Dallas Buyers Club

Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée

(R)

***

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It’s no wonder that Matthew McConaughey has critics buzzing, said David Denby in The New Yorker. Not only did the 43-year-old actor lose 38 pounds to star in this crowd-pleasing drama as a hard-partying homophobe who contracts AIDS in 1985 Texas. The personality transformation he effects proves “pretty much astounding.” Audiences should enjoy most everything about this “graceful and funny” film even though it cheats a bit on its history, said David Edelstein in New York magazine. McConaughey plays a real-life electrician and rodeo rider who started smuggling drugs into the U.S. for other AIDS sufferers, but the screenplay puffs his heroism by too quickly painting Washington, D.C., as an enemy of the afflicted. At least McConaughey’s Ron Woodroof has fine allies on screen, said Richard Corliss in Time. Griffin Dunne and Jennifer Garner both make fine physicians, and Jared Leto is so winning as Woodroof’s transsexual business partner that he “almost seizes the film’s emotional center.” Whatever fudging Dallas Buyers Club does on the margins, it imparts a dramatic truth.