Interstellar – reviews of ‘enthralling’ space odyssey

What you need to know

Science fiction adventure film Interstellar opens in UK cinemas today. The film is directed by Christopher Nolan (of Batman fame) and co-written with his brother Jonathan.

As Earth suffers from fatal environmental decline, a team of explorers including astronaut Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), and scientist Brand (Anne Hathaway), take humanity’s last spaceship through a wormhole in search of a new home and future among the stars. With Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck.

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What the critics like

“Interstellar is an exhilarating slalom through the wormholes of Nolan’s vast imagination that is at once a science-geek fever dream and a formidable consideration of what makes us human,” says Scott Foundas in Variety. Nolan stages one thrilling set piece after another, but even more thrilling is the movie’s ultimate vision of the universe.

“Brainy, barmy and beautiful to behold, this is Stephen Hawking’s Star Trek: a mind-bending opera of space and time with a soul wrapped up in all the science,” says James Dyer in Empire. And anchored in a tale of paternal love, it’s a story about feeling as much as thinking.

Interstellar is “enthralling”, gracefully blending the cosmic and the intimate, and deftly exploring the infinite in the smallest human details, says Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. McConaughey is on a roll, a virtuoso who nails every nuance without underlining a single one of them.

What they don’t like

Nolan’s new picture is his biggest – “biggest event, biggest spectacle, biggest pastiche, biggest disappointment”, says Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. It’s a colossal science-fiction adventure in the high visionary-futurist style of Kubrick’s 2001, but lacking Kubrick’s subversive interest in a post-human future it loops back to a sentimentally reinforced present.