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Matthew McConaughey’s First Movie in 6 Years Is Bananas in the Best Way
The Rivals of Amziah King is a rural comedy, a musical, and an agricultural crime drama, and it’s pretty damn wonderful.
The Rivals of Amziah King is the second feature from writer-director Andrew Patterson, who made his debut in 2019 with The Vast of Night, a 1950s-set sci-fi movie with the framing of a Twilight Zone episode and the wild ambition of an artist who didn’t treat limited resources as a barrier to big stylistic swings. They’re local guys who look like area demigods in that parking lot, their performance captured with stutter-stop editing and freeze-frames, the dredging of beef cutlets and frying of tater tots and the rapt face of the girl at the register spliced in as though they all have equal bearing on the overwhelming sensory pleasure of the night. The Rivals of Amziah King finds its way into some riotous diversions — like a church potluck that becomes an excuse for a storytelling exercise and a bee emergency at a local elementary school — before taking a turn into what can only be described as an agricultural crime drama featuring Kurt Russell.
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