Gary Ross, writer/director of such sermonizing entertainments as Pleasantville and Seabiscuit, has returned with another didactic drama, Free State of Jones, starring an appropriately unhygienic Matthew McConaughey as Newton Knight, a Mississippi man who rebelled against the Rebels during the Civil War and gathered a small army to fight conscription. (There's also a completely irrelevant subplot, set 85 years later, about Mississippi's legacy of segregation.) Ross' intentions are probably good, whatever they are, but he tries to cram an eight-hour miniseries' worth of material into one overlong movie, resulting in an airless history lesson. by Eric D. Snider