There is a moment in The Rivals of Amziah King when the movie stops being the film you thought you were watching. At first, Andrew Patterson’s neo-Western feels almost gentle. You have Matthew McConaughey wandering through rural Oklahoma, bluegrass drifting through the soundtrack, bees humming around wooden hives, and a community held together by one…
There are movies that change genres gradually, giving you plenty of warning. Then there is The Rivals of Amziah King, which basically looks you in the eye, lets a bluegrass tune play, hands you a jar of honey, and then kicks the door open to a crime thriller. Honestly? I loved the nerve of it….
There are movies that advertise exactly what they are from the first trailer. Then there are movies like The Rivals of Amziah King, which seem to change shape every time you think you have figured them out. Andrew Patterson’s second feature after The Vast of Night takes a seemingly modest subject — beekeeping in rural…
There’s something wonderfully ridiculous about Chad Powers. On the surface, it’s a sports comedy about a washed-up quarterback putting on a ridiculous disguise and trying to sneak his way back into college football. But the longer I watched, the more I felt like the wigs, fake mustache, and exaggerated Southern accent were almost a distraction…
If you watched Chad Powers and found yourself wondering whether the South Georgia Catfish actually exist, I honestly can’t blame you. The show pulls off something that sports comedies rarely manage: it makes a completely fictional college football program feel like a team you somehow forgot to hear about. The uniforms look right. The stadium…
If you told me a few years ago that one of the funniest sports comedies on television would revolve around a disgraced quarterback hiding under a terrible wig, fake teeth, prosthetic skin, and an aggressively Southern accent, I probably would have laughed. And yet here we are. Hulu’s Chad Powers has turned one of the…
There is something wonderfully ridiculous about watching Glen Powell, one of Hollywood’s most recognizable leading men, walk onto a football field looking like somebody’s weird cousin who somehow wandered into a college sports drama. That is exactly why the Chad Powers transformation works. The Hulu sports comedy could have taken the easy route and turned…
There are movies that fit neatly into a genre, and then there are movies like The Rivals of Amziah King, which seem determined to make the viewer guess what they are watching every twenty minutes. Andrew Patterson’s follow-up to The Vast of Night starts with the deceptively cozy atmosphere of a rural Oklahoma community. There…
Matthew McConaughey the beekeeper. Kurt Russell as a ruthless agricultural kingpin. Live bees. Mandolins. Rural Oklahoma. A revenge story that suddenly decides it wants to become something much stranger. That is basically the elevator pitch for The Rivals of Amziah King, and honestly, I’m glad nobody tried to make it sound more normal. After spending…
There are some movies that feel like they were made for a crowded theater, and The Rivals of Amziah King looks like one of them. Andrew Patterson, the director behind The Vast of Night, is back with a very different kind of slow-burn thriller: rural Oklahoma, a dangerous honey empire, bluegrass, family history, and a…
There is something wonderfully dangerous about The Gentlemen. One minute you’re watching an impeccably dressed British aristocrat worry about his family’s estate, and the next you’re knee-deep in a criminal empire involving marijuana, rival gangsters, bizarre millionaires, and people who seem to solve every disagreement with a gun. That is exactly why the question surrounding…
If there is one thing The Gentlemen knows how to do besides making crime look ridiculously stylish, it is throwing a completely unexpected person into the middle of a criminal mess and watching everything explode. That is exactly why the casting news surrounding The Gentlemen Season 2 has me so interested. Netflix is bringing Guy…