Matthew McConaughey

The Lost Bus

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Driver Kevin behind the wheel while fire rages outside

Paul Greengrass’s first film for five years is about a bus you definitely wouldn’t want to catch. The Lost Bus transports him and us back to the quasi-disaster-movie style of United 93, his 9/11 movie. It’s about a real-life disaster – 85 people dead, 50,000 evacuated in the 2018 Camp Fire, one of the deadliest in California’s history. In disaster-movie fashion we get to know our hero, the driver of a yellow school bus, on a fairly typical day. Kevin is nearing the end of his tether – can’t seem to get on the right side of bus company management, struggling with a sick mother at home, an estranged wife who hates him, a … Read more

Dazed and Confused

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Rory Cochrane, Jason London and Sasha Jenson

Dazed and Confused is Richard Linklater’s 1993 film doing for 1976 what George Lucas’s American Graffiti (1973) did for 1962. That is, it looks back fondly at a group of teenagers on the cusp of adult life on their last day/night of high school, while also observing how long ago it now all was, and in more than plain old years. Like Lucas’s gang, Linklater’s crew are a mixed crowd of jocks and nerds, lookers and plain-Janes and Johns, sensitive souls and bozos, cool kids and the terminally awkward, kids whose best days are to come and those whose lives have already peaked. The style builds on the loose, superficially disorganised approach of … Read more

Killer Joe

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Matthew McConaughey and Juno Temple in Killer Joe

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 18 August Lolita published, 1958 If you’re looking for a start date for the 1960s, you could do a lot worse than this: 18 August 1958, when Vladimir Nabokov’s novel was first published in the USA. Detailing the love of a middle aged literature professor for a 12-year-old girl, whom he has nicknamed Lolita, it had first been finished in 1953, but was turned down for publication by a string of publishing houses, finally seeing light of day only after Olympia Press in France, a publisher of pornography, printed it in 1955. In spite of its low key debut, it sold … Read more

Mud

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Tye Sheridan, Jacob Lofland and Matthew McConaughey in Mud

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 10 December Huckleberry Finn published, 1884 On this day in 1884, Mark Twain published Huckleberry Finn. It was the second book to feature the vagabond child of a vagrant drunkard father, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer being the first. Huck Finn would appear in two more short books, Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective, but only as the narrator. Huckleberry Finn is a romantic character, the free spirit not bound by the rules of bourgeois life – hence nice kid Tom Sawyer’s attraction to him. He was based on a Mississippi character called Tom Blankenship, whom Twain was friendly with … Read more

U-571

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Erik Palladino, Matthew McConaughey, U-571

 The standard submarine drama – depth charges, beep-beep sonar, bursting bulkheads, “secure that hatch” dialogue – gets an efficient workthrough by director Jonathan Mostow, who did a lot with very little in 1997’s “who stole my wife” thriller Breakdown. He’s got a good cast here too – Matthew McConaughey putting in one of his brattish turns as the “I’m ready for command” lieutenant, Bill Paxton as his “No, you’re not” commander, an underused Harvey Keitel and Jon Bon Jovi, continuing his hopeful advance into movies – but it’s the presence of the Enigma coding machine that is the film’s USP. By which I mean it’s the presence of the Enigma machine that is the … Read more

The Paperboy

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Nicole Kidman's Charlotte Bless is very pleased to see John Cusack's Hillary Van Wetter in The Paperboy

You want Southern Fried? The Paperboy has it for you by the boneless bucketful. Gourmets, look away now. Thanks to the success of Precious (Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire etc), a peculiarly successful misery memoir, for his follow-up its director Lee Daniels is able to call on a cast starry enough to open several films – Zac Efron, Nicole Kidman, Matthew McConaughey, John Cusack. A cast he then submerges in a 1960s Deep South swamp of gators and racial segregation, the spirit of Blanche Dubois invoked by Kidman’s performance as a slut of a certain age who relies on the comfort of whoever happens to be available. What little plot there … Read more