Paul Greengrass

The Lost Bus

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Driver Kevin behind the wheel while fire rages outside

Paul Greengrass’s first film for five years is about a bus you definitely wouldn’t want to catch. The Lost Bus transports him and us back to the quasi-disaster-movie style of United 93, his 9/11 movie. It’s about a real-life disaster – 85 people dead, 50,000 evacuated in the 2018 Camp Fire, one of the deadliest in California’s history. In disaster-movie fashion we get to know our hero, the driver of a yellow school bus, on a fairly typical day. Kevin is nearing the end of his tether – can’t seem to get on the right side of bus company management, struggling with a sick mother at home, an estranged wife who hates him, a … Read more

News of the World

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Helena Zengel and Tom Hanks

British readers wondering why Tom Hanks is starring in a film about a defunct Rupert Murdoch newspaper – fondly known as The News of the Screws, because of its interest in kiss-and-tell stories – wonder no more. This western is called News of the World because that is the name of the novel it’s based on, by American writer Paulette Jiles. Simple as. The film version is immediately reassuring on three counts. First, the look of it as it opens, honeyed light spilling from kerosene lamps in what is obviously a Western setting – props to DP Dariusz Wolski, who for a long time has been doing great work on what often turn … Read more

United 93

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The "let's roll" moment from United 93

A reconstruction of what happened on 11 September 2001 to the fourth hijacked plane, which went down in Pennsylvania before getting to its target in Washington DC, probably the White House. It’s shot in a documentary-like shaky-cam style, has not a single recognisable face to hook onto and there’s a complete absence of heroic Hollywood dialogue. Writer/director Paul Greengrass lets events unfold in real time which, coupled with the knowledge of how things pan out, has the effect of making every otherwise mundane detail – stewardesses sharing a joke, businessmen working on their laptops – unbearably poignant. As we have already seen in The Bourne Supremacy, Greengrass is a master of dramatic irony … Read more