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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The Fabelmans review – Spielberg’s beguiling ode to a life made by movies will leave you on a high

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The director’s 1950s-set semi-memoir brilliantly examines how we edit our own life stories, and the repercussions

Steven Spielberg’s utterly beguiling fictionalised movie-memoir is his new adventure in Panglossian optimism, and offers us a stunning critical insight into his own work and how and why artists cauterise childhood pain and rewrite their youth. Movies are not exactly a matter of “escapism” – a lazy and misleading word – but all about intervening in real life, reordering the landscape, addressing frailty and vulnerability candidly, but from a position of strength.

Young Spielberg is reborn as Sammy Fabelman, a little kid in 1950s New Jersey who is hit by cinema as by a bolt of lightning when he sees Cecil B DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth; he is stunned by the train crash scene, which he obsessively re-stages at home with a toy train set and an 8mm camera. Like most of the movie, this is based on a real event, or anyway a real memory, and Spielberg may also want us to think of Orson Welles’s comment that a movie studio is the “biggest electric train set any boy ever had”. The one movie legend Sammy eventually does get to meet in the flesh is John Ford, played here by another movie legend that it would be unsporting to reveal in a wonderfully funny and inspirational final scene.

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