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

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. Another round of trauma follows when the adopted guardians are in turn massacred and the orphans are returned to the alien captivity of civilisation. The famous abduction of Cynthia Ann Parker by Comanches in 1836 and the prolonged attempts to find her — followed by her attempts to escape from her rescuers — served as source material for John Ford’s The Searchers.

The latest iteration of this story, News of the World, is set in Texas in 1870 where Jefferson Kyle Kidd (Tom Hanks), formerly a captain with the Confederates, works as an itinerant news reader. Having enlightened the huddled masses of one town with the latest stories from his stash of print he moseys on to the next: a forerunner, let’s say, of Jeff Bridges, the country singer in Crazy Heart. One day Tom comes across a feral blonde child (Helena Zengel), recently rescued from the Kiowas. Her black escort has been lynched and so, with the army overstretched by the demands of reconstruction and a deadly epidemic, it falls to Hanks to shepherd her back to any remaining family, maintaining his schedule of events on the way. Plot-wise, then, it’s a continuation and reversal of The Searchers — later there will be a reframing of one of Ford’s iconic shots — with Hanks thrust into the role of The Finder. Crazed by a lust for vengeance, John Wayne became, in the course of his search, an Ahab of Comancheria.