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.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
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.
Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.
-
MG4 EV XPower review: what the car critics sayFeature The XPower just 'isn't as much fun' as a regular MG4
-
Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance review
The Week Recommends Fitzwilliam Museum exhibition features lives affected by the Atlantic slave trade
-
Private Lives review: a 'witty' revival of Noël Coward's classic comedy
The Week Recommends Patricia Hodge and Nigel Havers play the warring exes in this 'delicious retro treat'
-
Wilderness review: a soapy drama set in the American southwest
The Week Recommends Amazon series starring Jenna Coleman and Oliver Jackson-Cohen is 'full of twists'
-
Volkswagen ID.5 review: what the car critics say
Feature The ID.4's 'sportier, more stylish twin' – but 'don't believe the hype'
-
Jamaica Inn review: a small patch of Caribbean heaven
The Week Recommends Guests will feel like one of the family at this boutique beach resort in Ocho Rios
-
Scottish Women Artists review
The Week Recommends Exhibition uncovers the work of female artists long hidden in 'historical obscurity'
-
Dracula: Mina's Reckoning review
The Week Recommends A groundbreaking and distinctively Scottish retelling of Bram Stoker's classic novel
