The Rivals of Amziah King, Opens Aug. 14, State Theatre
The Rivals of Amziah King took the SXSW film festival by storm with audiences breaking into applause and standing ovations. It’s a crowd-pleasing film heralded as a “new classic of the American South that hums with earnest adoration for the people of this region.”
Matthew McConaughey plays Amziah King, a beekeeper (a very lucrative business) in rural Oklahoma. He heads a bluegrass band of misfits that play around town. When his estranged foster daughter returns home, Amziah wants to reconnect and build a family business while fending off rivals that threaten to destroy him. It should be noted that director Patterson’s style is unique, utilizing music as a device for storytelling not unlike a great country album.
Also starring Kurt Russell and Angelina LookingGlass.
RELATED: Arthouse Revival at Michigan Theater in August
Tony, Aug. 21, Opens State Theater
Director Matt Johnson (BlackBerry) puts an inventive spin on his biopic of Anthony Bourdain, choosing to focus on one pivotal summer in his life, and how it shaped him, rather than an entire lifetime. Adapted from Bourdain’s book, Kitchen Confidential (2000), the focus is on a 19-year-old Bourdain, a Vassar College student with hopes of a writing scholarship having evaporated. He takes a kitchen job at a popular restaurant in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and is thrown into the deep end of dinner rushes, big egos, no-nonsense line cooks, and drama only the real world can offer. It’s a coming-of-age-story with Tony having his youthful, idealistic-self changed by the lessons, taught in the kitchen, of real-world responsibility.
Starring Dominic Sessa and Antonio Banderas.
