Geoff Dyer

This is cinema as car ad, says Geoff Dyer: News of the World reviewed

With soaring drone shots, Paul Greengrass wants us to see too much in his new western. It’s not just nudity or violence that’s gratuitous

How the west was lost: Johanna Leonberger (Helena Zengel) and Captain Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks) in News of the World. Credit: Bruce W. Talamon/Universal Pictures/Netflix

It’s a premise with plenty of previous. Children whose parents were murdered by Indians on the frontier of the American west are abducted and then adopted by the tribe. Their plight is appalling — female captives were raped as a matter of course — but sometimes the hostages forget their mother tongue and come to relish the nomadic life of the plains.

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