Although he made his name as the star of some rather schlocky, trite, and conventional romantic comedies in the 2000s, Matthew McConaughey has undergone a professional shift recently. He has started giving truly nuanced performances in dramatic films.
In the years since his career went through this transformative phase, audiences have been able to count on McConaughey for regular masterpieces (and a handful of duds and misfires, like that so-called “thriller” where the big twist was that he was in a video game). Nobody can make every movie a hit, but McConaughey has really been knocking it out of the park in more recent years. Let’s take a look at some of his very best movies, as ranked by Rotten Tomatoes score.
10 Magic Mike (80%)
In the hands of someone other than Steven Soderbergh, Magic Mike would’ve settled for just showing a lot of close-up shots of well-defined abs to bring in audiences. However, drawing from Channing Tatum’s personal experiences and Soderbergh’s eye for the film-making craft, Magic Mike was elevated to become a well-made, character-driven drama.
Matthew McConaughey plays a supporting role as Dallas, Mike’s ex-stripper boss who owns the club, and his accent paired perfectly with his dialogue (“The law says you cannot touch…but I think I see a lotta lawbreakers up in this house tonight!”).
9 Tropic Thunder (81%)
Directed by, co-written by, and starring Ben Stiller, Tropic Thunder is one of the funniest satires of Hollywood film-making ever made. It’s a hilarious action comedy about a bunch of actors making a Vietnam War movie. They unwittingly wander into an active war zone as their director plans to get more intensive shots and is quickly dispatched by a landmine.
Matthew McConaughey hilariously plays Stiller’s agent, Rick Peck. Stiller initially wanted Owen Wilson to play the role. However, Wilson was unable to take the role and Stiller brought in Matthew McConaughey to take his place. He did a great job.
8 Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (83%)
The powerfully acted and told drama Thirteen Conversations About One Thing tells the stories of five characters who don’t know each other, but whose lives intersect in unexpected ways as they all search for happiness.
Matthew McConaughey plays a district attorney who is torn up with guilt after being involved in a hit-and-run incident that injures a cleaning woman played by Amy Irving. Alan Arkin and John Turturro also appear in the movie, which was directed and co-written with an idiosyncratic style by Jill Sprecher.
7 The Lincoln Lawyer (84%)
Marvel may have been praised for creating an intricate shared universe on the big screen, but Michael Connelly has been doing it on the page for years. He has a detective character, a crime reporter character, and a lawyer character who all intersect in and out of each other’s stories.
The Lincoln Lawyer was a film adaptation of the first book featuring the lawyer character, Mickey Haller, and Matthew McConaughey took on the role, knocking it out of the park once more. It’s unclear if the movie was intended to be the start of a franchise, but it’s a shame that it wasn’t.
6 Bernie (88%)
Matthew McConaughey reteamed with his Dazed and Confused director Richard Linklater for this dramatization of the murder of wealthy 80-year-old socialite Margie Nugent, played by Shirley MacLaine, by her flamboyant 39-year-old “friend,” Bernie Tiede, played by Jack Black. This is really Black’s movie, giving the performance of a lifetime in this pitch-black comedy, but McConaughey is also great as Danny Buck, the district attorney who charged Bernie with first-degree murder.
The movie was praised for revolutionizing the docudrama form by presenting insider information about the case via talking heads with the fictional town gossips, and by having a dark sense of humor.
5 Dazed and Confused (91%)
Perhaps the definitive coming-of-age comedy of the 90s, Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused is a hilarious, poignant, and relatable portrait of the last day of high school. It’s a night that kids spend celebrating their freedom, pondering their future, and worrying about the trajectory of their lives all at the same time, so it’s prime fodder for a movie.
Dazed and Confused is notable for kicking off the careers of a number of actors who would go on to be major stars, including Ben Affleck, Milla Jovovich, Renee Zellweger, and, of course, Matthew “I keep gettin’ older, they stay the same age…” McConaughey.
4 Dallas Buyers Club (93%)
This powerful drama about the AIDS crisis is the movie that won Matthew McConaughey an Oscar. Jared Leto, his co-star, also won an Oscar for the film. McConaughey played Ron Woodruff, a man who was diagnosed with HIV and found that approval for medication that was proven to go a long way towards curing the virus wasn’t forthcoming.
So, he started up “the Dallas Buyers Club,” a private organization that smuggled the meds across state lines to get AIDS patients treatment.
3 Lone Star (94%)
This neo-western from the mid-‘90s was set in a small Texan town and concerned a sheriff’s investigation into the murder of a previous sheriff.
The movie has a fresh style, blending the grisly crime thriller with the contemporary western. It wasn’t a huge hit at the box office, because it didn’t necessarily have a lot of commercial appeal, but it garnered some real praise from those who did go to see it.
2 Kubo and the Two Strings (97%)
Laika has been quietly building up a reputation as one of the greatest animation houses in Hollywood, coming close to competing with Pixar and DreamWorks while standing on their own with stop-motion animated movies in an industry dominated by lifeless computer animation. Kubo and the Two Strings is about a journey undertaken by a boy with a magical string instrument and a monkey for a sidekick.
Charlize Theron, Ralph Fiennes, and Rooney Mara appeared alongside Matthew McConaughey in the underappreciated masterwork’s star-studded voice cast. The jokes are actually funny, the frights are actually scary, and most importantly, the plot is genuinely engaging.
1 Mud (97%)
Jeff Nichols wrote and directed this indie drama about a pair of Arkansas teenagers who come of age when they build a friendship with a refugee, played by Matthew McConaughey, who they find living in their clubhouse (a boat stuck in some trees).
He promises to give them the boat if they bring him some food. This movie not only gave McConaughey a chance to show off his raw acting talents that his conventional Hollywood blockbusters rarely let him do; it did the exact same thing for Reese Witherspoon. It’s a truly great movie, because it is honest in its characterization.
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