Matthew McConaughey is back on the big screen for the first time in five years, starring in the Southern-fried crime drama "The Rivals of Amziah King," which opens in select theaters this Friday through the distributor Black Bear, according to The Hollywood Reporter and AP News.
The film marks the Oscar winner's first live-action movie since taking a lengthy break from Hollywood to focus on writing books, The Hollywood Reporter reported. McConaughey plays the title character, a honey producer, born-again Christian and bluegrass musician in rural Oklahoma, delivering what AP News described as a "Matthew-McConaughey-turned-up-to-11" performance full of Cheshire Cat smiles, rascally winks and buttery Southern charm, complete with suspenders, scruff and cowboy boots.
Director Andrew Patterson, making his long-awaited follow-up to his acclaimed 2019 debut "The Vast of Night," told The Hollywood Reporter the project began as an idea he wanted to pursue quickly after that first film, built around access he had to a friend's honey plant and a desire to center the story on a Native American female character who eventually takes over the narrative. That character, Kateri, is played by Angelina LookingGlass in her film debut, portraying Amziah's former foster daughter who is pulled back into his orbit years later during a personal crisis.
According to Patterson, the film's path to McConaughey was circuitous. The director said the coronavirus pandemic slowed development because he did not want to shoot under heavy social-distancing restrictions, and McConaughey was not initially available when the script was ready. Patterson told The Hollywood Reporter that other prominent actors were considered, including Denzel Washington, who loved the script but wanted creative control that Patterson felt he could not accommodate. When McConaughey later became available and read the material, he signed on. "He was as perfectly fit for the role as anybody would ever have been, and then became the role in a way that nobody ever could have," Patterson said.
McConaughey, for his part, said the script stood out immediately. "What an original time, place, space, and language. Oh man, there's such an innocence to this," he told The Hollywood Reporter, adding that he found it poetic, musical and "funny as shit," and saw it as a story for underdogs. He described his character as "a king of a man, a father, a shepherd, leader of misfits" and, after filming wrapped, came to see him as "a giver of belonging." McConaughey also noted the financial trade-off involved in choosing the project, saying he picked it "in place of other movies I could have done for a whole lot more money."
The production itself was shot back in 2023, then premiered at South by Southwest in the spring of 2025 before finally reaching wide theatrical release now, a year and a half later, through Black Bear, the production company that became the film's distributor. Patterson declined to detail the reasons for the delay to The Hollywood Reporter, saying only that the release "feels hard-earned." That gap also means other, more recently filmed McConaughey projects, such as Paul Greengrass's Oscar-nominated "The Lost Bus," have already reached audiences ahead of this one.
Despite the anticipation surrounding McConaughey's return, AP News gave the film a mixed review, awarding it two out of four stars. The AP review praised McConaughey's performance but faulted the movie for trying to be too many things at once, calling it "a maddening mishmash of genres" that blends sudden Tarantino-style brutality, a coming-of-age story, a heist plot, a revenge fantasy and a music-filled country hoedown. According to AP, the plot follows Amziah King as he navigates his rural Oklahoma honey operation, investigating a case of $250,000 worth of abandoned honey barrels, before he abruptly exits the film around the one-hour mark, handing the narrative over to LookingGlass's character, Kateri, exactly the structural gamble Patterson described wanting to build the story around.
AP News also highlighted supporting performances from Kurt Russell as a local crime boss who evades the law, and Jake Horowitz as a former Marine who orchestrates a theft with military precision. The review noted a scene widely reminiscent of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?," and pointed out that despite Patterson's insistence on the film's Oklahoma authenticity, much of it was actually shot in Alabama, a detail AP suggested undercuts the movie's sense of place. Musically, AP credited producer T Bone Burnett with contributing to standout Americana songs, including "Quill" and "Johnny Come Outside," though the review said the film's tonal whiplash — moving from communal singing to graphic violence, including a killing by boiling and a bus-related head injury involving children — makes it difficult for those musical high points to land consistently.
AP News rated the film R for language and grisly images, with a running time of 130 minutes, and concluded that the film, despite its ambitions, "doesn't feel authentic, either in place or in story."
Still, for McConaughey, the significance of the project appears to lie less in its critical reception than in the fact that it drew him back to acting at all. After years away from live-action film work, he told The Hollywood Reporter he was not actively chasing scripts but remained open to the right one, and this was it. Patterson, who spent years shepherding a passion project from a home-grown concept involving a friend's honey business into a fully realized feature, now sees it finally reach theaters with the actor he once considered nearly unreachable on his wish list attached to the lead role. Whether audiences respond as strongly as McConaughey and Patterson did to the material remains to be seen as "The Rivals of Amziah King" opens nationwide this week.
