Serenity (2019)

Interstellar, another movie starring Matthew McConaughey as a father separated by vast stretches of time and space from his child, was released five years earlier than Serenity, which is surprising because Serenity feels like the retro, 8-bit, pixelated version, playing with similar themes but in a story that awkwardly melds '40s film noir with family drama and a tuna-fishing adventure, all steeped in odd moments of reality-bending fantasy that may signal McConaughey's character's post-war trauma playing havoc with his head - or else something else delivered in not very stellar fashion.

★★☆☆☆ 

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Contact (1997)

In Robert Zemeckis' adaptation that does a good job of digesting into an engrossing blockbuster the hard science fiction of Carl Sagan's novel, a researcher (Jodie Foster, in top form, perfectly cast) sits under satellite dishes with headphones listening for messages from outerspace, eventually coming across a code blipped from somewhere far off, the deciphered message of which is a set of instructions to build something, but religious leaders are wary and politicians are defensive as space agencies hurry to act.

★★★★☆

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Fool's Gold (2008)

This much-maligned sun-drenched adventure from Warner Bros. has goofball divorcees, played by bronzed beach babes Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, reuniting in a race to claim a sunken treasure in the Caribbean, and it is so harmless a romantic romp, like an especially cartoony Romancing the Stone, it is hard to see why so many people regard it with such disdain, even if Donald Sutherland's appearance as a rich yacht owner feels unnecessary and his character's relationship with his daughter is irritating, even if McConaughey and Hudson are not the most likeable leads, and even if you are never going to want to watch it again, ever.

★★★☆☆

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True Detective (Season 1)

True Detective Season 1 (DVD)

True Detective Season 1 (DVD)

Two cops, Matthew McConaughey's Rustin "Rusty" Cohle and Woody Harrelson's Martin Hart investigate the ritualistic killing of a prostitute in this gritty eight-episode police procedural that distinguishes itself with its bleak view of human psychology - as bleak as any of its Louisiana backwater crime scenes - and with the false promise of its title: that this has anything to do with pulpy True Detective-style magazines or tells a crime story that is even slightly realistic. 

★★★★☆

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The Dark Tower (2017)

This Stephen King book adaptation about a supernaturally gifted boy upon whom the continued existence of multiple worlds relies never ceases world-building so that even three-quarters of the way through, Idris Elba's Gunslinger (a Western sheriff crossed with Devil May Cry's Dante, in a good-versus-evil battle with Matthew McConnaughy's Man in Black, a cadaverous Christopher Walken impersonation) turns to the boy to utter short scene-final explanations - "[the shapeshifting monster we've just bested] was exploiting your weakness, [by appearing in the form of your father]" and "What happens in this world [i.e. beams of light from the sky and portals opening and closing] is mirrored in other worlds," or things like that - and it is funny that by film's end you still have no idea what this intensively explained world is and why anyone should care less about it ceasing to exist, though it won't cease to exist - it is a part of the Stephen King canon that will be dredged up and reimagined forevermore irrespective of whether it makes sense or is interesting or not.

★☆☆☆☆

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The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

I read Jordan Belfort's revolting book at the insistence of an enthusiastic friend; watching this Scorsese adaptation was my own decision to see if the appeal of the book that eluded me was something discernable in the film and it turns out the extravagant rise and fall of the Wolf ("Wolfie"), a small-time Bernie Madoff, makes for a loud, looong, obnoxious film, all kinds of non-PC and hard-to-believe, but minus the book's self-adulating tone and despite the pitiful man on display and the devastating crimes just out of sight, the movie, particularly the last half, is engaging and often very funny.

★★★☆☆

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Interstellar (2014)

An incredible amount of stuff to cover (multiple planets, multiple dimensions, things happening in the future and the past, and stuff occurring at different relative speeds) is probably why Interstellar felt perfunctory and rushed to me, and I thought the ending, which made others so emotional, was daft...but this was more engaging than The Martian (another lost-in-space story with a few of the same actors).

★★★☆☆

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Mud (2012)

A man on the run enlists the help of two boys adventuring on a remote part of the Arkansas river and over the course of helping him the boys learn about life and love, in this part-Huckleberry Finn, part-Tom Sawyer, part-Stand By Me coming-of-age suspense drama.

★★★★☆

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