The Rivals of Amziah King (2026)
There’s a moment early on, Amziah King and his ragtag bluegrass band picking out a tune in a fast-food car park while they wait on an order, that tells you everything about the tone this film is chasing. It’s unhurried. It’s a little strange. And it’s charming in a way that feels earned rather than manufactured. Andrew Patterson, who announced himself with the eerie small-town mystery of The Vast of Night, swaps 1950s New Mexico for present-day rural Oklahoma, and somehow keeps the same patient curiosity about people who talk a lot and mean more than they say.
Matthew McConaughey plays the title role, and it’s the kind of performance you settle into rather than admire from a distance: a beekeeper, musician, and unofficial mayor of his own small orbit, motormouthed but never hollow. He’s magnetic. Amziah’s honey business anchors the community around him, right up until his estranged foster daughter Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass, startlingly assured for a debut) turns up wanting back into his life. What starts as a story about reconnection, potlucks, and old lessons in communal kindness slides sideways into something closer to a backwoods crime thriller, as barrels of stolen honey and the rivals threatening Amziah’s livelihood pull the film’s second half into darker, tenser territory.
That tonal pivot is the film’s boldest swing, and mostly it lands. Kurt Russell turns up as a corrupt local businessman with just enough menace to unsettle the film’s earlier warmth without curdling it entirely; Rob Morgan, as Amziah’s friend and reluctant lawyer, gets some of the sharpest lines in the picture. Scott Shepherd, playing a good-hearted local who’s nearly impossible to understand, is a small comic gift dropped into an otherwise grounded ensemble. None of it feels like stunt casting. Everyone seems to genuinely belong in this town.
The music deserves its own mention. The songs threaded through the film aren’t decoration; they carry mood the way dialogue can’t, and there’s a real ache to some of the quieter numbers that lingers after the credits roll. Miguel I. Littin-Menz’s cinematography leans into the Oklahoma light without romanticising the poverty sitting underneath it, which is a harder trick than it sounds.
Where the film falters is in the join between its two halves. The mystery plotting that dominates the back stretch is competent rather than gripping, and a couple of late revelations arrive with less weight than the film seems to think they carry. It shows. Patterson trusts his actors more than his plot mechanics, and for long stretches that trust pays off; elsewhere, it just means the seams show.
Still, this is a film built on the strength of its people rather than its twists, and on that measure it mostly delivers. Nobody in this town is purely good or purely bad, not even Russell’s businessman, and the film never once flattens anyone into a type to make the plot easier. That refusal is the point. A good, generous, occasionally messy piece of Southern storytelling that’s easy to recommend without needing to oversell it.
★★★½☆