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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Oscars 2023: a welcome turn to Ireland aside, these are very conventional picks | Peter Bradshaw

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The Banshees of Inisherin has made a stunning showing, along with welcome nods for Paul Mescal and The Quiet Girl, but there are few other surprises

First: a great deal of joy in Ireland for its tremendous successes on this year’s Academy Award nomination list. Martin McDonagh’s tragicomedy The Banshees Of Inisherin, about two men falling out in a remote island community at the time of the civil war, has a host of nominations: including best picture with McDonagh getting best director and best screenplay nods, best actor for Colin Farrell, best supporting actor(s) for Brendan Gleeson and Barry Keoghan and best supporting actress, for Kerry Condon. In addition to which, Paul Mescal gets a best actor nomination for his performance in Charlotte Wells’s beautiful father-daughter drama Aftersun; Colm Bairéad’s The Quiet Girl is nominated for best international feature and Tom Berkeley and Ross White’s An Irish Goodbye is nominated for best short.

Otherwise, there is some unease at the gravitational pull towards the mainstream: an all-male directing list (Charlotte Wells or Marie Kreutzer could have got in there) and Danielle Deadwyler’s excellent performance in Till is ignored in the best actress list. There has been some haughty online dismissal of Ana de Armas’s nomination for her performance as Marilyn Monroe in Andrew Dominik’s condescending psychodrama Blonde (although the problem is surely with the film rather than De Armas), and a mixed response on social media for the estimable Andrea Riseborough’s best actress nomination for the tough indie drama To Leslie, largely due to a wary response to a celebrity-driven viral campaign. But the always excellent Riseborough certainly shakes things up.

Cate Blanchett naturally takes pole position in the best actress list for her much-acclaimed uber-conductor role in Tár, a female-Furtwängler supernova of problematic power display. However, the best actor list is harder to call – though it could well be that Austin Butler will clinch it for his heartfelt impersonation of Elvis Presley, a performance much admired by the star’s late daughter Lisa Marie Presley.

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