The Lost Bus had its World Premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Apple TV+ will release it in theaters on September 19, followed by its streaming premiere on October 03.

A sad truth came to light the other day when I was having dinner with a friend. I was recounting my recent trip to the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), divulging the good, the bad, and the ugly. I eventually got to the part of my schedule that included The Lost Bus, which I described as the new Matthew McConaughey film about the California wildfires. "Which one?" my friend asked, a question that immediately contextualized the climate situation we're increasingly facing. According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, nine of the ten largest wildfires in California history have occurred within the last ten years. As I'm writing this review on September 24th, three new wildfires have been reported in the state.

The most destructive and deadliest wildfire in California history was the 2018 Camp Fire. This is where The Lost Bus gets its story from, beginning one day earlier on November 07, 2018. McConaughey plays Kevin McKay, a down-on-his-luck school bus driver in the town of Paradise. He's been divorced from his wife for a few years, his teenage son doesn't like him, his mom requires increased medical care, and he just had to put his dog down due to old age. He's begging for extra shifts at work to help with financial problems. The roads can be windy as he takes the kids to and from school, and his bus is in dire need of maintenance. In short, everything is already hanging on by a thread.

A faulty utility tower sets off a spark among some brush. A passerby on the highway calls in the small fire, and the trucks are on their way. By the time they get there, the dry conditions and gusty winds have already made this nuisance into a problem. From there, the area of danger keeps getting bigger... and bigger... and bigger. The situation eventually got so bad that the strategy shifted from fighting the fire to saving lives, as doing both became mutually exclusive. By the end, eighty-five were killed and tens of thousands of homes were destroyed.

Co-writer/director Paul Greengrass is the perfect person to helm this harrowing story on a macroeconomic level, having previously explored the matter-of-fact horrors of modern history with United 93, Captain Phillips, and 22 July. Multiple scenes are dedicated to the logistics of fighting a fire of this size. How big is the area of containment right now, and where will it be in a few hours? When should the public be alerted, and what roads need to be cleared for a safe evacuation? How many trucks need to be requested as backup from the neighboring districts? The list goes on and on, and the time crunch gets progressively more severe. It's propulsively taut, with a no-nonsense lesson about how these situations have been dangerously exacerbated by a lack of accountability and preparation by our country's leaders and corporations.

Once the microscope is zoomed in on Kevin, things get a lot more Hollywood-ized. Greengrass and co-writer Brad Ingelsby hammer home Kevin's status as an underdog and reluctant hero. He's just trying to get back home as the alerts start going out, and is the only bus within the vicinity of an elementary school with a class of twenty-two children whose parents couldn't pick them up. America Ferrera plays their teacher, essentially herding cats as everyone starts to sense that things are about to get much worse. The bus plows through smoke and debris as the rendezvous point constantly changes, with communication getting increasingly difficult.

Greengrass overplays his hand during these moments. The camera snakes through a very digital fire, treating it like the shark from Jaws on its way to eat the children. All of them are just statistics for the plot, blankly reacting in fear to what's going on around them. McConaughey and Ferrera do decent work as their characters trade stories about their hopes and dreams.

It's the same beats we've seen in every inspirational story "based on true events," ending on a small note of positivity about overcoming this tragedy. A decision was probably made at the pre-production stage to commit more to that angle than the docudrama about how hope is getting thinner by the day. I'd say they made the wrong choice, as Mother Nature continually proves that we're well past the point of wrapping these horrors with neat little bows.