Top 5 – Matthew McConaughey Movies

Matthew McConaughey has had the quite the career.  Kicking it off in the nineties, he was all over the place in terms of genre, being in Oscar worthy dramas, to indies, to comedies.  In the 2000’s, McConaughey became the king of romantic comedies, punching out what seemed to be one or two every year.  But it was the 2010’s where his career really blew up.  Kicking off what is now known as the McConaissance, he has put together quite a resume of great performance that even includes an Oscar win in 2013.  On Friday, McConaughey stars in The Beach Bum, a film that seems like it was tailor-made for McConaughey. So in honor of that, here are my top 5 Matthew McConaughey movies.

And remember, this list is based on movie quality and McConaughey’s performance.

5 – DETECTIVE RUSTY COHLE in TRUE DETECTIVE (Nic Pizzolatto, 2014)

As I posted in my Top 5 Woody Harrelson Films, True Detective is a television landmark led by two masterpiece performances from Harrelson and McConaughey.  Harrelson is the performance that keeps us grounded, but it’s McConaughey that gives the shows best performance.  This is really unlike anything McConaughey has ever done.  All of his swagger and charm is thrown out the window for a character who is fierce, methodical, brilliant, and tortured.  Playing essentially two characters, Rusty in the past and Rusty in the present, McConaughey shows us the effects the crime had on Rusty and takes on this dark journey. It is as captivating a performance I have ever seen on a television show and truly one of McConaughey’s best performances of all-time.

4- WOODERSON in DAZED AND CONFUSED (Richard Linklater, 1993)

This is the definition of making an entrance.  McConaughey bursted onto to the silver screen in a scene stealing, hilarious, and oddly weird performance.  Wooderson is well out of high school, but still gets the urge to hang out with all the seniors and hit on the freshman.  With his extremely tight bell-bottoms and swaggerly southern drawl, McConaughey is the true standout in this ensemble piece.  It was the birth place of his patented, “Alright, alright, alriiiight.” and the iconic quote, “That’s what I love about these high school girls, man.  I get older, they stay the same age.”  This was the cinematic birth of McConaughey.

3 – DALLAS in MAGIC MIKE (Steven Soderbergh, 2012)

You would think that Matthew McConaughey would sleep walk through a movie about male strippers.  Little do we know.  He absolutely kills it in Steven Soderbergh’s surprise dramedy.  Playing the manager of an all male strip club in Florida, McConaughey is a blast to watch as he entertains the ladies with his six pack, cowboy hat, chaps, and bongo playing, while also acting as hype man for the other men.  He also adds a sleazy side to Dallas, as he has other plans that are different from the other guys, adding depth to what should have been a role we’ve all seen before.  Magic Mike was a surprisingly brilliant movie and McConaughey gives a surprisingly brilliant performance.

2 – KILLER JOE COOPER in KILLER JOE (William Friedkin, 2012)

I have one word to describe William Friedkin’s Killer Joe: Wow.  This southern fried noir is one of the wildest, sickest, most deranged movies I have ever seen.  McConaughey plays Killer Joe Cooper, a hitman who is hired by a down on his luck Texan to murder his mother for money.  Joe isn’t your typical hitman.  He is a man of manners, morals, and honor, and if you break any of those, may God have mercy on your soul.  Joe is a quick tempered wild man that will do anything from gagging you with a chicken wing to just straight up killing you.  This performance is everything that is McConaughey.  He has his drawl, gentlemanly charm, swagger, and mixes that with his wild, violent, and dramatic side, making Joe McConaughey’s most layered character.  This is one of the most underrated performances of the decade.

1 – COOPER in INTERSTELLAR (Christopher Nolan, 2014)

Interstellar is a movie that you simply cannot process after one viewing.  Christopher Nolan created a dense, layered, truly epic space odyssey.  The first few times you watch the film, you’re focused on the story and how Nolan plays with space and time and how everything adds up.  You are just so overwhelmed with everything that is happening that you don’t truly appreciate the performances in the film.  It wasn’t until my fourth or fifth viewing that I truly realized how good McConaughey is in this film.  It really is a remarkable performance.  Cooper is a key part of a team of astronauts assigned to look for a new Earth, as the current one is in the middle of a massive dust bowl.  Cooper leaves his family behind in order to save Earth, which becomes the emotional epicenter of the movie.  McConaughey conveys the emotions of a man torn between his love of exploration and love for his family masterfully and shows what this costs.  Without McConaughey’s performance, Interstellar wouldn’t be as great as it is.  It is a performance like this that takes Interstellar from great film to masterpiece, which is why Interstellar is the best Matthew McConaughey movie.

What is your favorite Matthew McConaughey performance?  Comment below or hit me up on Twitter @kevflix or on Facebook at Kevflix.