<\/p>\n
On Nov. 8, 2018, the day one of the deadliest wildfires in U.S. history burned the town of Paradise, California,<\/a> and killed 85 people, a school bus driver was sent to pick up 22 elementary school students<\/a> to take them to safety. The Camp Fire was quickly spreading, communications were down and what was supposed to be a straightforward mission turned into a harrowing five-hour ordeal.<\/p>\n It\u2019s these events that are dramatized in \u201cThe Lost Bus,\u201d which opens in select theaters Friday<\/a> before streaming on Apple TV+ on Oct. 3. Turning a recent, real-life tragedy (even the heartwarming stories that emerge from the ashes) into Hollywood entertainment requires a deft touch. Lean too far into the melodrama, and it risks resembling a made-for-TV movie. Keep it too clinical and it becomes a news segment.<\/p>\n But filmmaker Paul Greengrass,<\/a> who has thrilled audiences with his Jason Bourne movies, taken them inside the Maersk Alabama hijacking and United flight 93, effectively toes that line. In \u201cThe Lost Bus,\u201d he and co-screenwriter Brad Ingelsby<\/a> have made an old-fashioned disaster movie that is captivating, frightening and startlingly moving.<\/p>\n Matthew McConaughey<\/a> plays that bus driver, Kevin, who is having a very bad day already. His dog is terminal, he\u2019s got bills he can\u2019t pay, he\u2019s taking care of his elderly mother in the months after his estranged father died and he\u2019s just had an awful fight with his teenage son (a small, but effective performance from McConaughey\u2019s actual son Levi).<\/p>\n Kevin just can\u2019t seem to catch a break and is feeling sorry for himself, dealing with his boss, annoyed calls from his ex-wife and a teenager who woke up with a bad fever. Then he starts noticing the plumes of smoke in the distance. He\u2019s on his way to deliver medicine to his son when the call comes in over the radio: Is any bus driver in the area available to deliver 22 children to a safe location? You can feel the agony, and slight annoyance, as Kevin waits for a beat hoping in vain that someone else is available.<\/p>\n Greengrass and Ingelsby smartly interweave Kevin\u2019s lousy morning with the beginnings of the fire, showing the methodology of the competent first responders attempting to manage a situation that is quickly spiraling out of control. Greengrass sustains a feeling of dread for the duration of the film, a white-knuckle experience that only gets more stressful when the children are added to the equation.<\/p>\n When Kevin gets to the school, he\u2019s not in any mood to gently walk the scared kids through this situation gently, insisting that a teacher, Mary ( America Ferrera<\/a> ) come along for the ride to handle them. Kevin is not a likely hero. He\u2019s barely even a reluctant one. He\u2019s simply a down-on-his-luck guy who showed up and, ultimately, did something extraordinary.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t a superhero story, however he is treated with more empathy than, say, Tom Cruise\u2019s bad dad in \u201cWar of the Worlds.\u201d There is an interesting thread woven into the story about absentee dads and regret, that extends even beyond Kevin, his late father and his son.<\/p>\n Watching Ferrara and McConaughey drive this school bus through the flames and collapsing power cables sometimes brings \u201cSpeed\u201d to mind. Occasionally, it veers a bit too far into spectacle and you start to question just how much the action has been upped for audience excitement. Perhaps these things really did unfold as they\u2019re presented, but at times it feels like you\u2019re suddenly on the Universal Studio Tour.<\/p>\n Still, it\u2019s impossible to take your eyes off the screen, away from the inferno and the sense of our own smallness and helplessness to \u201cbattle it,\u201d whatever that is supposed to mean. There is certainly a version of this story, adapted from Lizzie Johnson\u2019s novel \u201cParadise: One Town\u2019s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire,\u201d that could have focused on the firefighters. They do get a spotlight here, and the fire chief gets to say that these burns are only getting worse every year. But if you\u2019re looking for that movie, perhaps you should turn to Joseph Kosinski\u2019s \u201cOnly the Brave.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThe Lost Bus\u201d is about a few ordinary people in an impossible situation just trying to survive. While it’s not hard to wring emotion out of an audience watching kids in peril, it also, in some ways, gets right to the very heart of the matter.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Lost Bus,\u201d an Apple Original Films release in select theaters Sept. 19 and streaming on Apple TV+ on Oct. 3, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for \u201clanguage.\u201d Running time: 129 minutes. Three stars out of four.<\/p>\n Lindsey Bahr, The Associated Press<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source ca.news.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On Nov. 8, 2018, the day one of the deadliest wildfires in U.S. history burned the town of Paradise, California, and killed 85 people, a school bus driver was sent to pick up 22 elementary school students to take them to safety. The Camp Fire was quickly spreading, communications were down and what was supposed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2029911,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[351336,374253,374252,27639,339419,344166],"class_list":["post-2029910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists","tag-brad-ingelsby","tag-bus-driver","tag-elementary-school-students","tag-matthew-mcconaughey","tag-paul-greengrass","tag-school-bus"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Matthew-McConaughey-steers-a-white-knuckle-wildfire-drama-in-\u2018The-Lost.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2029910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2029910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2029910\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2029911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2029910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2029910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2029910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}