The last two years have been busy for Matthew McConaughey after he took some time off from acting — following his role in The Gentlemen (directed by Guy Ritchie) in 2019, he wasn’t seen again in a leading role until 2025, when he starred in The Lost Bus. Best known for his Oscar-winning role in Dallas Buyers Club and also for his unforgettable performance in the first season of True Detective, McConaughey has several roles booked for this year to look out for. On September 23, McConaughey will reunite with his True Detective co-star Woody Harrelson for a new Apple TV series, Brothers, which follows the duo as they learn to live together on their Texas ranch. In addition to starring in the show, Harrelson and McConaughey are also credited as writers and producers on Brothers.
Setting the stage for the premiere of Brothers is McConaughey’s long-gestating neo-Western, The Rivals of Amziah King, which is finally set to release in select theaters on August 14 before launching a wider release a week later on August 21. The film first premiered last year in March at SXSW, and it was a hit with critics, earning a 97% on the aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes. Written and directed by Andrew Patterson, the film features a loaded ensemble around McConaughey, including Kurt Russell, Tony Revelori, Owen Teague, Rob Morgan, Scott Shepherd, Angelina LookingGlass, Cole Sprouse, Catherine Dyer, and more. Critics agree that McConaughey gives one of the most powerful performances of his career in The Rivals of Amziah King, and the film could be considered a stealthy Oscar contender if it resonates with the masses as well as it has with reviewers.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
What Is ‘The Rivals of Amziah King’ About?
The Rivals of Amziah King follows Amziah King, a beekeeper, musician, and anchor of his community, who reunites with his former foster daughter after years apart to fend off threats to his honey community. After reading the synopsis, one film that immediately comes to mind is The Beekeeper (starring Jason Statham), as both movies center around beekeepers who will go to great lengths to protect their community. However, The Rivals of Amziah King also has shades of Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone, as it includes elements of a tight-knit community bent on protecting their coveted way of life.
Stay tuned to Collider for more updates and coverage of The Rivals of Amziah King, which is coming to theaters later this month.
Release Date
August 13, 2026
Runtime
130 minutes
Director
Andrew Patterson
Writers
Andrew Patterson
Producers
David Heyman, Jeffrey Clifford, Teddy Schwarzman, John Friedberg, Will Greenfield, Michael Heimler, Christopher Casanova