You know how someone might say that they would “listen to someone read the phone book”? Well, fortunately, News of the World isn’t just Tom Hanks reading the newspaper, although that’s his “job”. After getting out of military service and then his home and living is destroyed, he takes to the road to read the news to people who have little to no access to what is going on in the world.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t first in line to see this “riveting” story of someone reading the newspaper but when “my” theatre opened back up and the movies available to see were limited, this is what was left to see so I took a chance on it.

Tom Hanks is Tom Hanks and he does his usual solid acting but it was the other characters that made the movie better than it should have been. The 10-year old girl, Johanna (Helena Zengel) was really good. With almost no spoken word, at least not in English, she dominated her scenes. Good guys, bad guys and everyone in between were really excellent in their performances. Paul Greengrass, the director of a couple of the Bourne movies and Hank’s own Captain Phillips really does good work and once again he makes something better than expected.