“Interstellar”: Christopher Nolan’s grand space opera tries to outdo “2001″ — salon.com

“Interstellar” is M. Night Shyamalan’s finest film. It blends the aching, yearning, Hallmark-flavored sentimentality, the melodramatic plot twists and the pseudo-profound philosophical reversals with some surprising nuggets of cutting-edge hard science and a view of the human future grounded in both realism and hope. It hits all the notes a Shyamalan fan could hope for: It’s about an all-American farm family in the Corn Belt struggling through hard times, it’s about a grand intergalactic adventure whose real subject is family and love, and it’s got numerous scenes of major movie stars trying to hold back the tears but not succeeding. Anne Hathaway sobs, Jessica Chastain sobs and Matthew McConaughey sobs. Hell, Matt Damon sobs buckets – and the fact that he’s even in this movie was a well-protected secret until the reviews started to hit. Those people do their crying at different and irreconcilable points on the space-time continuum; now we know how water got from place to place in the universe.

Read More