Critical response
When did "Dallas Buyers Club" premier?
Dallas Buyers Club
Upon its premiere at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, "Dallas Buyers Club" received universal acclaim by critics and audiences, who greatly praised the film for its acting (particularly for McConaughey and Leto), screenplay and direction. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 93% based on reviews from 177 critics, with an average score of 7.7 out of 10, with the site's consensus stating, ""Dallas Buyers Club" rests squarely on Matthew McConaughey's scrawny shoulders, and he carries the burden gracefully with what might be a career-best performance." On Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 reviews from film critics, the film has a rating score of 84 based on 45 reviews, indicating universal acclaim. Richard Corliss of "Time" magazine considered McConaughey's portrayal to be a "bold, drastic and utterly persuasive inhabiting of a doomed fighter", remarking that "if the camera occasionally suffers a fashionable case of the jitters, the movie transcends its agitated verismo to impart dramatic and behavioral truth". Leto's portrayal of Rayon, a drug-addicted trans woman with AIDS who befriends McConaughey's character Ron Woodroof, received critical acclaim. The writers created Rayon, to show "Woodroof’s gradual acceptance of a subculture he had dismissed." "Time"'s Richard Corliss noted, "Leto captures the sweet intensity and almost saintly good humor of a glamorous, poignant and downright divoon creature — a blithe Camille who may surrender her health but never her panache." Leto was awarded a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award and a variety of film critics' circle awards, including his first Academy Award. After the Academy award, the casting of a non-transgender actor, as opposed to a transgender actor, was widely critiqued as a missed opportunity, with some LGBT activists criticizing the choice as misogynistic. The "L.A. Times" compared the issue to white actors appropriating, and exploiting, people of color roles of East Asians, and Africans in the past; and "The Guardian" noted transgender actors are often relegated to roles such as prostitutes, corpses and "freaks."