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Interstellar

2014, Sci-fi/Adventure, 2h 45m

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Critics Consensus

Interstellar represents more of the thrilling, thought-provoking, and visually resplendent filmmaking moviegoers have come to expect from writer-director Christopher Nolan, even if its intellectual reach somewhat exceeds its grasp. Read critic reviews

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Watch Interstellar with a subscription on Prime Video, Paramount+, rent on Apple TV, Fandango at Home, or buy on Apple TV, Fandango at Home.

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Interstellar videos, interstellar photos.

In Earth's future, a global crop blight and second Dust Bowl are slowly rendering the planet uninhabitable. Professor Brand (Michael Caine), a brilliant NASA physicist, is working on plans to save mankind by transporting Earth's population to a new home via a wormhole. But first, Brand must send former NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and a team of researchers through the wormhole and across the galaxy to find out which of three planets could be mankind's new home.

Rating: PG-13 (Some Intense Perilous Action|Brief Strong Language)

Genre: Sci-fi, Adventure, Action

Original Language: English

Director: Christopher Nolan

Producer: Emma Thomas , Christopher Nolan , Lynda Obst

Writer: Jonathan Nolan , Christopher Nolan

Release Date (Theaters): Nov 7, 2014 wide

Release Date (Streaming): May 24, 2016

Box Office (Gross USA): $188.0M

Runtime: 2h 45m

Distributor: Paramount Pictures

Production Co: Syncopy, Lynda Obst Productions

Sound Mix: Datasat, Dolby Digital

Cast & Crew

Matthew McConaughey

Anne Hathaway

Amelia Brand

Jessica Chastain

Michael Caine

Professor Brand

Ellen Burstyn

Mackenzie Foy

Young Murph

Timothée Chalamet

Wes Bentley

David Gyasi

John Lithgow

Casey Affleck

Topher Grace

Collette Wolfe

Leah Cairns

David Oyelowo

Christopher Nolan

Jonathan Nolan

Screenwriter

Emma Thomas

Jordan Goldberg

Executive Producer

Thomas Tull

Hoyte Van Hoytema

Cinematographer

Film Editing

Nathan Crowley

Production Design

Hans Zimmer

Original Music

Mary Zophres

Costume Design

Dean Wolcott

Supervising Art Direction

Joshua Lusby

Art Director

Eric Sundahl

Gary Fettis

Set Decoration

John Papsidera

News & Interviews for Interstellar

Rank All of Christopher Nolan’s Movies

Michelle Rodriguez’s Five Favorite Films

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Critic Reviews for Interstellar

Audience reviews for interstellar.

Another epic Christopher Nolan brain-twister, this time in space. As a father, the setup is utterly frustrating as Matthew McConaughey leaves his young children behind to venture through a worm-hole to find a habitable planet next to a ginormous black-hole.

Christopher Nolan is the smartest writer/director in Hollywood, so smart that a lot of people claim his films are over their heads. The master of twists and deception made Batman real, showed us how dreams work in Inception, and brought us inside the dangerous world of magic in the Presitige. In his latest film, Interstellar, Nolan tackles the concept of time and how different it is from what we perceive. This film does have a great twist in the end and some terrific special effects, but beyond that it is one of the longest and slowest moving films I've seen in years. Once again, Humans have finally destroyed Earth and have gone looking for a new home, but outside our solar system, things are much different than they appear. Time and gravity are different concepts in different regions of space, and the effects on the crew, who had hoped to one day see their families again, diminish with each passing day. Matthew McConaughey stars and as is the case with most of his films, he's terrific. Based on some of the poor choices he made in his younger years, he has a bad rep among critics, but the fact is that he's always fun to watch, and is one of the most intense actors out there today. As for the rest of the film, it's usually Nolan's genius that makes the film unique and special, but in this instance he was too smart for his own good. The story moves very slowly and at times is more than somewhat confusing, not to mention at nearly three hours long, it's a challenge to sit through to even reach his famous twist at the end. Nolan films are something I always look forward to, as they are different and both entertain me and make me think, but in this case, I was just beyond bored and fed up with the whole thing. I guess sometimes even genius takes a holiday.

Christopher Nolan delivers another instant classic with an unforgettably beautiful soundtrack by Hans Zimmer.

Engrossing, though not riveting, and far from the masterpiece time magazine tried to indicate with their cover story. Heavily influenced by both close and counters and especially 2001, interstellar does manage some moments of transcendence and also works in part as a contemplation about man's place in the universe, how such a tiny entity can cope with living across such.inconceivable space. I liked how the Knowlens left it for the viewer to figure out this future earth they have envisioned without needing to spell every little detail. McConaughey does solid work as the reluctant spaceman , but I felt Anne Hathaway was lacking as his scientist colleague. At least she managed to give a speech about how love may be the undiscovered dimension That controls the universe without cracking up. And how weird is it that both Jessica Chastain and especially marooned astronaut Matt Damon both show up here fresh from their similar roles in the Martian?

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Christopher Nolan’s "Interstellar ," about astronauts traveling to the other end of the galaxy to find a new home to replace humanity’s despoiled home-world, is frantically busy and earsplittingly loud. It uses booming music to jack up the excitement level of scenes that might not otherwise excite. It features characters shoveling exposition at each other for almost three hours, and a few of those characters have no character to speak of: they’re mouthpieces for techno-babble and philosophical debate. And for all of the director’s activism on behalf of shooting on film, the tactile beauty of the movie’s 35mm and 65mm textures isn’t matched by a sense of composition. The camera rarely tells the story in Nolan’s movies. More often it illustrates the screenplay, and there are points in this one where I felt as if I was watching the most expensive NBC pilot ever made.

And yet "Interstellar" is still an impressive, at times astonishing movie that overwhelmed me to the point where my usual objections to Nolan's work melted away. I’ve packed the first paragraph of this review with those objections (they could apply to any Nolan picture post "Batman Begins"; he is who he is) so that people know that he’s still doing the things that Nolan always does. Whether you find those things endearing or irritating will depend on your affinity for Nolan's style.

In any case, t here’s something pure and powerful about this movie. I can’t recall a science fiction film hard-sold to a director’s fans as multiplex-“awesome” in which so many major characters wept openly in close-up, voices breaking, tears streaming down their cheeks. Matthew McConaughey ’s widowed astronaut Cooper and his colleague Amelia Brand ( Anne Hathaway ) pour on the waterworks in multiple scenes, with justification: like everyone on the crew of the Endurance , the starship sent to a black hole near Jupiter that will slingshot the heroes towards colonize-able worlds, they’re separated from everything that defines them: their loved ones, their personal histories, their culture, the planet itself. Other characters—including Amelia's father, an astrophysicist played by Michael Caine , and a space explorer (played by an un-billed guest actor) who’s holed up on a forbidding arctic world—express a vulnerability to loneliness and doubt that’s quite raw for this director. The film’s central family (headed by Cooper, grounded after the dismantling of NASA) lives on a corn farm, for goodness’ sake, like the gentle Iowans in " Field of Dreams " (a film whose daddy-issues-laden story syncs up nicely with the narrative of " Interstellar"). Granted, they're growing the crop to feed the human race, which is whiling away its twilight hours on a planet so ecologically devastated that at first you mistake it for the American Dust Bowl circa 1930 or so; but there's still something amusingly cheeky about the notion of corn as sustenance, especially in a survival story in which the future of humanity is at stake. ( Ellen Burstyn plays one of many witnesses in a documentary first glimpsed in the movie's opening scene—and which, in classic Nolan style, is a setup for at least two twists.)

The state-of-the-art sci-fi landscapes are deployed in service of Hallmark card homilies about how people should live, and what’s really important. ("We love people who have died—what's the social utility in that?" "Accident is the first step in evolution.") After a certain point it sinks in, or should sink in, that Nolan and his co-screenwriter, brother Jonathan Nolan , aren’t trying to one-up the spectacular rationalism of “2001." The movie's science fiction trappings are just a wrapping for a spiritual/emotional dream about basic human desires (for home, for family, for continuity of bloodline and culture), as well as for a horror film of sorts—one that treats the star voyagers’ and their earthbound loved ones’ separation as spectacular metaphors for what happens when the people we value are taken from us by death, illness, or unbridgeable distance. (“Pray you never learn just how good it can be to see another face,” another astronaut says, after years alone in an interstellar wilderness.)

While "Interstellar" never entirely commits to the idea of a non-rational, uncanny world, it nevertheless has a mystical strain, one that's unusually pronounced for a director whose storytelling has the right-brained sensibility of an engineer, logician, or accountant. There's a ghost in this film, writing out messages to the living in dust. Characters strain to interpret distant radio messages as if they were ancient texts written in a dead language, and stare through red-rimmed eyes at video messages sent years ago, by people on the other side of the cosmos. "Interstellar" features a family haunted by the memory of a dead mother and then an absent father; a woman haunted by the memory of a missing father, and another woman who's separated from her own dad (and mentor), and driven to reunite with a lover separated from her by so many millions of miles that he might as well be dead.

With the possible exception of the last act of " Memento" and the pit sequence in "The Dark Knight Rises"—a knife-twisting hour that was all about suffering and transcendence—I can’t think of a Nolan film that ladles on misery and valorizes gut feeling (faith) the way this one does; not from start to finish, anyway. T he most stirring sequences are less about driving the plot forward than contemplating what the characters' actions mean to them, and to us. The best of these is the lift-off sequence, which starts with a countdown heard over images of Cooper leaving his family. It continues in space, with Caine reading passages from Dylan Thomas's villanelle "Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night": "Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light." (If it wasn't already obvious, this sequence certifies Nolan as the most death-and-control obsessed major American filmmaker, along with Wes Anderson .)

The film's widescreen panoramas feature harsh interplanetary landscapes, shot in cruel Earth locales; some of the largest and most detailed starship miniatures ever built, and space sequences presented in scientifically accurate silence, a la "2001." But for all its high-tech glitz, "Interstellar" has a defiantly old-movie feeling. It's not afraid to switch, even lurch, between modes. At times, the movie's one-stop-shopping storytelling evokes the tough-tender spirit of a John Ford picture, or a Steven Spielberg film made in the spirit of a Ford picture: a movie that would rather try to be eight or nine things than just one. Bruising outer-space action sequences, with astronauts tumbling in zero gravity and striding across forbidding landscapes, give way to snappy comic patter (mostly between Cooper and the ship's robot, TARS, designed in Minecraft-style, pixel-ish boxes, and voiced by Bill Irwin ). There are long explanatory sequences, done with and without dry erase boards, dazzling vistas that are less spaces than mind-spaces, and tearful separations and reconciliations that might as well be played silent, in tinted black-and-white, and scored with a saloon piano. (Spielberg originated "Interstellar" in 2006, but dropped out to direct other projects.)

McConaughey, a super-intense actor who wholeheartedly commits to every line and moment he's given, is the right leading man for this kind of film. Cooper proudly identifies himself as an engineer as well as an astronaut and farmer, but he has the soul of a goofball poet; when he stares at intergalactic vistas, he grins like a kid at an amusement park waiting to ride a new roller coaster. Cooper's farewell to his daughter Murph—who's played by McKenzie Foy as a young girl—is shot very close-in, and lit in warm, cradling tones; it has some of the tenderness of the porch swing scene in " To Kill a Mockingbird ." When Murph grows up into Jessica Chastain —a key member of Caine's NASA crew, and a surrogate for the daughter that the elder Brand "lost' to the Endurance 's mission—we keep thinking about that goodbye scene, and how its anguish drives everything that Murph and Cooper are trying to do, while also realizing that similar feelings drive the other characters—indeed, the rest of the species. (One suspects this is a deeply personal film for Nolan: it's about a man who feels he has been "called" to a particular job, and whose work requires him to spend long periods away from his family.)

The movie's storytelling masterstroke comes from adherence to principles of relativity: the astronauts perceive time differently depending on where Endurance is, which means that when they go down onto a prospective habitable world, a few minutes there equal weeks or months back on the ship. Meanwhile, on Earth, everyone is aging and losing hope. Under such circumstances, even tedious housekeeping-type exchanges become momentous: one has to think twice before arguing about what to do next, because while the argument is happening, people elsewhere are going grey, or suffering depression from being alone, or withering and dying. Here, more so than in any other Nolan film (and that's saying a lot), time is everything. "I'm an old physicist," Brand tells Cooper early in the film. "I'm afraid of time." Time is something we all fear. There's a ticking clock governing every aspect of existence, from the global to the familial. Every act by every character is an act of defiance, born of a wish to not go gently.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Film credits.

Interstellar (2014)

Rated PG-13 for some intense perilous action and brief strong language

169 minutes

Matthew McConaughey as Cooper

Wes Bentley as Doyle

Anne Hathaway as Brand

Jessica Chastain as Murph

Michael Caine as Dr. Brand

John Lithgow as Donald

Topher Grace

Casey Affleck as Tom

Mackenzie Foy as Young Murph

Ellen Burstyn as Old Murph

Bill Irwin as TARS (voice)

Collette Wolfe as Ms. Kelly

David Oyelowo as Principal

William Devane as Old Tom

Christopher Nolan
Jonathan Nolan

Director of Photography

Hoyte van Hoytema

Original Music Composer

Hans Zimmer

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Interstellar

When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans. When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans. When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans.

Christopher Nolan
Jonathan Nolan
Matthew McConaughey
Anne Hathaway
Jessica Chastain
5.7K User reviews
487 Critic reviews
74 Metascore
44 wins & 148 nominations total

Murph (10 Yrs.)

Murph (Older)

Tom (15 Yrs.)

School Principal

(as Francis Xavier McCarthy)

Professor Brand

All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Trivia To create the wormhole and black hole, Dr. Kip Thorne collaborated with Visual Effects Supervisor Paul J. Franklin and his team at Double Negative. Thorne provided pages of deeply sourced theoretical equations to the team, which then created new CGI software programs based on these equations to create accurate computer simulations of these phenomena. Some individual frames took up to one hundred hours to render, and ultimately the whole CGI program reached to eight hundred terabytes of data. The resulting visual effects provided Thorne with new insight into the effects of gravitational lensing and accretion disks surrounding black holes, and led to him writing two scientific papers, one for the astrophysics community, and one for the computer graphics community.
Goofs Two characters sustain a fall from an ice plateau, on a steep ice ramp, onto a shadowy ice platform. A moment later, a panoramic shot shows them fighting on a very different place.

Cooper : We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down, and worry about our place in the dirt.

Crazy credits The Warner Bros, Paramount, Syncopy and Legendary Pictures logos are brown and dusty, representing Earth's arid dry state in the film.
Alternate versions The 70mm IMAX version is two minutes shorter than the regular 70mm, Digital IMAX, 35mm, and digital projection versions. This is because the end credits are played in an abbreviated slide-show form (rather than scrolling from bottom to top), due to the size capacity of the IMAX platters, which can hold a maximum of 167 minutes of film.
Connections Featured in Trailer Failure: Interstellar (2013)
Soundtracks Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night (uncredited) Written by Dylan Thomas

User reviews 5.7K

May 31, 2015

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November 7, 2014 (United States)
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Runtime 2 hours 49 minutes
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Off to the Stars, With Grief, Dread and Regret

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Anatomy of a Scene | ‘Interstellar’

Christopher nolan discusses a sequence from his film..

By A.O. Scott

Nov. 4, 2014

Like the great space epics of the past, Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” distills terrestrial anxieties and aspirations into a potent pop parable, a mirror of the mood down here on Earth. Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” blended the technological awe of the Apollo era with the trippy hopes and terrors of the Age of Aquarius. George Lucas’s first “Star Wars” trilogy, set not in the speculative future but in the imaginary past, answered the malaise of the ’70s with swashbuckling nostalgia. “Interstellar,” full of visual dazzle, thematic ambition, geek bait and corn (including the literal kind), is a sweeping, futuristic adventure driven by grief, dread and regret.

Trying to jot down notes by the light of the Imax screen, where lustrous images (shot by Hoyte van Hoytema and projected from real 70-millimeter film) flickered, I lost count of how many times the phrase “I’m sorry” was uttered — by parents to children, children to parents, sisters to brothers, scientists to astronauts and astronauts to one another. The whole movie can be seen as a plea for forgiveness on behalf of our foolish, dreamy species. We messed everything up, and we feel really bad about it. Can you please give us another chance?

The possibility that such a “you” might be out there, in a position to grant clemency, is one of the movie’s tantalizing puzzles. Some kind of message seems to be coming across the emptiness of space and along the kinks in the fabric of time, offering a twinkle of hope amid humanity’s rapidly darkening prospects. For most of “Interstellar,” the working hypothesis is that a benevolent alien race, dwelling somewhere on the far side of a wormhole near one of the moons of Saturn, is sending data across the universe, encrypted advice that just may save us if we can decode it fast enough.

Movie Review: ‘Interstellar’

The times critic a. o. scott reviews “interstellar.”.

What our planet and species need saving from is a slow-motion environmental catastrophe. Rather than explain how this bleak future arrived through the usual montages of mayhem, Mr. Nolan (who wrote the screenplay with his brother Jonathan) drops us quietly into what looks like a fairly ordinary reality. We are in a rural stretch of North America, a land of battered pickup trucks, dusty bluejeans and wind-burned farmers scanning the horizon for signs of a storm. Talking-head testimony from old-timers chronicles what sounds like the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, until we spot a laptop on the table being set for family dinner.

The head of the family in question is Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a widower who lives with his two children and his father-in-law (John Lithgow). Once a NASA pilot, Cooper now grows corn, the only thing that will grow after a blight has wiped out most of the planet’s other crops. The human population has shrunk to a desperate remnant, but the survivors cling to the habits and rituals of normal life. For now, there is plenty of candy and soda and beer (thanks to all that corn); there are parent-teacher conferences after school; and Cooper’s farmhouse is full of books and toys. But the blight is spreading, the dust storms are growing worse, and the sense of an ending is palpable.

The Nolans cleverly conflate scientific denialism with technophobia, imagining a fatalistic society that has traded large ambition for small-scale problem solving and ultimate resignation. But Christopher Nolan , even in his earlier, more modestly budgeted films, has never been content with the small scale. His imagination is large; his eye seeks out wide, sweeping vistas; and if he believes in anything, it is ambition. As it celebrates the resistance to extinction — taking as its touchstone Dylan Thomas’s famous villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” with its repeated invocation of “rage against the dying of the light” — “Interstellar” becomes an allegory of its own aspirations, an argument for grandeur, scale and risk, on screen and off.

Dick Cavett , a son of Nebraska, used to ask (quoting Abe Burrows), “How you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm, after they’ve seen the farm?” Cooper and “Interstellar” are clearly marked for something other than agrarian pursuits, but the first section of the movie is the richest and most haunting, establishing a delicately emotional tone and clear moral and dramatic stakes for the planet-hopping to follow. Cooper is devoted to his children, in particular his daughter, Murph, played as a young girl by the preternaturally alert and skeptical Mackenzie Foy and as an adult by Jessica Chastain. When her father is recruited for a secret NASA mission to search for a habitable new planet, Murph is devastated by his departure. Her subsequent scientific career is both a tribute to his memory and a way of getting even.

The Nolans are fond of doubled characters and mirrored plots, and so “Interstellar” is built around twinned father-daughter stories. Among Cooper’s colleagues on board the spaceship is Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway), whose father, also called Dr. Brand (Michael Caine), has developed the theories behind their quest. He and Murph remain on the ground, crunching the numbers and growing older in the usual earthly way, while Cooper and the younger Brand, thanks to relativity, stay pretty much the same age. (Cooper’s son, Tom, played by Timothée Chalamet as a boy, matures into Casey Affleck). The two pairs of daughters and dads perform variations on the theme of paternal and filial love, finding delicate and moving passages of loyalty, rebellion, disillusionment and acceptance.

A lot of other stuff happens, too, as it tends to out in space. A cynical critic might suppose that the last two hours of “Interstellar” were composed in a fit of spoiler hysteria. Nondisclosure pleas from the studio have been unusually specific. Forget about telling you what happens: I’m not even supposed to tell you who’s in the thing, aside from the people you’ve seen on magazine covers. I guess I can disclose that Cooper and Brand are accompanied by two other astronauts, played by a witty, scene-stealing David Gyasi and a deadpan Wes Bentley, and also by a wry robot who speaks in the voice of Bill Irwin.

The touches of humor those characters supply are welcome, if also somewhat stingily rationed. Nobody goes to a Christopher Nolan movie for laughs. But it is hard to imagine that his fans — who represent a fairly large segment of the world’s population — will be disappointed by “Interstellar.” I haven’t always been one of them, but I’ve always thought that his skill and ingenuity were undeniable. He does not so much transcend genre conventions as fulfill them with the zeal of a true believer. It may be enough to say that “Interstellar” is a terrifically entertaining science-fiction movie, giving fresh life to scenes and situations we’ve seen a hundred times before, and occasionally stumbling over pompous dialogue or overly portentous music. (In general, the score, by Hans Zimmer, is exactly as portentous as it needs to be.)

Of course, the film is more than that. It is in the nature of science fiction to aspire to more, to ascend fearlessly toward the sublime. You could think of “Interstellar,” which has a lot to say about gravity, as the anti-"Gravity.” That movie, which would fit inside this one twice, stripped away the usual sci-fi metaphysics, presenting space travel as an occasion for quiet wonder and noisy crisis management. Mr. Nolan takes the universe and eternity itself as his subject and his canvas, brilliantly exploiting cinema’s ability to shift backward and sideways in time (through flashbacks and cross cuts), even as it moves relentlessly forward.

But “Gravity” and “Interstellar” are both ultimately about the longing for home, about voyages into the unknown that become odysseys of return. And “Interstellar” may take its place in the pantheon of space movies because it answers an acute earthly need, a desire not only for adventure and novelty but also, in the end, for comfort.

“Interstellar” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). A few expletives, a lot of peril.

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Review: <i>Interstellar</i> Shows the Wonder of Worlds Beyond

Review: Interstellar Shows the Wonder of Worlds Beyond

“We’ve forgotten who we are,” says Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper. “Explorers, pioneers — not caretakers.” That could be Christopher Nolan speaking about movies in this timid age of old genres endlessly recycled and coarsened. He’s the rare filmmaker with the ambition to make great statements on a grand scale, and the vision and guts to realize them.

Nolan is also a consummate conjuror. Memento, his amnesiac movie, ran its scenes in reverse order. In The Prestige, magicians devised killer tricks for each other and the audience. Inception played its mind games inside a sleeper’s head, and the Dark Knight trilogy raised comic-book fantasy to Mensa level. But those were the merest études for Nolan’s biggest, boldest project. Interstellar contemplates nothing less than our planet’s place and fate in the vast cosmos. Trying to reconcile the infinite and the intimate, it channels matters of theoretical physics — the universe’s ever-expanding story as science fact or fiction — through a daddy-daughter love story. Double-domed and defiantly serious, Interstellar is a must-take ride with a few narrative bumps.

In the near future, a crop disease called “the blight” has pushed the Earth from the 21st century back to the agrarian 1930s: the world’s a dust bowl, and we’re all Okies. In this wayback culture, schools teach that the Apollo moon landings were frauds, as if America must erase its old achievements in order to keep people from dreaming of new ones.

Farmer Coop, once an astronaut, needs to slip this straitjacket and do something. So does his daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy); she’s getting “poltergeist” signals from her bookshelves. A strange force leads them to a nearby hideout for NASA, whose boss, Dr. Brand (Michael Caine), drafts Coop to pilot a mission to deep space. With Brand’s daughter Amelia (Anne Hathaway) and two others as his crew, Coop is to find a wormhole near Saturn that may provide an escape route for humanity. “We’re not meant to save the world,” Brand says. “We’re meant to leave it.”

Coop, a widower, wasn’t meant to leave his children. Son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) can manage; but the precocious Murph sees abandonment and betrayal in Dad’s journey to save billions of humans. Coop, who thinks a parent’s main role is to be “the ghosts of our children’s future,” shares Murph’s ache. He needs her. He goes out so he can come back.

What’s out there? New worlds of terror and beauty. Transported by the celestial Ferris wheel of their shuttle, Coop and the crew find the wormhole: a snow globe, glowing blue. One planet it spins them towards has a giant wall of water that turns their spacecraft into an imperiled surfboard. Another planet, where treachery looms, is icy and as caked with snow granules as Earth was with dust. Interstellar may never equal the blast of scientific speculation and cinematic revelation that was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but its un-Earthly vistas are spectral and spectacular.

Someone on the icy planet says, “Our world is cold, stark but undeniably beautiful.” Shuttling between the grad-school blackboard and the family hearth, this undeniably beautiful film blows cold and hot, stark and sentimental by turns. Taking the visual wow factor as a given, you may feel two kinds of wonder: a child’s astonishment at the effects and a bafflement that asks, “I wonder why that’s happening.”

It’s not just that the rules of advanced physics, as tossed out every 15 minutes or so, are beyond the ken of most movie-goers. It’s also that some scenes border on the risible — a wrestling match in space suits — and some characters, like Amelia, are short on charm and plausibility. In story terms, her connection with Coop is stronger than that of the two astronauts in Gravity. But Sandra Bullock and George Clooney gave their roles emotional heft, in a film more approachable and affecting than this one.

If the heart of Interstellar is Coop’s bond with Murph, its soul is McConaughey’s performance as a strong, tender hero; in the film’s simplest, most potent scene, he sheds tears of love and despair while watching remote video messages from his kids. He is the conduit to the feelings that Nolan wants viewers to bathe in: empathy for a space and time traveler who is, above all, a father.

With Interstellar, Nolan’s reach occasionally exceeds his grasp. That’s fine: These days, few other filmmakers dare reach so high to stretch our minds so wide. And our senses, all of them. At times, dispensing with Hans Zimmer’s pounding organ score, Nolan shows a panorama of the spacecraft in the heavens — to the music of utter silence. At these moments, viewers can hear their hearts beating to the sound of awe.

Go Behind the Scenes of Interstellar

Read next: Watch an Exclusive Interstellar Clip With Matthew McConaughey

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‘interstellar’: what the critics are saying.

Christopher Nolan's space-set epic stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn, John Lithgow, Michael Caine and Casey Affleck

By Ashley Lee

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Interstellar , out Wednesday in Imax and Friday nationwide, is the space-set epic that searches for a suitable home for humans in another dimension, yet is grounded in a story about love and family . Directed by Christopher Nolan , the super-secret drama stars Matthew McConaughey , Anne Hathaway , Jessica Chastain , Ellen Burstyn , John Lithgow , Michael Caine , Casey Affleck , Wes Bentley and Mackenzie Foy .

Read more THR Cover: Interstellar’s’ Christopher Nolan, Stars Gather to Reveal Secrets of the Year’s Most Mysterious Film

See what top critics are saying about Interstellar :

The Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy warns, “ Interstellar so bulges with ideas, ambitions, theories, melodrama, technical wizardry, wondrous imagery and core emotions that it was almost inevitable that some of it would stick while other stuff would fall to the floor. … This grandly conceived and executed epic tries to give equal weight to intimate human emotions and speculation about the cosmos, with mixed results, but is never less than engrossing, and sometimes more than that. … For all its adventurous and far-seeing aspects, Interstellar remains rather too rooted in earthly emotions and scientific reality to truly soar and venture into the unknown, the truly dangerous.” Hans Zimmer ‘s compositions add up to an “often soaring, sometimes domineering and unconventionally orchestrated wall-of-sound score.”

The theme of the parent-child bond “is overstressed in a narrow manner. Murph’s [Chastain] persistent anger at her father is essentially her only character trait and becomes tiresome; she’s a closed-off character. Her brother [Affleck] remains too thinly developed to offer a substantial contrast to her attitude.” Additionally, “what goes on among the astronauts is not especially interesting and Amelia [Hathaway], in particular, remains an annoyingly vague and unpersuasive character in contrast to McConaughey’s exuberant, if regret-laden, mission leader, a role the actor invests with vigor and palpable feeling.”

See more ‘Interstellar’ Premiere: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Christopher Nolan Hit Hollywood

The New Yorker ‘s David Denby says the film “is ardently, even fervently incomprehensible, a movie designed to separate the civilians from the geeks, with the geeks apparently the target audience. … There’s a problem, however. Delivered in rushed colloquial style, much of this fabulous arcana, central to the plot, is hard to understand, and some of it is hard to hear. The composer Zimmer produces monstrous swells of organ music that occasionally smother the words like lava. The actors seem overmatched by the production.” Visually, the film’s “basic color scheme of the space-travel segments is white and silver-gray on black, and much of it is stirringly beautiful. There’s no doubting Nolan’s craft. … But, over all, Interstellar , a spectacular, redundant puzzle, a hundred and sixty-seven minutes long, makes you feel virtuous for having sat through it rather than happy that you saw it.”

USA Today ‘s Claudia Puig gives the film three out of four stars. Among impressive special effects are “minimalist exchanges between McConaughey and Hathaway, whose chemistry as space-exploring partners is lacking. Hathaway’s character is not given much dimension. Other members of the space team are even less well-drawn, so it’s hard to care what befalls them.” Also, “what is meant as a climactic humanistic ending seems to tie things up far too neatly for a film about the complex messiness that comes with a world that has taken dramatic wrong turns.”

See more ‘Interstellar’: Inside THR’s Roundtable With Christopher Nolan and Matthew McConaughey

Time ‘s Richard Corliss calls it “a must-take ride with a few narrative bumps. … Interstellar may never equal the blast of scientific speculation and cinematic revelation that was Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey , but its un-Earthly vistas are spectral and spectacular.” In comparison to Gravity , “ Sandra Bullock and George Clooney gave their roles emotional heft, in a film more approachable and affecting than this one.” Still, “McConaughey’s performance as a strong, tender hero is notable.”

The Guardian ‘s Henry Barnes writes, “ Interstellar only really gets going once it’s up in the air. … It saves its beauty for the cosmos and its humanity for the machines. The actors — even those of the calibre of McConaughey and Hathaway — are script-delivering modules, there to output exposition and process emotional data. The best lines, those that seem truly spontaneous and responsive, go to TARS, the crew’s AI assistant.”

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Screen Rant

'interstellar' review.

Interstellar is an imaginative movie, but a heavy-handed mix of personal sacrifice and theoretical physics doesn't leave much room for subtle storytelling.

In the not-too-distant future of Interstellar , Earth has been ravaged by an environmental disaster known as the Blight - forcing humanity to abandon technology and the dreams of discovery, in order to focus on basic survival. To that end, former NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a widowed father of two, is now a farmer tasked with growing one of the planet's last remaining sustainable crops: corn. In a time when humankind has been asked to put aside personal desire in the interest of a greater good, Cooper has attempted to make peace with farm life, providing for his teenage children, Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and Murph (Mackenzie Foy), as well as his aging father-in-law (John Lithgow). Yet, even as conditions become increasingly dire on Earth, Cooper's thirst for scientific discovery remains.

However, when Cooper is reunited with an old colleague, Professor Brand (Michael Caine), he is offered a new chance to fulfill an old ambition. Informed that the situation on Earth is much more serious than he previously knew, Cooper is asked to leave his family behind (in an increasingly dangerous world) and set out on an uncertain journey into space - to find humankind a new planet.

Director Christopher Nolan has built a career on cerebral storytelling - starting with his feature debut, Following , in 1998. Since that time, the filmmaker has delivered one thought-provoking drama after another ( Insomnia , Memento , The Prestige , and Inception ) - while also setting a new bar for comic book adaptations with a contemplative three-film exploration of Batman (and his iconic villains). As a result, it should come as no surprise that Nolan's Interstellar offers another brainy (and visually arresting) moviegoing experience - one that will, very likely, appeal to his base (those who spent hours pouring over minute details in the director's prior works); however, it may not deliver the same casual appeal that made Inception and The Dark Knight cross-demographic hits.

Interstellar is an imaginative movie, but a heavy-handed mix of personal sacrifice and theoretical physics doesn't leave much room for subtle storytelling (or particularly memorable action). For a film that is rooted in the love between a father and his daughter, Interstellar offers surprisingly cold (and often stiff) drama - albeit drama that is buoyed by high-minded science fiction scenarios and arresting visuals. Nolan relies heavily on lengthy scenes of surface-level exposition, where characters debate or outright explain complicated physics and philosophical ideas, to educate the audience and ruminate on humanity (both good and bad) in the face of death and destruction.

It's a smart foundation to juxtapose personal desire and our place in the larger universe - as well as evolved levels of understanding we have yet to achieve - but unlike Nolan's earlier works, the filmmaker's passion is most apparent in his science (based on the theories of physicist Kip Thorne) - rather than his characters. This isn't to say that Interstellar doesn't provide worthwhile drama, but there's a stark contrast between the lofty spacetime theories and the often melodramatic characters that populate the story.

Viewers who reveled in McConaughey's philosophical musings on True Detective will find the actor treading similar territory as Cooper. McConaughey ensures his lead character is likable as well as relatable, and manages to keep exposition-heavy scenes engaging. Still, despite a 169 minute runtime, Interstellar never really develops its central heroes beyond anything but static outlines - and Cooper is no exception. Viewers will root for him, and come to understand what he cherishes and believes about humanity, but any major revelations come from what happens to him - not necessarily what he brings to the table or how he evolves through his experiences.

The same can be said with regard to the supporting cast. Everyone involved provides a quality turn in their respective roles, but they're shackled by straightforward arcs - limited exposition machines that add to the film's thematic commentary and/or advance the plot, but aren't particularly well-realized or as impactful as Nolan intends. To that end, in a cast that includes Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Casey Affleck, and Matt Damon, two of the most memorable characters are actually non-humans - quadrilateral-shaped robots, TARS and CASE, that aid the crew on their adventure (and inject much-needed humor into the proceedings).

Interstellar is also playing in IMAX theaters and the added charge is definitely recommended. Much of the film was shot with actual IMAX cameras and the filmmaker makes worthwhile use out of the increased screen space and immersive sound - especially when the crew visits alien worlds. IMAX won't be a must for all viewers, but given that the film's visuals (many of which relied on practical sets and effects) are one of Interstellar 's biggest selling points, moviegoers who are excited about Nolan's latest project shouldn't hesitate in purchasing a premium ticket.

Casual filmgoers who were wowed by the director's recent filmography may find that Interstellar isn't as accessible as Nolan's prior blockbuster movies - and dedicates too much time unpacking dense scientific theories. Nevertheless, while the movie might not deliver as much action and humor as a typical Hollywood space adventure, the filmmaker succeeds in once again producing a thought-provoking piece of science fiction. For fans who genuinely enjoy cerebral films that require some interpretation, Interstellar should offer a satisfying next installment in Nolan's well-respected career.

That said, for viewers who are simply looking to get lost in a thrilling adventure with memorable characters (from the director of Inception and The Dark Knight ), Interstellar may not provide enough traditional entertainment value to balance out its brainy scientific theorizing. On many levels, it's a very good film, but Interstellar could leave certain moviegoers underwhelmed - and feeling as though they are three-dimensional beings grasping for straws in a five-dimensional movie experience.

_____________________________________________________________

Interstellar runs 169 minutes and is Rated PG-13 for some intense perilous action and brief strong language. Now playing in IMAX theaters with a full release Friday, November 7th.

Confused about Interstellar 's ending? Read our Interstellar Ending & Space Travel Explained article.

Let us know what you thought of the film in the comment section below. If you’ve seen the movie and want to discuss details about the film without worrying about spoiling it for those who haven’t seen it, please head over to our Interstellar Spoilers Discussion . For an in-depth discussion of the film by the Screen Rant editors check out our Interstellar episode of the Screen Rant Underground Podcast .

Agree or disagree with the review? Follow me on Twitter @ benkendrick to let me know what you thought of Interstellar .

Interstellar

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

It’s damn near three hours long. There’s that. Also, Interstellar is a space odyssey with no UFOs, no blue-skinned creatures from another planet, no alien bursting from the chest of star Matthew McConaughey . It reveals a hopeful side of filmmaker Christopher Nolan that will piss off Dark Knight doomsayers. And, hey, didn’t Alfonso Cuarón just win an Oscar for directing Gravity ? How long are audiences expected to get high on rocket fumes?

Blah, blah, blah. Bitch, bitch, bitch. What the neg-heads are missing about Interstellar is how enthralling it is, how gracefully it blends the cosmic and the intimate, how deftly it explores the infinite in the smallest human details.

Of course, Nolan has never been the cold technician of his reputation. Watch Memento again, or The Prestige , or the undervalued Insomnia . The sticking point here is that Interstellar finds Nolan wearing his heart on his sleeve. Nothing like emotion to hold a cool dude up to ridicule. But even when Nolan strains to verbalize feelings, and the script he wrote with his brother Jonathan turns clunky, it’s hard not to root for a visionary who’s reaching for the stars.

Which brings us to a plot full of deepening surprises I’m not going to spoil. The poster for Interstellar presents McConaughey surveying a wasteland. It’s meant to be Saturn, but it could just as well be Earth, where environmental recklessness has morphed the planet into a Dirt Bowl starving and choking its citizens.

Nolan spends the first third of the film in the American farm belt of the near future, introducing us to widower Cooper (McConaughey), a former test pilot, who depends on his father-in-law (John Lithgow) to help him raise 15-year-old son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and 10-year-old daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy, superb). Like her dad, Murph is a rebel who refuses to buy into her school’s official dictum that the Apollo space program was a lie.

It’s when dad and daughter find the remnants of NASA, headed up by Cooper’s old boss Professor Brand (Michael Caine), that the story gains momentum. Cooper heads into space to find a new world to colonize, leaving behind two kids who may never forgive him.

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The physics lessons (Cal-tech’s Kip Thorne consulted) kick in when Coop captains the Endurance mother ship with a science team made up of Amelia ( Anne Hathaway ), Brand’s daughter; Romilly (David Gyasi); and Doyle (Wes Bentley). And don’t forget R2-D2 and C-3PO. Not really. The ex-military robots of Interstellar are called CASE and TARS. The great Bill Irwin voices TARS, a chatty monolith that looks like something out of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and sounds like that film’s HAL. (Note to viewers: Kubrick’s 1968 landmark and George Lucas’ Star Wars franchise are part of Nolan’s DNA. React accordingly.)

Next comes the wow factor that makes Interstellar nirvana for movie lovers. A high-tension docking maneuver. A surprise visitor. A battle on the frozen tundra. A tidal wave the size of a mountain. Cheers to Nolan and his team, led by cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema and VFX supervisor Paul J. Franklin ( Inception ). See Interstellar in IMAX, with the thrilling images oomphed by Hans Zimmer’s score, and you’ll get the meaning of “rock the house.”

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And yet it’s the final, quieter hour of Interstellar that gives the film resonance and lasting value. All the talk of black holes, wormholes and the space-time continuum take root in Coop when he realizes his two years in space have occupied 23 years on Earth. His children, the now-adult Tom (Casey Affleck) and Murphy ( Jessica Chastain ), spill out decades of joys and resentments in video messages that Coop watches in stunned silence. McConaughey nails every nuance without underlining a single one of them. He’s a virtuoso, his face a road map to the life he’s missed as his children bombard him with a Rorschach test of emotions.

In case you haven’t noticed, McConaughey is on a roll. And he partners beautifully with the sublime Chastain, who infuses Murph with amazing grit and grace. Familial love is the topic here, not the romantic or sexual kind. How does that figure into space exploration? Nolan gives Hathaway a monologue about it. But dialogue is no match for the flinty eloquence shining from the eyes of McConaughey and Chastain. They are the bruised heart of Interstellar, a film that trips up only when it tries to make love a science with rules to be applied. In 2001, Kubrick saw a future that was out of our hands. For Nolan, our reliance on one another is all we’ve got. That’s more the stuff of provocation than a Hallmark e-card. Nolan believes it’s better to think through a movie than to just sit through it. If that makes him a white knight, Godspeed.

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Critics Consensus

Critics consensus: interstellar and big hero 6 are certified fresh, plus, the theory of everything is smart and well-acted, and we tell you what's fresh on tv..

TAGGED AS: Certified Fresh

This week at the movies, we’ve got a perilous space mission ( Interstellar , starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway ) and a boy and his robot ( Big Hero 6 , featuring voice performances by Ryan Potter and Scott Adsit ). What do the critics have to say?

Interstellar

Many have tried, but few have approached 2001: A Space Odyssey ‘s heady mix of philosophical depth and space adventure (though last year’s Gravity had its moments). Director Christopher Nolan is clearly gunning for the sci-fi pantheon with Interstellar , and while critics say the movie is loaded with ambition and jaw-dropping visuals, its plot is sometimes a muddle. In the not-too-distant future, Earth is on the verge of becoming uninhabitable. Coop (Matthew McConaughey) a former test pilot, is recruited for a risky mission to find another planet that might be able to sustain human life. The pundits say the Certified Fresh Interstellar veers between brilliance and bombast, but its best moments approximate a sense of awe that recalls Andrei Tarkovsky ‘s’s Solaris . (Check out this week’s Total Recall, in which we count down McConaughey’s best-reviewed films , as well as our interviews with the stars .)

Does the world need another superhero origin story? If it’s as lively as Big Hero 6 , then the answer is yes; critics say this colorful, beautifully-crafted animated film scores on the strength of its distinctive setting, heartfelt story, and its loveable robotic hero, the puffy, literal-minded Baymax. Hiro Hamada is a pre-teen science geek whose older brother has invented an inflatable healthcare robot. However, tragedy strikes, and Hiro, Baymax, and a ragtag group of nerds must team up to save the city. The pundits say the Certified Fresh Big Hero 6 isn’t particularly original, but it’s briskly-paced, action-packed, and often touching. (Check out Baymax’s Five Favorite Films here .)

What’s Fresh on TV:

Critics say that Olive Kitteridge ( Certified Fresh at 95 percent) lives up to its compelling source material, thanks to fascinating performances from the likes of Frances McDormand , Richard Jenkins , and Bill Murray .

Despite a familiar Cold War spy template, critics say The Game (100 percent) has enough style, intelligence, and twists to be worth playing.

Also opening this week in limited release:

Actress , a documentary portrait of The Wire star Brandy Burre and her attempt to get back into showbiz, is at 100 percent.

Pelican Dreams , a documentary about the rehabilitation of an injured pelican, is at 100 percent.

Frederick Wiseman ‘s National Gallery , a documentary about London’s eminent art museum, is at 95 percent.

The Brazilian import The Way He Looks , a coming-of-age drama about a blind teenager in love, is at 94 percent.

The Theory of Everything , starring Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones in a biopic of celebrated astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in his 20s, is at 82 percent.

Why Don’t You Play in Hell? , a gonzo action flick about a group of young filmmakers who get caught up in a mob war, is at 79 percent.

Plot for Peace , a documentary about the behind-the-scenes machinations that led to the fall of Apartheid in South Africa, is at 71 percent.

Mr. Pip , starring Hugh Laurie as an Englishman teaching Charles Dickens to the children of a South Pacific island in the midst of war, is at 54 percent.

Open Windows , starring Elijah Wood and Sasha Grey in a thriller about a hacker who manipulates an overzealous fan into cyberstalking his favorite actress, is at 47 percent.

21 Years: Richard Linklater , a documentary about the indie film legend, is at 44 percent.

The Better Angels , starring Diane Kruger and Jason Clarke in a meditative drama about Abraham Lincoln’s early life, is at 42 percent.

Jessabelle , a horror film about a woman who returns to her Louisiana home to recover from an accident and discovers she’s being haunted by a malevolent spirit, is at 29 percent.

Elsa & Fred , starring Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer a romantic comedy about two mismatched seniors who find love, is at 20 percent.

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Interstellar review: McConaughey v the whole wide world

Christopher Nolan’s post-Batman epic gens up on the physics, gets down with the grandeur, rattles down a wormhole and gets lost in space

Full coverage of Interstellar

T he moon and the planets are there, likewise new hopes for knowledge and peace. JFK would doubtless approve of Christopher Nolan’s grand space opera, Interstellar – well, the subject matter, at least. Strident, overbearing, tangled up in plot-lines and bunged with theory, the director’s first film post-Batman rockets its way to entertainment through Nolan’s dogged force of will.

Earth’s food is running out. The wheat is blighted, the okra’s out. Every able body is needed to help grow corn. Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), an engineering whiz and former flying ace, tends his farm amid worsening dust storms with the help of son, Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy).

Tom is happily grounded, but Murph’s like her dad: she sees patterns in chaos, knows there’s something out there that can save humanity. She’s convinced that a ghost is leaving her messages which point to a new truth all of them need to appreciate. Her hunch leads them to Lazarus, a covert operation run by what remains of Nasa, where chief scientist Professor Brand (Michael Caine) proposes sending a team, including his own daughter (Anne Hathaway) and Cooper on humanity’s last space flight – a journey through a wormhole to scope out a distant solar system for new planets to call home.

Co-written by Nolan (with his brother, Jonathan) and inspired by theoretical physicist Kip Thorne’s work on traversable wormholes , Interstellar only really gets going once it’s up in the air. A tribute – occasionally a remake – of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, it saves its beauty for the cosmos and its humanity for the machines. The actors – even those of the calibre of McConaughey and Hathaway - are script-delivering modules, there to output exposition and process emotional data. The best lines, those that seem truly spontaneous and responsive, go to TARS, the crew’s AI assistant. In this world human beings are outdated software, bad code to be over-written.

The fear of the unknown is matched only by the threat of humanity knowing more than is good for us, but this is no Alien. There’s no sense of day-to-day existence, no capacity for individual quirk. The soundtrack thunders all over the dialogue. Michael Caine intones Dylan Thomas’s Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night across scenes of brave men and women in peril. The solemnity makes the journey hard-going and the film sporadically sways into the absurd, like a M Night Shyamalan film shackled with the responsibility of maintaining its intelligence. Not every film need address the possibility of human extinction with the gung-ho silliness of Armageddon, but at least that was a space adventure. This is a science report.

Interstellar looks remarkable. It’s the best introduction of scientific theory into blockbuster cinema since Nolan’s state-of-consciousness thriller, Inception. Nolan never patronises his audience, yet – in thrilling at the potential of human endeavour – he often forgets them. The relationships (even the crucial one between Cooper and Murph, who is abandoned and bitter, back on earth) don’t have enough pull. The characters got lost in space.

The last of our species wobble on the brink of extinction. The crew, stranded in a distant solar system with time running out, debate quantum theory and the selfish gene. Outside the majesty of the galaxy sweeps by, a glorious, timeless distraction. Interstellar, a near three-hour whopper of a picture, powers through its plot holes and barrels through the corn. It’s a glorious spectacle, but a slight drama, with few characters and too-rare flashes of humour. It wants to awe us into submission, to concede our insignificance in the face of such grand-scale art. It achieves that with ease. Yet on his way to making an epic, Nolan forgot to let us have fun.

Interstellar is released in the US and UK on 7 November

Interstellar
First look review
Matthew McConaughey
Anne Hathaway
Michael Caine
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Interstellar review

The most human characters in interstellar's cardboard cast aren't human at all.

“Anything that can happen, will happen.”

Murphy’s Law casts a long shadow over Interstellar , the ninth feature film from director Christopher Nolan. It’s the namesake of one of the film’s key characters, for one thing. The law itself is repeated time and again throughout Interstellar , serving as a hopeful reminder that no matter how dark things get, the dawn is coming.

But there’s another, arguably more popular reading of Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.” That version of the adage doesn’t totally work with Interstellar , but there are failures here — big ones.

Set a few decades from now, Interstellar paints a bleak picture of our future. It’s a world where the concept of “billions” of people is a distant memory. The future has little need for engineers, problem-solvers, and thinkers; it needs farmers. It’s “the caretaker generation,” a world so low on sustenance that only a small portion of the population receives higher education, while everyone else works the land, dedicating their lives to generating more food.

Interstellar is a majestic movie, providing some of the most awe-inspiring imagery offered up in recent memory.

Food isn’t the only thing that’s fading. Oxygen is running out, too. There’s no two ways about it: Earth’s dying, and we’re dying with it — unless we leave.

To that end, the limited leftovers of NASA are hard at work on a plan: They’ve sent scientists into space through a wormhole, placed near Saturn by an inexplicable, unknown “They.” Signals from the first teams indicate that there are three potentially habitable planets through the wormhole. Now, a second wave of scientists must travel through the wormhole to determine whether or not we have a chance — and if we do, what to do about it.

In comes Cooper (McConaughey), a farmer born 40 years too late (or 40 years too soon) to do anything with his brilliant intellect, his abilities as a pilot, and his yearning to explore the stars. But when seemingly supernatural events lead him right to NASA’s door, the brilliant Professor Brand (Michael Caine) courts Coop as the interstellar mission’s pilot, alongside three other scientists (including his daughter Amelia, played by Anne Hathaway) and a pair of personality-infused robots named TARS and CASE.

Coop accepts the job, but only after he learns that his son Tom and daughter Murph’s generation will be humanity’s last on Earth. He holds hope that the mission will result in Tom, Murph and others on Earth finding a new home. But circumstances quickly call those hopes into question — quickly for Coop, at least, if not quite as fast for everyone else.

The stakes have never been higher in a Christopher Nolan film. In the past, he’s dealt with themes of vengeance and redemption, told through broken individuals and heroes of legend who tear themselves apart in the service of grand ideas and the greater good. Interstellar takes those familiar themes and tales to all-new heights. It’s bigger than Batman saving Gotham. Here, Coop quite literally has to save the world.

In terms of scale, Interstellar clears the high bar and then some. It’s a majestic movie, best seen in IMAX, with snow-strewn landscapes, ocean planets, black holes, and wormholes providing some of the most awe-inspiring imagery offered up in recent memory. Interstellar is a beautiful film to behold.

But the movie never comes near the bar, in terms of characters and story. The introduction of NASA is so hurried and out-of-nowhere that it’s almost laughable. We know little about Coop’s crew beyond surface details; Wes Bentley’s Doyle has a ferocious beard, David Gyasi’s Romilly feels the heat of space-travel isolation, and Hathaway’s Brand… honestly, we never learn enough about Brand.

McConaughey is terrific as always, but not because he’s playing a brilliantly written character; it’s because, well, he’s McConaughey. Of course he’s terrific. Same story for Jessica Chastain and Mackenzie Foy as the older and younger versions of Murph, Coop’s daughter; they’re great, and the closest thing Interstellar has to a fully realized human character.

Indeed, the best characters in the movie aren’t even human; they’re TARS and CASE, a pair of walking-and-wisecracking robots that look like the 2001: A Space Odyssey monolith, albeit with moving parts and personality. There’s something endearing about their odd-looking, clunky aesthetic. Bill Irwin and Josh Stewart’s voice work supplies both bots with a touching amount of heart and soul.

This is Nolan at his absolute chilliest. It’s a ride worth taking — but you better bring a coat.

Great as they are, TARS and CASE represent Interstellar ‘s, and Nolan’s, great failure. The robots come equipped with customizable personality settings; their humor and honesty levels can be programmed on a scale of one to 100%. It’s as if Nolan deliberately applied that formula to his characters. Fifty percent humor here, twenty percent humor there. In one character’s case, 98% cowardice, if not the full 100%. It’s how Nolan approaches character, and it’s never more apparent than here in Interstellar .

The result is a cast of characters that are vaguely human at best. That’s a big problem, given that the entire movie is about saving mankind. How do we invest in such a big idea when the individuals we meet along the way are so very blah? That question is front and center in the film — can we sacrifice the ones we love if it means saving the larger species? — but it’s a hollow question given who is on the line.

It’s not as if there isn’t time to flesh these characters out, either. Interstellar clocks in at 169 minutes, dangerously close to a three-hour runtime. You feel it, too. The movie is a marathon, filled with hyper-detailed jargon and expository dialogue that moves at a slow crawl. Given the runtime, Nolan has plenty of opportunity to create real people. He chooses not to.

Ambitious in scale and scope, armed with huge ideas and images to back them up, Interstellar is undeniably beautiful and awe-inspiring. But its message of saving humanity only resembles something vaguely human. It’s ice-cold, Nolan at his absolute chilliest. It’s a ride worth taking — but you better bring a coat.

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Paramount Pictures

Summary With our time on Earth coming to an end, a team of explorers undertakes the most important mission in human history; traveling beyond this galaxy to discover whether mankind has a future among the stars. [Paramount Pictures]

Directed By : Christopher Nolan

Written By : Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan

Where to Watch

Matthew McConaughey

Anne Hathaway

Jessica Chastain

Mackenzie Foy

Murph (10 yrs.).

Ellen Burstyn

Murph (older).

John Lithgow

Timothée Chalamet

Tom (15 yrs.).

David Oyelowo

School principal.

Collette Wolfe

Francis x. mccarthy.

Andrew Borba

Wes Bentley

William Devane

Michael Caine

Professor brand.

David Gyasi

Josh Stewart

Casey Affleck

Leah Cairns

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Interstellar Reviews: Is It Christopher Nolan's Best Movie Yet?

Christopher Nolan's Interstellar is being called an ambitious, personal movie with big ideas and some flaws as it garners mixed reactions.

Will Christopher Nolan 's Interstellar be the heralded filmmaker's first ever flop, or will mainstream audiences respond to what is being called a very personal and ambitious film with big ideas? We'll have to wait a few more weeks to find out, but the first wave of reviews have come in, and they are not as overwhelmingly positive as his previous work. The sci-fi thriller currently has a 72% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes , a number which will surely change as more reviews come in before the November 7 release. The aggregate score so far represents his lowest RT score to date for his first eight films:

Following - 78% Fresh

Memento - 92% Fresh

Insomnia - 92% Fresh

Batman Begins - 85% Fresh

The Prestige - 78% Fresh

The Dark Knight - 94% Fresh

Inception - 86% Fresh

The Dark Knight Rises - 88% Fresh

Interstellar - 72%

Below we have compiled excerpts from some of the first 18 reviews that were published today, which display a diverse number of opinions on this sci-fi thriller.

"An exhilarating slalom through the wormholes of Christopher Nolan 's vast imagination that is at once a science-geek fever dream and a formidable consideration of what makes us human. As visually and conceptually audacious as anything Nolan has yet done...More emotionally accessible than his coolly cerebral thrillers and Batman movies, touching on such eternal themes as the sacrifices parents make for their children and the world we will leave for the next generation to inherit."

The Hollywood Reporter

"Preoccupied with the notion that humankind will one day need to migrate from Earth to some other planet we can call home, Interstellar bulges with ideas, ambitions, theories, melodrama, technical wizardry, wondrous imagery and core emotions...It was inevitable that some of it would stick while other stuff would fall to the floor. This grandly conceived and executed epic tries to give equal weight to intimate human emotions and speculation about the cosmos, with mixed results, but is never less than engrossing..."

" Interstellar may represent an apotheosis of sorts, as it illustrates the very best and the very worst of Nolan as a writer-director."

The Playlist

"Promising outer-space majesty and deep-thought topics like some modern variation on Stanley Kubrick 's 2001: A Space Odyssey , Interstellar instead plays like a confused mix of daringly unique space-travel footage like you've never seen and droningly familiar emotional and plot beats that you've seen all too many times before."

Time Out London

" Interstellar is long, grand, strange and demanding - not least because it allows time to slip away from under our feet while running brain-aching ideas before our eyes. It's a bold, beautiful cosmic adventure story with a touch of the surreal and the dreamlike, and yet it always feels grounded in its own deadly serious reality."

While a 72% early rating on Rotten Tomatoes is a number most filmmakers would be very pleased with, these early reviews hint that Interstellar may be Christopher Nolan 's most divisive movie to date. We'll have to wait just a few short weeks to see if the mixed reaction will have an adverse effect on the box office receipts when Interstellar opens on November 7.

What do you think about these early reviews? Will they have any impact on you heading to the theaters to see Interstellar next month? Chime in with your thoughts below.

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Interstellar Movie Review — Christopher Nolan’s most epic, but human movie yet

Interstellar is a visual masterpiece that has a human touch that propels it to greatness. it is perhaps one of the best space movies ever made..

Christopher Nolan isn’t one known to be taciturn when it comes to his movies. Even his smaller movies like Momento have grand structures bolstering their simple plots. However, Interstellar is easily is first brush with the epic — unless you consider the full Dark Knight trilogy as one. On paper, it should not work. A sweeping narrative covering different times and worlds would be eaten up by audiences. That’s why Gravity found so much success financially and at the Oscars. But Nolan does something completely different with Interstellar . He introduces science in a way that isn’t watered down or ignored. His film, according to astrophysicists, is completely plausible. Though that fact makes the movie a hard one to digest for viewers, the end result is an incredible study of human nature and our desire to survive.

Food is running out. The world is becoming overpopulated. The Yankees look nothing more than a high school baseball team. A crop blight is threatening the very existence of the human race. Nolan drops into this terrifyingly realistic future plagued with dust storms and the risk of the world simply ending within grasp. With this, the nation turns its attention to farmers and away from the sciences and engineers to save the world.

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However, Joseph Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ) who was once a pilot for NASA, maintains his faith in STEM. After a dust storm, a mysterious gravitational disturbance leads him back to the formerly disbanded agency. He discovers that NASA, led by Dr. Brand (Nolan regular Michael Caine ) and his daughter Dr. Amelia Brand ( Anne Hathaway ) have discovered a wormhole. “One system with three potential worlds,” as Amelia puts. it. Something, or someone, has given the human race a chance to live by presenting them with potential new planets to call home.

Cooper is given the seemingly possible decision to leave his children forever, potentially, or save the humanity from extinction. Choosing the latter, he embarks into an incredible mission on the ship Endurance. He, along with Amelia, Dr. Doyle ( Wes Bently ), and Dr. Romilly ( David Gyasi ) set off to assess the three worlds to choose where to start a new civilization.

Back on earth, Murphy Cooper ( Jessica Chastain ), who grows up while her father is gone, begins to help Dr. Brand determine the formula to get humans off of earth in a mass exodus.

While wormholes and other worlds seem like the work of science fiction, the science is very real. Though throughout the movie it sometimes gets a little confusing, with a little thinking you can piece it together. Essentially, it’s the Neil DeGrasse Tyson of movies. The science is explained in a non-condescending way.

One of the most surprising elements of Interstellar is not the story or the science, but the sentimentality. It’s shockingly emotional and often heartbreaking. In fact, parts of it gutted me. Whether it’s surprising because of the director or the premise is anybody’s guess. However, the grasp it has on humanity is both refreshing and welcome. Especially in the science fiction genre, a human factor is usually missing. But Nolan and the screenplay exhibit human nature for all its beauty and destruction.

We have an innate desire to survive. That’s why the people on earth in Interstellar begin to lose faith in the dream to leave the planet. They are thinking of how they can solve the problems on Earth. The very idea of the movie is thinking of a way to save our race. However, the movie explores the selfish motivations we also innately have. The way it is explored is surprising and devastating.

But it’s not just the screenplay and direction that exudes that. The ensemble was tasked with accessing emotions that humans would actually feel in these situations. Overall, the entire cast is phenomenal. However, there are three standouts for me. The first is Matthew McConaughey . I think it’s very unfortunate that he won his Oscar for Dallas Buyers Club. Not to take away from that performance. His performance in Interstellar is an incredible meditation on one of the hardest questions for humans: how much will you sacrifice for the greater good. There is no better way to show this than when he is watching messages from his kids as the years go by. This is the best performance of his career.

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The other two performances that stood out were the two actresses that portrayed Murph. Mackenzie Foy breaks any stigma surrounding child actors with a really naturalistic and heartbreaking performance. She has these knowing gazes that foreshadow the scientific curiosity that follows her throughout her life. Jessica Chastain is an incredible presence as the older Murph. She carries over the knowing gazes, but adds the emotional baggage of years of abandonment by Coop. It is easily one of her most memorable performances.

Masterpiece isn’t a word I take lightly. I’ve said it in probably two reviews on this blog ( Boyhood and Moonlight – the former I’m less inclined to continue using that phrase). However, I’d call Interstellar a masterpiece of filmmaking. It’s as grand as it is introspective and as grounded as it is existential. By the end of the nearly three-hour running time — it goes by in a flash — you feel as if you’ve experienced something that is so rarely captured on film. If not for the plot or performances, watch it for the stunning visuals that haven’t been seen on the silver screen since perhaps 2001: A Space Odyssey. I think a decade from now we’re going to look back and wonder how we fell asleep to such a grand and sweeping epic.

★★★★★ out of 5

Get Interstellar on DVD, Blu-Ray, or Digital on Amazon or stream for free with Amazon Prime!

Karl Delossantos

Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.

Karl Delossantos https://smashcutreviews.com/author/karldelogmail-com/ 12 Years A Slave Movie Review — A Beautiful, Unflinching Film
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Karl Delossantos https://smashcutreviews.com/author/karldelogmail-com/ 2014 Oscar Predictions: Best Director (Is Alfonso Cuarón a Lock to Win?)

Five of Christopher Nolan's Movies Are Returning to Theaters

Thank you, Regal Cinemas!

The Big Picture

Regal is screening iconic Christopher Nolan movies for $5 this month as part of Regal Forever Favorites, a treat for fans.
Films like The Dark Knight, Inception, Insomnia, Dunkirk , and Interstellar will be shown on the big screen, including fan-favorite interpretations.
From groundbreaking superhero movies to mind-bending thrillers and visually stunning space exploration, fans are in for a treat.

Fans of Christopher Nolan films heads up, Regal is bringing back some iconic movies of the acclaimed director to the big screen. The theatre chain has announced audience will be able to watch his movies this month for $5 thanks to Regal Forever Favorites. Nolan recently won an Academy Award for his latest film, Oppenheimer starring Cillian Murphy , Robert Downey Jr , Matt Damon, and Emily Blunt among others and watching his previous works on the big screen again would be a perfect celebration for fans.

Which Nolan Movies Are Returning to Theaters?

The movies include fan-favorite features like The Dark Knight starring Christian Bale in the titular role , which is considered the movie that changed the game for the superhero genre altogether. The film bagged several Oscar nominations in categories including cinematography, VFX, and sound mixing. The movie kickstarted one of the best comic book trilogy with brilliant performances, writing, and direction. Also coming back to the big screen is Inception , starring Leonardo di Caprio , Tom Hardy , Murphy, Joseph Gordon-Levitt among others. The sci-fi thriller has fascinated fans for years many still contemplating its ending and analyzing several dream levels . The movie has a brilliant non-linear structure and is well-loved by fans for its practical effects and mind-bending story.

Speaking of mind-bending stories, Nolan’s psychological thriller Insomnia will also be screened. It’s the only movie in Nolan’s filmography which he didn’t write or co-write, nonetheless, is exciting by all accounts. A remake of the Norwegian movie of the same name it stars power packed performers like Al Pacino , Robin Williams , and Hilary Swank . Fans will also be able to watch war drama Dunkirk , it’s often touted as Nolan’s best work as well as counted among the best war movies. It garnered the acclaimed director his first Academy Award nomination for Best Director along with seven other Oscar nominations. It’s hailed for the screenplay, editing, score, sound design and cinematography . The film features an ensemble cast including Fionn Whitehead , Tom Glynn-Carney , Jack Lowden , Harry Styles , Barry Keoghan , Kenneth Branagh , Murphy, and Hardy and has an approval rating of 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes as well.

Also, returning to the big screen is probably the most visually stunning from Nolan’s filmography, Interstellar , starring Matthew McConaughey , Anne Hathaway , and Jessica Chastain . The film is one of its kind as it uses extensive practical and miniature effects mixed with digital effects. It has been praised by the scientific community as well as astronomers for its scientific accuracy and portrayal of theoretical astrophysics.

Christopher Nolan's Interstellar To Re-Release In IMAX On 10th Anniversary

Published By : Shreyanka Mazumdar

Trending Desk

Last Updated: April 13, 2024, 14:33 IST

Mumbai, India

Interstellar stars Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway. (Image Credits: Instagram/christophernolann)

Co-written by Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan, the film centres on a farmer and former NASA pilot assigned to pilot a spaceship if Earth becomes inhospitable in the future.

The science fiction epic Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan, will be re-released in cinemas to commemorate its tenth anniversary. Paramount Pictures revealed this at its CinemaCon presentation in Las Vegas on April 12. It will be available for viewing on digital screens in addition to 70MM IMAX prints, which are director Christopher Nolan’s preferred format. The movie, co-produced by Warner Bros., will be released on September 27, 2024. With Anne Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey in the key roles, the movie brought in $188 million domestically and over $730 million worldwide.

Co-written by Nolan and his brother Jonathan Nolan, the film centres on a farmer and former NASA pilot assigned to pilot a spaceship if Earth becomes inhospitable in the future.

Interstellar, which many consider one of Nolan’s greatest works, has received great praise for its realistic depiction of theoretical astrophysics and scientific correctness. With its depictions of black holes, space travel and several planets—all of which were heightened by the use of lots of real and miniature effects combined with computer effects—it also happens to be among his most visually magnificent films.

In the film, McConaughey played Joseph Cooper, Anne Hathaway played Dr Amelia Brand, Jessica Chastain played Murphy Cooper, John Lithgow played Donald, Michael Caine played Professor John Brand, Casey Affleck played Tom Cooper, Wes Bentley played Doyle, and Bill Irwin played TARS. The cast is further completed by Timothée Chalamet, Matt Damon, David Gyasi, Mackenzie Foy, and Topher Grace, among many more.

Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an audience score of 83%. In addition, it received five nominations for Academy Awards and took home the Best Visual Effects title.

Interstellar is Nolan’s most recent picture to return to theatres. In February, Tenet was re-released for a week, and Regal Cinemas announced that this month they would be showing Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, The Dark Knight, and Insomnia for just $5 each.

Nolan’s most recent movie, Oppenheimer, brought in an astounding $968 million globally last year, mostly because of IMAX screenings. At the Academy Awards, the film—which starred Cillian Murphy as the film’s title physicist—won seven prizes, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Murphy, Best Director for Nolan, and Best Supporting Actor for Robert Downey Jr.

Christopher Nolan

Christopher Nolan’s ‘Interstellar’ Sets Imax 70mm Re-Release for 10th Anniversary This Fall

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Christopher Nolan’s “ Interstellar ” will be re-released in theaters in honor of the sci-fi epic’s 10th anniversary. The film, which earned an impressive $731 million globally when it debuted in 2014, stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain and Matt Damon and is set in a dystopian future in which a group of astronauts must travel to the far reaches of space to find a new planet for humankind to colonize.

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Nolan shot “Interstellar” with a combination of 35mm anamorphic film and 65mm Imax. The picture was released in film formats, which was a herculean task at the time as many theaters had switched over to digital projectors. Nolan has continued to be a champion for film, as well as for Imax. He urged moviegoers to see the movie in 70mm Imax, which led to weeks of sold-out showings.

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Interstellar is an imaginative movie, but a heavy-handed mix of personal sacrifice and theoretical physics doesn't leave much room for subtle storytelling.

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The Guardian Film Show: Interstellar, Leviathan, Say When and The Possibilities are Endless - video reviews

Matthew McConaughey and the cast of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar: 'Mother nature's going to be just fine, it's us that might not be' - video interview

Interstellar European premiere – in pictures

Interstellar review – if it’s spectacle you want, this delivers