Because agriculture is threatened by multiple viruses and the climate is drying out, mankind seems condemned to disappear from the Earth. Forced to become a farmer in this dying world, Cooper, engineer and pilot, raises his son Tom and daughter Murphy, helped by the father of his dead wife. An extraordinary event pushes him to discover that NASA has secretly been preparing a last-ditch mission to find a new home for mankind. Driven by the desire to find a future for his children, Cooper decides to leave them and embark on an expedition into a black hole…

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In many ways, Interstellar marks a great step in the career of Christopher Nolan. Raised up to the rank of A-list Hollywood director thanks to the phenomenal success of the Dark Knight trilogy, Nolan is riding the momentum of Inception with this highly ambitious super-production, traveling through space and time over a period of almost three hours. The natural comparison with Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey seems increasingly less apt as the movie goes on, because behind Interstellar, the blockbuster hides an astonishingly tender heart, more reminiscent of Robert Zemeckis’s Contact with Jodie Foster – the father-daughter relationship, the black hole, the preference for people over special effects. The scenes between Matthew McConaughey, who yet again delivers a sold performance, and his screen daughter are the best of the film, which seems much more sure of itself on Earth than in space. Once it has its head in the stars, the weakness of Interstellar’s screenplay starts to show, as does the Hollywood aspect of a handful of visually spectacular but otherwise shaky scenes. Whether naïve or humanist, Christopher Nolan’s ninth movie hits the purest of emotions all the way through. Even if it pits the epic dimension of its story against the harrowing simplicity of a father stolen from his daughter.