Dir:

Christopher Nolan

With: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine

Runtime: 166 minutes

HAPPEN to be a good friend of Professor Brian Cox? Got a PhD in theoretical physics? If so, you will be among the select band not wearing a puzzled look at times during Christopher Nolan's space odyssey drama Interstellar.

Never fear, though. When not furrowed of brow you will be too busy rubbing your eyes in wonder at the fantastic sights, or being moved by the family drama at the heart of the film, to care much about looking like a numptie.

Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Interstellar is a magnificent bafflement, a head nipper extraordinaire which works on many levels while remaining utterly beautiful to look at. With this picture, the British director of Inception and the Dark Knight series has confirmed himself as the true heir to Kubrick. Vacancy closed, thanks for your application Mr Cuaron, congratulations on those seven Oscars for Gravity, but the position has been filled by Nolan.

The first thing to note is that the picture sends you through a wormhole for close to three hours, so be prepared. It opens with a trinity of images and sounds - fields of corn surrounding a farmstead, organ music and scenes of a crash. Home, faith and mankind's collision with destiny are just some of the ideas to be explored by Nolan, who co-wrote the screenplay with brother Jonathan.

Nolan takes a relative age to set up his story, signalling that for all the bells and whistles coming up, this is essentially a family drama. Here on Earth, the food is running out. Everyone must scrabble a living as a farmer now, including a former test pilot and engineer, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), who is taking care of his son, daughter and father following the death of his wife.

Just when it seems recovery might be on the way, another dust storm hits. This is the near future but the images of fleeing families and climate catastrophe are straight out of The Grapes Of Wrath.

Back at the farm, strange goings on add to the end-of-days feel. Cooper's daughter Murphy (an astonishingly good Mackenzie Foy) has books falling from her shelves and believes ghosts are at work. Dad, being a scientist and an intensely practical man, thinks otherwise.

One thing eventually becomes clear: mankind, if it is to stand a chance of survival, must find a new place to live. Cue McConaughey, an actor with the Right Stuff if ever there was one, climbing back into a space suit, accompanied by crew mate Anne Hathaway, while back on Earth, Michael Caine's Professor Brand directs operations.

Fasten your seat belts for what follows, not least when it comes to the dialogue. Where Gravity had the "wow" factor, the phrase that most often came into this reviewer's mind while watching Interstellar was "Eh?" Between the jaunts around time and relativity, the exploration of singularity, and the crash course in dimension, Interstellar appears to care not a jot whether the audience is keeping up.

But then no-one ever entered a Christopher Nolan film without expecting a workout for the old grey matter. What matters here is the general sense of things, and on that the film is clear. What happens "up there" only matters because of what it means "down here". For all the awesome sights he conjures, Nolan's focus is on the ties that bind us to each other.

Not everything works. The film begs the audience's indulgence in making itself clear, and even a few of the special effects leave one wondering what the designers were thinking (this year's HAL 9000, for example, looks plain old fashioned silly).

But the story comes good eventually - and how - and the performances, particularly from McConaughey and Jessica Chastain, who enters the tale in the final third, are outstanding. What is most astonishing is the sheer ambition exercised by Nolan as a storyteller, boldly going where no other director working today would dare. His set-piece scenes are things of wonder that one could marvel at for hours. Even if you don't know a wormhole from a hole in the ground, this is a fantastic, must-take voyage.