(Above: Matthew McConaughey and Angelina LookingGlass in The Rivals of Amziah King (2025).

By M. Faust

There’s a word for what Oklahoman Amziah King does, but I’m not sure what it is. When someone says that he makes honey, he corrects them: the bees make the honey, he just collects and sells it. 

Of course it’s rather more complicated than that, and the new film The Rivals of Amziah King goes into some detail about the honey industry, as well as about tending to the millions of bees on which it depends. This is all more interesting than you might expect, thanks to writer-director Andrew Patterson, who has fashioned a movie in which I never knew from moment what was going to happen next. 

It also helps that Amziah, a name that apparently did not exist before this movie, is played by Matthew McConaughey, one of the great talkers of contemporary cinema. (It’s a wonder he has never worked with the Coen Brothers.) Nothing in the utterly charming first half of this movie comes at you in a straight line, regularly branching off into tangents such as Amziah’s memory of a child with the face of a 50-year-old alcoholic. 

There is also music, lots of it. Amziah plays all kinds of instruments, as apparently does everyone else in town, and they love getting together to jam. I guess what they play is bluegrass, though it sounds more like what Belle and Sebastian had they come from the Great Plains. (T-Bone Burnett was one of the score’s producers.) 

Early in the film Amziah has a chance meeting with Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass). As a child she spent a few years in his family’s foster care, but was taken away when his wife died. He brings her into his operation, and their discussions give the film just enough structure to hold it together. 

But then comes the second half of the movie….

I plumbed my memory for a movie that takes such a drastic change in tone and quality as The Rivals of Amziah King does at its halfway point. The closest I could think of is Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild, which starts out as a laidback road romance between Jeff Daniels and Melanie Griffith before throwing psychotic Ray Liotta into the mix. 

But where Demme managed to weave his disparate threads into a satisfying whole, Patterson, whose only previous film was the Amazon release The Vast of Night, goes wildly astray. What had been a joyous celebration of community suddenly becomes a revenge tale of inexcusable cruelty. If this was where Patterson’s story was always headed, he should have done more to prepare us. Maybe the casting of McConaughey turned that first half into more than it was supposed to be; it wouldn’t be the first time that a performer so connected with a part that the director let him capsized a movie. 

I still recommend that you see The Rivals of Amziah King – that first half is easily the best film I’ve seen all year. But prepare to be disappointed. 

The End of Oak Street pits a Spielburgian suburban family of the early 1980s against dinosaurs who overnight take over their neighborhood. Or is it that their neighborhood is somehow transported back millions of years in time? The script doesn’t seem too sure, not does it seem to care all that much. The only point is to put the special effects guys to work without having to use the word “Jurassic,” all to wrest ticket dollars from an audience the filmmakers are assuming will not pay too much attention to the details. (The flimsily concocted happy ending makes no sense whatsoever.) I suppose something like this is inevitable every few years to show off new techniques in digital technology, or perhaps new discoveries in paleontology – when did we learn that dinos were so hairy? It stars Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor, and was directed by David Robert Mitchell, who did much scarier work in 2015’s It Follows. 

The Wrong Girls is being described as a female stoner comedy. The characters played by Kristen Stewart and Alia Shawkat certainly qualify for the stoner part. As for comedy, not only did I laugh at almost nothing, I couldn’t even tell what the jokes were supposed to be, aside from comments by Seth Rogan and Kumail Nanjiani as the voices of our heroine’s cats. Even the worst Cheech and Chong movies – and some of them were pretty bad – had more laughs than this.