribe, from whom she has been separated. Kidd decides that his moral obligation is to return her to her original family.
There are resounding echoes of John Ford’s 1956 masterpiece The Searchers, though I was reminded, too, of all those films that trade on the generation gap between a grown-up and a child not his or her own, especially the wonderful Paper Moon (1973).
News of the World is a road movie, an odd-couple movie, a western and a Tom Hanks vehicle, all in one. Pictured: Tom Hanks as Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd in the Paul Greengrass film
Actually, News Of The World (based on a 2016 novel) would inspire a heck of a Venn diagram. It’s a road movie, an odd-couple movie, a western and a Tom Hanks vehicle, all in one.
Moreover, you don’t need to look too hard to find a few cheeky references to the U.S. presidency just gone, in some rabble-rousing shouts of fake news.
It’s a thriller as well but, a little surprisingly, that’s where Greengrass, who also has three Jason Bourne films to his name, is less sure-footed.
The perilous journey through Texas amounts to a kind of check-list of obstacles, as Kidd and his brave young charge — who speaks no English — find themselves dealing with communication issues, assorted baddies including human traffickers, tricky topography, a fierce dust storm and a chase that composer James Newton Howard, in a different sort of film, might have set to One Wheel On My Wagon.
The perilous journey through Texas amounts to a check-list of obstacles. Pictured: (from left) Doris Boudlin (Mare Winningham), Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks) and Johanna Leonberger (Helena Zengel, back to camera) in News of the World directed by Paul Greengrass
If that sounds a bit flippant, then rest assured there’s a great deal to like, above the burgeoning bond between these two unlikely fellow-travellers, and the clever way in which we are fed fragments of Kidd’s background story until we have a satisfying whole.
There are flaws both large and small (my wife pointed out that Johanna maintains throughout a ‘lovely graduated bob’ possibly not compatible with her challenging lifestyle).
But it’s almost always a pleasure to spend a couple of hours in the reliably splendid company of Tom Hanks, a cinematic axiom this film does nothing to undermine.
By stark contrast, I found an hour-and-three-quarters in the company of John David Washington’s character in Malcolm & Marie nigh-on unendurable.
Sam Levinson’s film, a two-hander shot in black and white, chronicles the aftermath of a glitzy film premiere, taking us back to a chic beach house where the hysterically self-centred director, Malcolm (Washington), and his reformed drug-addict girlfriend, Marie (Zendaya), mull over the evening’s events.
This, in turn, forces them to assess their entire relationship.
This two-hander, shot in black and white, chronicles the aftermath of a glitzy film premiere. Pictured: Zendaya as Marie and John David Washington as Malcolm, a film director
The basic premise will appeal to anyone who has ever wondered what might unfold privately after a star has stood in the spotlight and forgotten to thank a partner, which is Malcolm’s oversight.
But soon we are pitched into a shrieking melodrama as the pair of them row, reconcile and row again, punctuated by Malcolm’s ferocious rants about racism and film critics (nice of him to take us seriously, at least).
The film — a product of the coronavirus lockdown, after production was halted on Levinson’s HBO drama Euphoria (also featuring Zendaya as an addict) — is being tipped for awards.
Well, if there’s one for actorly speechifying and writerly grandstanding, then bring it on.
Between real-life couples, anger is never unleashed as word-perfect, barnstorming rhetoric. Washington has made an award-worthy job of learning his overwritten lines, but that’s all
Admittedly, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? trod similar ground 55 years ago and won a heap of Oscars, but there’s a phoniness here that anyone who has ever had a late-night marital barney, especially one fuelled by alcohol, will surely recognise.
Between real-life couples, anger is never unleashed as word-perfect, barnstorming rhetoric. Washington has made an award-worthy job of learning his overwritten lines, but that’s all.
News Of The World is available on Netflix from next Wednesday; Malcom & Marie is on Neflix now.