First Wave Of INTERSTELLAR Reviews Prove Christopher Nolan Isn't Perfect

"The universe-spanning saga — starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Jessica Chastain — is challenging, provocative, and gorgeous. Until it isn't. To paraphrase Christopher Nolan‘s “The Dark Knight,” we don't get the prestige filmmakers we need, we get the ones we deserve. And one of the ones we seemingly deserve is Nolan himself, a filmmaker with a keen visual sense but also one who undercuts the big, challenging ideas of his movies with unnecessarily tidy resolutions." - Alonso Duralde

"After all the jaw-dropping cinematography and carefully-buffed CGI, in fact, "Interstellar" winds up fitting into a fairly narrow and deeply tired sub-genre alongside films like "Frequency," "Contact," and even "Field of Dreams": Dad Issues from Dimension X. It's impossible to not admire the technical achievements of "Interstellar," but as Michael Bay and so much more modern moviegoing has proved, rapturous visuals can't make up for a ruptured script. Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" spends hundreds of millions to take the audience on a journey to the farthest parts of the cosmos ... so they can be told sentiments as close, and as cheap, as any of the offerings at your local Hallmark card retailer." - James Rocchi

"Interstellar is a spine-tingling blend of brains and heart, a high concept sci-fi opera that's as unafraid of cerebral ideas as it is of heart-on-sleeve emotion, even if its ambitious reach occasionally exceeds its narrative grasp. It's the first film of Nolan's that could justifiably be called sentimental, but it earns every moment of unrestrained emotion with another of quiet fortitude. " - Emma Dibdin

"The space travel stuff is beautiful and realized though largely physical means. It works both inside the ships and outside, and there's a lot of "Interstellar," particularly in 70MM IMAX, that is just jaw-dropping. I love photographs of space, of stars, of galaxies, of pretty much everything out there, and this movie feels like it captures some of the genuine sensations of travel, although everything's cranked up for the sake of a movie. " - Drew McWeeny

"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. Startling at times, it never confronts the terror of the infinite and nothingness, no matter how often the dialogue cites the spectre of a “ghost” or how many times we hear Dylan Thomas's “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and its famous “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”" - Todd McCarthy

"‘Interstellar’ is a good movie that so desperately wants to be important. That sentence is going to read as churlish, but I do admire ‘Interstellar’ for at least attempting to be something that’s not dumb. There are already too many dumb things we are subjected to on a daily basis. And ‘Interstellar’ is ambitious, even though there are a lot of head-scratching scenes. Yet, there we still are, spinning out of control with the reality that Nolan has created – and it’s only when we stop spinning, when we look at it from afar, that we kind of realize how absurd it all was … even though it leaves us craving a little more." - Mike Ryan

"To infinity and beyond goes “Interstellar,” 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, the director’s ninth feature also proves 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 vice versa) and the world we will leave for the next generation to inherit. An enormous undertaking that, like all the director’s best work, manages to feel handcrafted and intensely personal, “Interstellar” reaffirms Nolan as the premier big-canvas storyteller of his generation, more than earning its place alongside “The Wizard of Oz,” “2001,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Gravity” in the canon of Hollywood’s visionary sci-fi head trips. Global box office returns should prove suitably rocket-powered." - Scott Foundas

Official Synopsis - The adventures of a group of explorers who make use of a newly discovered wormhole to surpass the limitations on human space travel and conquer the vast distances involved in an interstellar voyage.