The Rivals of Amziah King review – Matthew McConaughey returns with unwieldy misstep

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SXSW film festival: The Oscar winner’s first film role for six years shows his undeniable magnetism but squanders it on a baggy mix of tones and genres In the past six years, the Academy award-winning actor Matthew McConaughey , the reigning prince of Austin, Texas, has kept busy. He raised his three kids in the city, written and released a bestselling memoir on “easy-livin’” (“because life is a verb”), taught in the film department at the University of Texas at Austin, pleaded for gun control at the White House after the horrific school shooting in his home town of Uvalde and “seriously considered” running for governor of Texas. But he has not acted on screen – relegating his last two film roles, underwhelming romps in Harmony Korine’s The Beach Bum and Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen , to the distant memory of a pre-pandemic 2019. With the end of the 2010s, the energy of the McConnaissance went elsewhere. That is, until Monday, when McConaughey returned to red carpet promotional...
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Last Tango in Paris at 50: Bertolucci’s controversial drama remains troubling

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The Italian director’s knotty drama remains a provocation, a film filled with lyrical beauty but also repulsive cruelty

Revisiting films on the occasion of major anniversaries can be a disorienting reminder of time’s too-swift passage: that film is now 20/30/40 years old? How can that be? Why does it still feel so much younger than I do? In other cases, however, the film wears its advanced age in a way that makes complete sense, and so it is with Last Tango in Paris, released in cinemas in 1973. Now a half-century old, Bernardo Bertolucci’s lightning rod for scandal and debate has dated in many of the ways you might expect, but that’s not quite what I mean: at 50, the film’s age has now caught up with the overriding air of middle-aged despair and disarray that it always carried. In a sense, it was a film made to be forgotten, and then remembered with bittersweet, conflicted feelings, its significant beauty curdled over time.

Bring up Last Tango in Paris in cinephile circles today – especially those reckoning with the gender politics of the artform post-MeToo – and you won’t hear that many fond endorsements. When it’s brought up at all, the conversation swiftly narrows to its most notorious scene: the one where Marlon Brando’s Paul, a recently widowed American abroad, holed up in a desolately furnished Parisian apartment, forces himself on Maria Schneider’s Jeanne, a 20-year-old ingenue whose name he refuses to learn. Grabbing a dab of fridge-cold butter for lubrication, he anally rapes her.

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