Bob's Cinema Diary: 'The Rivals of Amziah King' and 'Learning to Fly'

The Rivals of Amziah King

 The Rivals of Amziah King stars Matthew McConaughey as a country singer and beekeeper who turns a Native American woman into a devoted protege. As a foster child, Kateri (Angelina Looking Glass) shared a home with Amziah. When she re-enters his life as an adult, she's exposed to a beekeeping world she learns to love. 

  In an overextended dramatic section, Kateri tries to save Amziah’s business after his hives are stolen.

 The movie emerges as a bit of a hodgepodge: a celebration of down-home virtues (the kind you’d find at a weekly potluck at the local church), a lively music film, and a labored drama in which Kateri searches for Amziah’s bees.  

  Too long at 130 minutes, Amziah King gets only so far with applications of rural Oklahoma color. I enjoyed director Andrew Patterson's presentation of toe-tapping music, and McConaughey seems to be having fun, but this foray into country virtues can’t sustain the infectious rhythms of its early going. Perhaps because of a surfeit of plot, what begins promisingly loses its way.

Learning to Fly

Scattered and teetering on the edge of becoming an advertisement for HOKA running shoes, the documentary Learning to Fly tells a story about ultra-distance running. The movie introduces Aisha McAdams, a photographer who made her mark chronicling the efforts of long-distant competitors. The movie includes a variety of runners, principally Jim Walmsley, a top runner whom McAdams follows to several races. 

   A runner herself, McAdams reveals details of her difficult upbringing as she tries to understand why people participate in such a grueling sport. 

    Torn between McAdams and the depiction of various races, the movie could have done more to develop both.

  You may not realize that MacAdams, who offers narration throughout the film, isn't the movie's director. That job falls to Max Lowe, who skillfully shows the teamwork required to support a 100-mile run. Race scenes can be impressive, although the athletes are more defined by the intensity of their efforts than by anything revealed in interviews. 

 So, a mixed review of Learning to Fly, a less-than-triumphant documentary that earns points for opening a world that may be unfamiliar to many viewers.

Racing against a deadly fire

After the release of United 93 in 2006, there was little doubt that director Paul Greengrass knew how to create vivid, suspenseful movies based on real events. With The Lost Bus, Greengrass tells another reality-based  story, this one about a daring rescue that took place during the 2018 California Camp Fire which resulted in 85 deaths and caused massive destruction in the town of Paradise. Matthew McConaughey stars as Kevin McKay, a beleaguered school bus driver who's going through a bad patch. His 15-year-old son (McConaughey's real-life son Levi) maintains a sullen distance from his divorced father. Kevin’s mom (McConaughey's real-life other Kay McCabe McConaughey) is ill. Kevin struggles to get by financially and  often finds himself an odds with his boss (Ashlie Atkinson). But let's cut to the chase: Personal issues aside, the movie quickly pits Kevin against the raging fire. When panicky evacuation begins, Kevin agrees to transport a classroom full of elementary school children and their teacher (America Ferrera) to a safe place. Ferrera and McConaughey deal with upset children, gridlocked traffic, encroaching flames, and the prospect of failure — which will be lethal. The real stars of the movie are the special and digital effects team that create the terrifying fire. The Lost Bus isn't the deepest of dramas, and Greengrass doesn't spend much time on the electrical company that was held responsible for the blaze. But Greengrass and his team know how to hold attention. At its best, The Lost Bus tells a harrowing story of behavior under extreme stress.

Cast lifts familiar British gangster movie

Director Guy Ritchie may not be breaking new ground in The Gentlemen, but his actors provide the movie with some juice.

If the year were 1999 instead of 2020, director Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen might have seemed more inventive. Ritchie, you'll recall, made his cinematic bones with 1998’s Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, a fresh-feeling foray into a netherworld occupied by British gangsters.

In this outing, Ritchie again goes gangster but the verve that once defined Ritchie's style now feels a little proforma, something on the order of the difference between an arranged marriage and a spontaneous love affair.

After striking out with King Arthur (2017), it’s not surprising that Ritchie sought comfortable ground — and, to be fair, The Gentlemen derives a fair measure of entertainment from a spot-on cast.

Notable among a large ensemble is Hugh Grant, playing a sleazy, gay private detective with traces of cockney in his accent. Colin Farrell adds more color as Coach, a character who trains boxers and occasionally dips into the dark arts required to settle matters in the criminal world.

Add an unflappable Charlie Hunnam to the mix. Hunnam rides shotgun to Matthew McConaughey, who plays Mickey, a pot czar who pays off fading aristocrats for the privilege of building vast underground grow houses on their property.

Now another American (Jeremy Strong) wants to buy Mickey's vast empire so that he can reap illegal gains and be ready to capitalize when marijuana goes legit. Tired of life in the fast lane, Mickey may be willing to sell.

A Chinese gangster named Dry Eye (Henry Golding) also would like to purchase Mickey’s business, an ambition that sets off fireworks, notably a raid on one of Mickey’s mammoth facilities.

To add structural pizazz, Ritchie frames the story by having Grant’s character try to extort money from Hunnam’s character, using a screenplay to convince Ray to pay up. The screenplay gambit proves a bit much, even in a movie that's not afraid to display its cinematic self-consciousness.

True to its title, The Gentlemen is mostly an all-guys affair, although the dashing Mickey has a greyhound sleek wife (Michelle Dockery) who runs a garage staffed by many female mechanics. Mickey, we're told, relies on her judgment.

It takes time to get all the characters straight and to fully appreciate The Gentlemen, you need a taste for a narrative that hopscotches through the proceedings, sometimes creating confusion. You also may find yourself wondering whether any of these characters possibly could exist outside a Guy Ritchie movie.

Still, there’s pleasure in watching actors sink into juicy roles as we wait to see who among these felons will emerge as the king of the gangster jungle. In January, that may as good as we get.

Second-rate material sinks 'Serenity'

Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway drown in a thriller set on a Caribbean island.

Serenity, a new movie starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway, tells the kind of story that’s meant to be played back in viewers' heads once the movie concludes. That sort of exercise can fun, but in this case, the playback likely will lead to an unhappy conclusion: Not only do the pieces in the movie’s puzzle seem mismatched, but the whole enterprise is marked by silliness and over-reach.

Serenity begins as a noir thriller in which an abused wife (Hathaway) asks her ex-husband (McConaughey) to kill her current husband (Jason Clarke). Not only will the murder net McConaughey’s Baker Dill a cool $10 million, but it will also help his son escape a vile stepfather.

The movie takes place on a Caribbean island the movie calls Plymouth, a detail that has as little meaning as just about everything else in this misfire.

When we first meet Baker, he's a boat owner who takes beer-guzzling customers on day-long fishing expeditions. Early on, Baker gets crosswise with two customers by refusing to allow one of them to reel in The Big One, a giant tuna Baker evidently has been trying to catch for years and with which he's developed an Ahab-like obsession.

Baker is aided in his efforts by an assistant (Djimon Hounsou), a man who tries to help Baker control his temper. Baker thinks Hounsou's recently widowed character has brought him bad luck.

When he’s not at sea, Baker carries on an affair with a woman played by a wasted Diane Lane. Lane’s character gives Baker money when the fish aren’t running — if that’s what fish do.

The plot picks up when Hathaway, in overdone blonde femme-fatale makeup that borders on Halloween costume chic, shows up to enlist Baker in her plan: She wants Baker to take her current husband to sea and drop him into the drink.

Meanwhile, the movie dishes out colorful detail as if it were afraid it might run out of ways to add flavor.

An example: Baker, who lives in an abandoned shipping container, has a unique idea of what it means to take a shower. He sheds his clothes, runs naked toward a cliff and leaps into the ocean.

Speaking of showers, director Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things and Eastern Promises) also films a lot of scenes in the rain which — McConaughey’s character — doesn’t have sense enough to come out of.

Now and again, the story ambiguously cuts to images of Baker's son working at his computer. The screenplay lamely suggests a near-paranormal connection between Baker and his teenage son, who’s still back on the mainland.

To add to the sense of mystery, a man in a suit (Jeremy Strong) keeps following Baker but continually fails to connect with his quarry. When the two finally meet, the movie indulges in silly exposition about games, rules and the unknowable nature of reality.

The whole enterprise is marked by a thorough lack of credibility, a problem that mounts as McConaughey’s performance goes increasingly over-the-top.

McConaughey’s Baker wants to catch The Big One, but it’s not the fish that gets away: It’s this whole preposterous, self-serious movie.

Drugs and despair in the streets of Detroit

Director Yann Demange grounds White Boy Rick in grim realism.

Illegal gun sales, drugs, gangs, corruption, and injustice.

You can tell from this list, and I've abbreviated it, that the new movie White Boy Rick spends little time traversing feel-good turf. Based on a true story, White Boy Rick plunges into Detroit's economic decay during the free-wheeling 1980s.

White Boy Rick focuses on three tumultuous years in the life of Rick Wershe Jr. (Richie Merritt) as he moves from a being a wayward 14-year-old with a father (Matthew McConaughey) who traffics in illegal guns to a cocaine peddler to an FBI informant and, finally, to his inevitable identity: prisoner.

In telling Rick's story, director Yann Demange pushes McConaughey into more of a supporting role than you might expect. This time, McConaughey plays a dirtbag hustler with a difference. Richard Wershe Sr. lacks the charm of some of the rogues McConaughey previously has played.

Aware of his mammoth failures as a father, Richard knows he has nothing to give his son, but the tricks of an illegal trade. McConaughey's performance hints at a sad self-awareness that borders on the tragic.

As Demange tells Rick's story, the movie evokes the ragged, jittery style of the '70s, chopping its way through lives that would be utterly empty if not for trouble.

Early on, Ricky falls in with a group of black drug dealers led by Johnny Curry (a quietly scary Jonathan Majors). Johnny's younger brother Boo (RJ Cyler), Ricky's only real friend, brings Ricky into a gang in which he's the only white guy.

For a time, it's all fun and games as Ricky finds friends and family-like ties among a group of black men who have connections to City Hall. Finally, Rick belongs to something -- or thinks he does.

Meanwhile -- and White Boy Rick is a movie of many "meanwhiles" -- Rick's sister Dawn (Bel Powley) wallows in a drug-addicted life that brings her to the edge of physical ruin. Ravaged by crack, her face seems to be rotting right along with Detroit's declining industrial landscape.

Ricky also draws the attention of two FBI agents (Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rory Cochrane) who want Ricky to help them bring Johnny down. Ricky's given an impossible choice: Either he informs for the FBI or the FBI will shut down his father's illegal gun business. Family ties win out.

Some of the movie's scenes are given a humorous twist -- few greater than the movie's prologue which finds father and son arriving home from a successful buy at a gun show trying to convince the drug-addicted Dawn to accompany them for frozen custard, a ludicrous and inevitably futile stab at familial normalcy.

But harsh realities overshadow humor, even when it comes from Ricky's grandparents (Bruce Dern and Piper Laurie). Grandma keeps a pistol in her oven.

Merritt, who has no previous acting experience, gives a raw, natural performance as a kid who never entirely sells out his innocence. When Rick begs his father to join him in the drug business, he's not so much acting the thug as pleading for the life of his family and the ability to sustain it the only way he knows.

White Boy Rick isn't a perfect movie, perhaps because it never entirely convinces us that there's anything major to be gained from watching these characters fall prey to their devastated environment. Still, there's something to be said for movies that insist on shining realistic light on society's margins.

White Boy Rick makes a last-minute attempt to criticize the justice system that ultimately betrays Ricky, but the feeling one draws from the movie has less to do with rage at judicial inequity than with the bone-deep despair that stems from watching so many lives swirl desperately before going down the drain.

Little illuminated in 'Dark Tower'

Inspired by eight Stephen King novels, this summer movie may do a quick fade.

One of America's most popular and prolific authors, Stephen King wrote eight novels in his Dark Tower series. Instead of picking one of them, director Nikolaj Arcel and his team, which included Arcel and three additional writers, decided to make a big-screen mash-up of King's opus, cherry picking what they must have seen as choice elements for a screenplay.

The resultant movie -- The Dark Tower -- can be taken as a pean to unabashed eclecticism, drawing on everything from spaghetti westerns to sci-fi ploys to Tolkien-like fantasy.
Early fears that the movie would veer toward incoherence can be set aside. The Dark Tower -- which alternates between a world called Mid-World and present day New York City -- can be followed, but before it's done a different question emerges: Followed to what end?

Neither bad enough to offer the guilty pleasures of pure trash or good enough to constitute enthralling summer fun, the movie -- which clocks in at a merciful 95 minutes -- features a cast that includes Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey, each of whom plays a character representing a different moral polarity. Elba portrays The Gunslinger, a cowboy seeking revenge against the Man in Black (McConaughey).

This disreputable Man in Black, also known as Walter, killed The Gunslinger's father and has devoted himself to destroying the Dark Tower.

The tower, which looks like a giant stalagmite that has been painted black, can be found at the center of a circle that encompasses many universes. If the tower falls, demons will be unleashed. Horrors will ensue. The Man in Black will capitalize, reigning over the chaos.

To achieve his evil goal, the Man in Black appropriates the energy of specially gifted children to beam potent rays of destruction at the tower.

A Manhattan teenager named Jake (Tom Taylor) is the most powerful of these psychically gifted young people. The Man in Black wants to use Jake to destroy all the universes, which are connected by portals.

Nutty? To be sure, but most fantasies resist careful scrutiny, and -- in this case -- themes about sons who lose fathers barely resonate.

Add some creatures with skin that they wear (seams show) and a variety of other tricks that give birth to special effects that fall short of knockout levels, and you've got the idea.

Elba, a fine actor, looks great in a Clint Eastwood-style duster. Sporting an upwardly brushed hair style that might make Christopher Walken envious, McConaughey does his best to convey the eerie villainy of a character who refers to his various abilities in the plural, calling them "magics."

The Man in Black can work simply, as well, killing people by passing a hand over their faces and telling them to "stop breathing."

It seems cavalier to dismiss a movie inspired by eight novels with a short review, but I see no reason to belabor this one or to suggest that I returned from any of the movie's various universes with anything resembling great rewards. Despite lots of huffing and puffing on the part of the filmmakers, The Dark Tower seems far too easy to shrug off.

Looking for gold in Indonesia

Matthew McConaughey headlines in a story about a major gold strike.

In the new movie The Founder, Michael Keaton reveals the character and personal drives of Ray Kroc, the businessman who turned McDonald's into a national phenomenon. Keaton gets to the core of the character without trying to physically transform himself into Kroc. In the new movie Gold, Matthew McConaughey takes a totally different tack, turning himself into a balding, paunchy warthog of a man who seeks to enrich himself with what's purported to be the world's biggest gold find.

I start here because I'm always a little suspicious of extreme physical transformations, mostly because they threaten to call as much attention to the transformation as to performance.

Gold begins by telling us that it was inspired by real events. I've read the movie was based on the Bre-X scandal. Bre-X, a Canadian group, in the 1990s reported that it had made a major gold find in Indonesia. I can't tell you the rest without revealing important plot points in Gold.

Know, though, that McConaughey's Kenny Wells is a fictitious character who joins forces with another character, Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramirez), a geologist with a theory about where Indonesian gold can be found. Son of a successful businessman who specialized in looking for ore, Kenny wants to prove that he's as adept at prospecting as his old-school father.

McConaughey has given the character his all, which earns some respect, but the movie bogs down in familiar turf when Wells and Acosta take their story to Wall Street; predictably, the trappings of wealth dazzle Kenny, threatening his relationship with his loyal girlfriend, a convincing Bryce Dallas Howard.

Before striking gold, Kenny hits bottom; his dad's company -- Washoe Mining -- teeters on the edge of bankruptcy. A bereft Kenny travels to Indonesia in hopes that he can persuade Acosta to help him find the gold deposits that remain undiscovered.

Say this: McConaughey conveys the sheer joy Kenny experiences when he gains a foothold in the world of high finance. He woos an investment banker (Corey Stoll) and outsmarts a South African competitor (Bruce Greenwood). As if adhering to formula, Kenny's head is turned by a sophisticated woman (Rachael Taylor) from the world of finance.

Director Stephan Gaghan, who wrote and directed Syriana, keeps the movie moving -- even with a narration supplied by McConaughey, whose obviously speaking after the fact.

Hopscotching from Indonesia, where Kenny becomes deathly ill with malaria, to Reno and Wall Street, the movie offers visual diversity, and has fun with scenes in which Kenny allies himself with Indonesian leader Suharto's debauched billionaire son, although a bit in which Kenny must confront a tiger to prove his courage goes beyond far-fetched.

A major twist can't be revealed here, but Gold never quite strikes the vein for which it surely was digging. We've seen far too many stories about unbridled greed, ambition and dreams for Gold to register as much more than a showcase for McConaughey's transformative powers.

That transformation -- which required a weight gain of 40 pounds -- makes it difficult not to be aware that McConaughey willingly presents himself as the antithesis of the suave figure he plays in commercials for Lincoln.

It's a feat, I suppose, an actor who's like a runner who only knows how to sprint, but it's not enough to save a movie whose familiarity makes it feel as if much relevance has been lost.

It takes a while, but 'Sing' connects

I'm not going belabor Sing, a commercially potent bit of family entertainment with a decent amount of humor to carry it past its dull spots. This animated romp centers on a show-biz loving koala bear named Buster Moon (voice by Matthew McConaughey) who needs to raise money to save his beloved theater. To achieve his goal, Buster decides to sponsor a singing contest. As the result of a misprint, the winners think they'll receive $100,000. Poor Buster. He intended to award only a $1,000 prize. The plot makes room for a teeming cast of anthropomorphic animals such as a rat who croons like Sinatra (Seth MacFarlane) and a very shy elephant (Tori Kelly) who eventually unleashes a potent rendition of Leonard Coen's Hallelujah. Scarlett Johansson voices a porcupine punk rocker. We also meet a singing pig (Reese Witherspoon) who tries to juggle motherhood and a stage career, no easy task because she has 25 piglet kids. Then there's the gorilla (Aaron Egerton) who abandons his criminal father's ways to pursue a career on stage, but still longs for Dad's approval. There are more animals, but I think you get the idea. Sing makes use of many already popular tunes before arriving at a finale that pretty much rescues the whole enterprise. Director Garth Jennings (Son of Rambow) and his team don't offer animated perfection, but Sing ought to give Moana some competition for holiday viewing in a season that's running short on fun fare.

Rebelling against the South's Rebels

Despite Matthew McConaughey's fiery performance, Free State of Jones is a bit of a slog.

Some background: During the heat of the Civil War, Newton Knight left the Confederate army, returned to his Mississippi home and formed a ragtag band of fighters to combat what he viewed as injustices inflected by the Confederate Army on poor farmers and blacks who had been enslaved. Knight's rogue army -- a.k.a. the Knight Company -- was composed of deserters and runaway slaves.

Knight was motivated to desert the Rebel army, where he served as a nurse, by the Confederacy's "Twenty-Negro Law." That law exempted Southerners who owned 20 or more slaves from fighting, thus establishing grounds for believing that the Civil War was a battle in which poor southerners fought to protect the bounties of the rich.

A bona fide man of personality, Knight evidently took seriously the biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply. He had nine children with Serena, his white wife. Knight also had a common-law wife, a former slave, with whom he had five children.

So was Knight a prototypical hippie or an authentic champion of the poor?

That argument reportedly remains unsettled, but not for director Gary Ross, whose new movie -- The Free State of Jones -- treats Knight (Matthew McConaughey) as a heroic figure who believes in racial equality and in simple economic justice: A man deserves to own what he plants, etc.

I don't know whether Ross's interpretation of history is correct, but I do know that his movie possesses a pulse that beats only intermittently. Free State of Jones also suffers because Ross seems to prefer the lengthy accumulation of events to incisive character development.

Looking fierce, a bearded McConaughey blazes with passion as the committed Knight, but the rest of the cast -- including Knight's two wives (Keri Russell and Gugu Mbatha-Raw) -- aren't given enough chance to evolve.

Like nearly everyone else in the movie, they're swamped by Ross's need to cover ground -- from the waning days of the war through reconstruction to a jarringly presented 1948 trial in which Knight's great-grandson is accused of miscegenation, interracial marriage being illegal in Mississippi.

At times, the movie seems like an American take on Robin Hood with Knight's merry band of rebels living an idyllic life in the Mississippi swamps. At other times, the movie seems like a Western; Knight becomes the loner who protects the weak. At still other times, Ross uses photographs of the period to add authenticity. It's as if Ken Burns cropped up in the middle of the story to add his two cents.

There are compelling scenes, Knight discovering the body of a comrade in arms (Mahershala Ali) who has been hanged and castrated by Klansmen who can't accept the Reconstructionist idea that black men could vote. Unfortunately, such harrowing moments emerge amid what amounts to a general slog through an obscure slice of history.

Not widely known, Knight's story proves interesting enough to keep this lead-footed effort from totally foundering. But Ross (The Hunger Games) squanders an opportunity: Too many of the movie's scenes fail to spark in ways that would have taken The Free State of Jones to more memorable levels.

A sometimes blurry 'Interstellar' vision

How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen a worm hole?

Christopher Nolan's Interstellar provides us with reason to re-appreciate the genius of director Stanley Kubrick, who brilliantly opted to use minimal dialogue in his momentous and still glorious 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Nolan, who wrote the screenplay for Interstellar with his brother Jonathan, includes some surprisingly opaque dialogue that -- at least momentarily -- deflates the grandeur of his deep-space enterprise.

Kubrick's genius consisted of not trying to explain everything. He allowed the mystery of his movie to match the incomprehensible vastness of space.

Nolan, on the other hand, offers dialogue that explains without always clarifying all of the movie's narrative lapses in what amounts to a strange and not quite digestible mixture of homespun virtue and theoretical physics.

It's one hell of a tall order, I suppose, trying to span the distance from dirt farms to black holes.

To be fair, it should be noted that along the way, Nolan creates images that give the movie a stunning, forceful presence -- no small achievement.

It's the conception behind the drama that sometimes falters. Nolan begins with yet another view of a depleted Earth. Agriculture is failing, population has diminished and breathable air is on schedule to run out.

Is there a way out of this dystopian trap?

Enter Matthew McConaughey as Cooper, a NASA pilot turned farmer, who finds his way to a secret NASA hideout where he's recruited by Dr. Brand, a renowned physicist played by a weary-looking Michael Caine.

Cooper's assignment: to fly the ship that will journey through a worm hole and beyond. It's part of an attempt to find a new galactic home for the dwindling populace of Earth.

To pursue this mission, Cooper -- a widower and father of two -- must leave his young kids (Mackenzie Foy and Timothee Chalamet) in the care of their grandfather (John Lithgow).

The explanation for how Cooper goes from farmer to space hero is not especially convincing, but it launches him on a voyage of salvation along with a crew that includes Anne Hathaway's Amelia, the daughter of Dr. Brand.

I don't think it's spoiling anything to tell you that the scientists in Interstellar are operating under the assumption that an unspecified being (or beings) is providing humanity with an assist in its quest for survival.

After his acceptance speech at this year's Oscars, I wondered whether McConaughey already had traveled in space, but he brings a down-home Texas twang and lots of high-level fretting to the role of a man thrust into the position of trying, as a mere human, to do something usually reserved for superheroes; i.e., saving all of humanity.

If there's a truly compelling reason to see Interstellar, it centers on the grandiosity of Nolan's space vision, made significantly more powerful when seen in Imax. Nolan captures the vastness of space, and some of the action scenes involving docking maneuvers of space craft are suitably impressive.

Cooper's adventures keep him away from Earth for quite a while. So it's not surprising that somewhere toward the middle of the movie's two-hour and 49-minute span, Cooper's kids become adults, played by Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck.

Of the two, Chastain has the more important role because we're told that her character has a powerful love bond with her space-voyaging father. More about that later.

Nolan fills individual set pieces with tension, but the greater question (will mankind survive?) doesn't exactly keep us on the edge of our seats, and when the dialogue tries to incorporate scientific jargon, the outlines of Nolan's human drama tend to blur.

Those familiar with Nolan's blockbuster filmography (a couple of Batman movies and Inception) hardly will be surprised by the movie's ambition, but it's a bit odd that Interstellar tries to bring the whole business to its conclusion by telling us that love (in this case between father and daughter) has the potential to bridge the space/time continuum -- or something like that.

At times, Interstellar feels reminiscent of Kubrick, and at other times it feels almost Spielbergian, particularly in opening segments that take place in a future that has been made to resemble the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression.

I wore out on Hans Zimmer's creative but inescapable score, which provides both menace and cosmic inspiration. Zimmer hits highs, and then tries to repeat them.

One of those highs involves a Michael Caine recitation of Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, which serves as a kind of poetic bit of cheerleading, encouraging humanity to rage against the dying of the light -- which in this case reaches beyond individual death to the extinction of the entire species.

Nolan's gigantic exercise soars and sinks, even as its boosted by amazing sights: a planet on which ocean waves reach mountainous heights and a journey past a black hole, for example.

Some viewers may find that Nolan has infused Interstellar with palpable human longing. If you share that view, the movie may strike a deep chord with you.

Me? I can't think of a recent movie that gave thrills with one hand while eliciting groans with the other. You'll have to see Interstellar for yourself to determine on which side of the line you land.

I'm not sure you'll agree, but I thought Nolan's movie represented an outsized amalgam of unlikely bedfellows, the Beatles and Einstein. It goes something like this: All you need is love -- and quite possibly an advanced degree in physics.

A club no one would want to join

Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto give Dallas Buyers Club its heart and soul.

Dallas Buyers Club -- the real-life story of a dissolute Texas homophobe who in 1985 was diagnosed with AIDS -- has been written about almost exclusively in terms of its two stars: Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto.

McConaughey plays rodeo cowboy and electrician Ron Woodroof, and Leto plays Rayon, a transvestite who becomes an unlikely friend to Woodroof, as well as a business associate of sorts.

The fact that most of the writing about the movie has focused on McConaughey and Leto -- and the truly amazing performances each gives -- is understandable.

It's impossible to write about Dallas Buyers Club without mentioning that the movie caps a transition in McConaughey's career -- from promising pretty boy to a full-fledged character actor who can be eccentric, fearless and unnervingly immersive. McConaughey's engine always seems to be running at high speeds, even when he's idling.

To play Woodroof, McConaughey reduced himself to skeletal weight, unflinchingly embraced the ugly side of Woodroof's character and wound up offering a piece of performance-art caliber acting that poses a seldom-debated question: How much can experience really change a person?

Can a good-ole Texas boy, with a proclivity for drugs and hookers, develop unexpected sensitivities? How far in that direction could he possibly go? How would it look if he did begin to see the world through different eyes?

To McConaughey's and the film's credit, Dallas Buyers Club never totally files away Woodroof's rough edges: His bigotry, his boundless capacity for hustling and his unapologetic self-absorption remain constant throughout.

If you're familiar with Leto -- i.e., if you know what he looks like -- you'll find him unrecognizable as Rayon, a transvestite who forms an initially uneasy alliance with Woodroof.

Woodroof and Rayon meet in a hospital, after both have been diagnosed with AIDS. Rayon approaches the wary Woodroof, and as the movie progresses, it becomes increasingly clear that Leto has put himself as far out on an emotional limb as McConaughey. He's playing a good-hearted character whose AIDS leads him down a path of heightened self-destruction.

Woodroof develops a personal connection to Rayon, but he also sees an opportunity to cash in on other people's troubles.

After he visits a rogue doctor (Griffin Dunne) in Mexico, Woodroof finds a way around U.S. law. He sets up a club that allows him to import and provide vitamin concoctions that Dunne's character dispenses. Club members pay dues: The drugs are free.

Woodroof initially was told he could expect to live another 30 days. The movie suggests that abandoning AZT and switching to an entirely different drug regimen allowed Woodroof to live another seven years.

Not surprisingly, Woodroof's new business venture puts him in conflict with the DEA, FDA and other government agencies. It also allows him to find a measure of unexpected fulfillment as a drug entrepreneur.

McConaughey amply conveys Woodroof's delight in running a burgeoning business. He might be the only person in the world whose disease resulted in an ego boost.

Two major figures represent the medical community. Denis O'Hare plays a doctor in charge of AZT trials at a Texas hospital. Jennifer Garner portrays another doctor, a physician who begins to understand that rules promulgated by the medical establishment may actually be harming patients.

Dallas Buyers Club seems to want to give us insights about AIDS, about the perils of early treatments with AZT, about the blind recalcitrance of the FDA, about the bureaucratic foolishness of the DEA and about the ways in which helpful potentially alternative medicines have difficulty finding their way into the mainstream.

I don't know what director Jean-Marc Vallé intended, but his actors tend to overwhelm the medical issues at the movie's core. I have no problem with that: Some of those issues have been explored elsewhere. Besides, McConaughey and Leto have done what movies do best. They've given us a couple of unforgettable characters.

Sex, sweat and lots of humidity

Overwrought Paperboy goes way south

Director Lee Daniels's new movie The Paperboy, an adaptation of a 1995 Peter Dexter novel, sweats its way through a densely packed and lurid story that can seem both pungent and preposterous -= not to mention a trifle repellent.

What did Daniels have in mind? A wallow in southern-fried sleaze? A story about misapplied justice? A display of weird sexual tension? An opportunity for Zac Efron to spend time lolling about in his underwear?

Daniels, who co-wrote the screenplay with Dexter, dips into a vat full of Southern Gothic ingredients and scoops them onto the screen without straining them through the filter of a carefully developed narrative. What you get are large, often indigestible hunks of movie. The Paperboy is all gristle.

Daniels laces the humid Florida air with several narrative threads. A crusading journalist (Matthew McConaughey) tries to free a convict (John Cusack) who may have been wrongly convicted of murdering a sadistic sheriff. A slatternly woman (Nicole Kidman) corresponds with the convict, believing she has found a soul mate. The journalist's younger brother (Efron) falls for Kidman's Charlotte Bless, seeing himself as her protector.

The actors in The Paperboy are drenched in so much humidity that the movie can feel as it's taking place in a swamp. Of course, some of it does take place in swampy Florida backwaters. The time: 1969.

McConaughey plays Ward Jansen, a Miami reporter who travels to a small Florida town accompanied by a defiant black writing partner (David Oyelowo).

Efron's Jack Jansen, Ward's brother, lives with his father (Scott Glenn) and stepmother (Nealla Gordon). Jack takes advice from the family maid (Macy Gray), a woman who seems to have supplied him with the only form of maternal love he has known. Add a few Oedipal overtones, stir gently and you've got the relationships between Jack and Gray's character.

Gray's Anita Chester narrates the film, but her guidance doesn't help Daniels to keep the narrative from confusion, particularly in the early going when the movie's who's-who list has yet to sort itself out.

Kidman, who embraces her character's slutty vivaciousness, certainly doesn't need to prove her courage, but The Paperboy reminds us that she's up for almost anything. Here, she shares a scene with Cusack (a jailhouse visit) in which both characters engage in some kind of psychic sexual interchange that leaves them damp. The two journalists and Jack, who are also present, look on with amazement. So, probably, will you.

In another scene, Kidman's character urinates on Efron's Jack, apparently to relieve a severe allergic reaction to a jellyfish sting.

For Cusack, The Paperboy marks a stretch; maybe he has a future playing crude men with IQs that seem to dip below the scorching Florida temperatures. He's convincingly raw and frightening.

Daniels always seems to be pushing too hard, and, as he showed in Precious, he often carries things too far. Let's just say that there have been kinder views of McConaughey than the one that shows his naked posterior in a motel room.

But wait: There's more. When Ward and Jack visit a swamp-dwelling miscreant in search of evidence that might help liberate Cusack's character, we watch as the man slices open an alligator and lets its innards fall to the dirt. Oh well, at least Daniels didn't ask anyone to eat the slimy entrails.

If you're looking for something something febrile, the finale of The Paperboy won't disappoint. The same goes for much of the movie's beginning and its middle.

The actors are all game and committed, but Daniels too often leaves them wallowing in this sty of a story. Watching The Paperboy can be like watching someone drown in a bucket of sweat.

The chaotic world of male strippers

Soderbergh strips away plot and indulges in atmospherics -- and male stripping.

When I read that director Steven Soderbergh was making a movie about male strippers, I scratched my head, but figured that Soderbergh -- who has had both commercial (Ocean's Eleven) and artistic successes (Bubble) -- deserved the full benefit any doubts I and others might have about Magic Mike, a movie starring Channing Tatum.

I carried that accepting attitude into the movie's preview screening, but, sad to say, Magic Mike too often comes across as a lively hunk of junk cinema that does little more than titillate the demographic at which it seems to be aimed, the kind of women who consider watching male strippers a fun night out with the girls.

Not surprisingly, the talented Soderbergh sets the scene well, establishing the environment around a Tampa club called Xquisite, which is run by an oily impresario of beefcake who calls himself Dallas (Matthew McConaughey). McConaughey, who knows how to play sleazy, gives himself fully to the role of an ex-stripper who aspires to move his club from Tampa to Miami and who offers his strippers equity share in the business.

A variety of intentionally hockey strip numbers serve as showy highlights, although they tend become repetitive as the strippers play with male stereotypers -- from firemen to cowboys to cops to sailors.

A whisper of a story emerges when Mike takes a newcomer (Alex Pettyfer) under his wing. We see how Pettyfer's Adam -- a.k.a. The Kid -- learns to be an effective stripper and how he begins to enjoy a life that gives him money, women, notoriety and fun -- at least within the small, strip-club world.

It's probably a mistake to think of Magic Mike as episodic; it's really an immersive movie in which Soderbergh takes us into a world where the men are sex objects and, for the most part, seem to embrace the role.

Tatum, who at age 18 worked as a stripper, is credible as the kind of guy who has irons in many fires. Mike sees himself as a budding entrepreneur, and he hopes one day to start a custom furniture business. To date, he's gotten by on hustle, good looks and charm. He's one of those guys who seem to be dancing on air.

Adam's sister (Cody Horn) would like to see her 19-year-old brother on a more normal path and occasionally serves as the movie's scold, a role not even she takes all that seriously. Horn's Brooke is more concerned about her chaotic younger brother than about the propriety of stripping.

At about an hour into the movie's 110 minutes, I noticed two things. First, the air-conditioning in the theater where the preview screening was being held seemed to be flagging, not a good thing on a day when temperatures had reached 105 degrees. Even worse, the movie began to show its need for a stronger story.

The best Soderbergh can do is to introduce a secton in which Adam gets himself into trouble feeding ecstasy to a sorority girl. The incident further prompts Mike to wonder whether his life isn't a tad empty. Mike'a attempts to make a genuine connection with a woman he seems to see regularly (Olivia Munn) go nowhere. She sees him only as a sexual diversion.

Soderbergh opts for a naturalistic acting style that allows for plenty of hemming and hawing. The cast seems comfortable enough, although some of the strippers (Adam Rodriguez and Joe Manganiello) receive little attention, aside from Manganiello who is seen using a pump to ... er ... enhance his on-stage appeal.

Soderbergh doesn't judge anything that happens, suggesting only that young men outgrow this sort of thing (Mike) or turn it into a marginal form of show business (Dallas) or go along for the ride as long as it lasts (Adam).

There's no point moralizing when a substantial part of the audience will be attending for the beefcake alone, but Soderbergh could have said something a little more trenchant than what we find here.

The world of the male stripping ultimately isn't all that interesting, and this is a case in which what could have made for a lively and unusual backdrop basically becomes the entire movie.

The rise and fall of a Texas funeral director

A flower blooms in a small Texas town -- and his name is Bernie.

Bernie Tiede was a solicitous assistant funeral director in the tiny Texas town of Carthage. Marjorie Nugent was Carthage's richest widow, a woman known for her meanness of spirit. Bernie (Jack Black) prided himself on providing service with a sensitive smile and praise to Jesus. Perhaps convinced that even the town ogre couldn't help responding to his irresistible warmth, Bernie befriended Marjorie (Shirley MacLaine).

Bernie eventually gave up his job at the Carthage funeral home to become Mrs. Nugent's aide and confidant. He prospered. He traveled with her. She found someone to assuage the loneliness she wouldn't admit to having, but she never lost her taste for delivering a punishing remark. No matter what else happened, Marjorie never allowed Bernie to forget that he had been put on this Earth to respond to her every demand.

One day or maybe it was in one frustrated moment, Bernie snapped. He shot Marjorie four times with a rifle. She died, a fate that often befalls those who suffer multiple rifle wounds.

Bernie, a seriocomic movie from director Richard Linklater, is based on a true story taken from a magazine article by Skip Hollandsworth, who co-wrote the movie's screenplay with Linklater. Mixing actors and real Carthage townsfolk, Linklater comes up with a movie that should be celebrated -- not because it deals with murder -- but because it exudes the kind of regional flavor that's difficult to come by in today's homogenized movie climate. Linklater's movie is Texas to the core.

Black's fans are in for a surprise. His Bernie is a Jesus-loving graduate of funeral director school who also preaches and sings at the local church. Bernie prides himself on his neat-as-a-pin appearance, and has a slight mincing quality to his gait. Bernie may be light in the loafers, as one townsperson unoriginally puts it, or he might just be a kind of rare Texas flower that blooms in a small town that can't always tell the difference between sincerity and salesmanship. Hell, neither can Bernie?

I couldn't look at Black without thinking that Bernie probably overdoes it in the cologne department.

Looking as if someone had just force fed her a lemon, MacLaine creates a character who seems to have been born sour and remained that way.

Black and MacLaine -- as unlikely a screen pairing as I ever expected to see -- are terrific together. She hectors and bullies Bernie. He tolerates her until the moment he loses his patience and picks up that rifle.

Linklater spends a lot of time introducing us to Bernie and to Carthage. In an early scene, Bernie addresses a group of aspiring funeral directors, teaching them the finer points of mortuary science, things like how to keep the eyes of the deceased from popping open, always a cause for alarm.

The second half of the picture deals with the way in which Bernie tries to cover up his crime and the trial that follows his arrest.

In district attorney Danny Buck, Matthew McConaughey has found a role he really was born to play, a country bumpkin whose strategy involves turning Bernie into an effete alien who knows things like which color wine goes with which kind of food and who can pronounce a few common French words. Scandalous.

Buck finds himself at odds with the good people of Carthage, some of whom think that Bernie may have done the world a small favor when he sent Mrs. Nugent to her eternal reward. They're outraged that Buck has been granted a change of venue for the trial, shifting the proceedings to another small Texas town where (as one character puts it) the people are likely to have more tattoos than teeth.

Linklater, the director of movies as wide-ranging as Slacker, Waking Life, Before Sunset and Me and Orson Welles, has come up with a winning oddball of a movie. Having real people -- most of them naturally funny -- comment on Bernie and Mrs. Nugent makes us appreciate the comic tone Linklater has chosen for the movie. It's not imposed on the material, but stems from a living, breathing reality.

Bernie may be guilty of minimizing murder a bit, but it also maximizes local flavor. And that's something movies very much need.

Law from the backseat of a limo

Matthew McConaughey, an actor who’s had as many downs as he’s had ups, seems to do well in courtrooms. His “breakthrough” movie – 1996’s A Time to Kill – cast him as an attorney, and so does The Lincoln Lawyer, a pulpy, improbable and moderately entertaining new thriller.

In The Lincoln Lawyer, McConaughey portrays Mickey Haller, a slick, marginally ethical attorney who delights in either getting his clients off or cutting them the best possible deals. The title of the movie stems from the way Mickey conducts his business, from the backseat of a black, chauffer-driven Lincoln Town Car.

Directed by Brad Furman and written by John Romano, The Lincoln Lawyer tells a story that relies on the kind of twists and turns that seem to occur only in legal thrillers – either on screen or on the page. The movie is based on a 2005 novel by Michael Connelly, a veteran cop reporter, who now plies his trade writing fiction.

McConaughey keeps the movie on track, giving Mickey plenty of conniving spirit and immodest charm as he deals with a variety of low-life clients – from prostitutes to gang bangers to drug dealers. Mickey has built a solid reputation among Los Angeles' criminal class. He is not admired by the police.

Fortune – in the form of a major payday -- smiles on Mickey when he’s asked to represent Louis Roulet (Ryan Phillippe), a rich guy whose mother (Frances Fisher) wants to keep him out of jail. A high-priced hooker has accused Roulet of beating her senseless.

Is this woman for real or is she seeking to drain the rich kid’s pocketbook?

The movie quickly answers that question as it morphs into a cagey game in which a hard-partying attorney -- perhaps for the first time – finds himself asking pointed ethical questions.

The movie boasts a strong supporting cast. Marisa Tomei portrays a prosecuting attorney who happens to be Mickey’s former wife. John Leguizamo shows up as a corrupt bail bondsman, and William H. Macy (sporting the long-haired look of an unrepentant hippy) plays an investigator who helps Mickey, sometimes making well-placed payoffs.

Fair to say that the entire supporting cast is a bit under-exposed as the story lurches from point A to point Z, sometimes speeding too quickly past the rest of the alphabet. Let’s just say the plot loses credibility as the movie progresses, maybe because Lincoln Lawyer isn’t quite smart enough to pull off its plethora of dodges, feints and last-minute revelations.

But McConaughey and crew keep Lincoln Lawyer in the game. Sans any desire to probe deeply, Lincoln Lawyer slides by quickly, but contains a few too many contrivances to make us believe it knows how things really work.