Dallas Buyers Club

Based on a true story but I gather filled with cinematic license 'Dallas Buyers Club' tells the story of Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey) who is diagnosed with AIDS in the 1980s and told that he has thirty days to live. Unable to legally access drugs under test in the USA that he believes may help him, Woodroof establishes a 'buyers club' which 'imports' drugs from Mexico which then are distributed to the club's members.

The film revives memories of the early reactions to AIDS as 'the gay disease' when fear and irrational concerns that just being in the same room as a sufferer was a danger to life. Sufferers were treated as pariahs.

Initially indignant at inferences he might be gay, the evidently heterosexual Woodroof embarks on a battle against a rigid legislative and bureaucratic environment that refuses to be flexible in the face of an horrific new illness threatening lives.

McConaughey and Jared Leto, as a fellow sufferer, give superb performances in what is overall a well acted movie.

This is not a pleasant entertainment but the film vividly revisits the world's response to an important health issue. The subject matter and visuals are raw and powerful.
★★★★