The Rivals of Amziah King

Amziah King lives deep in rural Oklahoma, plays in a bluegrass band full of oddballs, and runs the biggest honey operation in the county. When his estranged foster daughter Kateri turns up unexpectedly — after her mother's death, out of the foster system — Amziah seizes the chance to build something together. But honey is a brutal business, full of rivals and questions of ownership, and when things turn devastating, it is Kateri who is left to seek justice. From there the film does not go where you'd expect.

It resists classification: a crime film on paper, but really a long-form rural portrait with room for music, crime and family history in it. Andrew Patterson made his debut with The Vast of Night (2019), the micro-budget Oklahoma science-fiction film set over a single night that worked almost entirely through sound and long takes. His second film has a far larger apparatus behind it, but the same directorial appetite drives it: what can be got out of a place, a voice, a scene allowed to run. He wrote it as well; it was shot in Alabama.

Matthew McConaughey plays Amziah, in his first live-action leading role in years — most of the press around the film has been about that return. Angelina LookingGlass makes her debut in the other lead, and critics were unanimous in singling her out. Kurt Russell, Scott Shepherd, Rob Morgan, Tony Revolori, Cole Sprouse, Owen Teague and Jake Horowitz round out the cast. M.I. Littin-Menz shot it; the score is by Erick Alexander and Jared Bulmer, the same pair who scored Patterson's first film.

The film premiered at SXSW in March 2025, but had to wait over a year for a theatrical release. Its critical standing has held up: twenty-nine of thirty-one reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes are positive, and the site's consensus calls it "a sprawling, unpredictable, and genre-blurring epic, anchored by Matthew McConaughey's charm and Angelina LookingGlass's striking debut."