True tale of a harrowing rescue mission

Paul Greengrass turns the 2018 Camp fire into a disaster flick with ‘The Lost Bus.’

- Review ROBERT ABELE

Apple TV+

AMERICA FERRERA is a teacher who teams up with Matthew McConaughey's Kevin to pick up stranded children as the Camp fire rages in "The Lost Bus."

Disasters are real — also, these days, frighteningly common, be they epic confluences of nature and negligence or the murderous and preventable kind.

And when it comes to disaster movies, it’s hard to know what the acceptable level of exploitation is.

Of course, director Paul Greengrass could never be confused with the unseriousness of producer Irwin Allen (“The Towering Inferno”) or filmmaker Roland Emmerich (“The Day After Tomorrow”), ringmasters who preferred heaping helpings of A-listers on slick, expensive calamities. Rather, when Greengrass, coming from documentaries, tackles dark days of mass casualty, they tend to be true stories like “United 93” and “Bloody Sunday.” His stripped-down, jagged style, absent marquee names and focused on such issues as terrorism and community, brings intelligent urgency to the unfathomable.