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Director Ron Howard's delightfully soft-centred rumination on the excesses of television has suffered in the wake of The Truman Show, but comparisons with the Jim Carrey blockbuster are misplaced. Howard's comedy drama is more concerned with “feel-good” laughs and formulaic romantic complications than hard-edged satire, and it doesn't disappoint in delivering sheer enjoyment. Matthew McConaughey gives a winning performance as the small-town video-store assistant who agrees to be filmed 24 hours a day by a camera crew for a ratings-hungry cable network. However, when his regular-guy persona makes him nationally famous, disrupting his entire existence, the novelty wears off. McConaughey delivers the homespun messages in Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel's script with aplomb, while Ellen DeGeneres steals every scene as McConaughey's ratings-hungry producer. Also rising to the occasion is Elizabeth Hurley, who makes sure her supporting role as the wannabe “It Girl” hitching her career wagon to Ed's new-found fame pays maximum dividends. Hardly subtle yet highly entertaining, despite its deliberately unchallenging fuzziness.

Ed (McConaughey) is a big-grinned lunk, overshadowed by his loud brother (Harrelson). But when Ed's chosen to star on a... read more on Time Out