elvis movie reviews

• Share full article

Advertisement

Supported by

‘Elvis’ Review: Shocking the King Back to Life

Austin Butler plays the singer, with Tom Hanks as his devilish manager, in Baz Luhrmann’s operatic, chaotic anti-biopic.

By A.O. Scott

My first and strongest memory of Elvis Presley is of his death. He was only 42 but he already seemed, in 1977, to belong to a much older world. In the 45 years since, his celebrity has become almost entirely necrological. Graceland is a pilgrimage spot and a mausoleum.

Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” — a biopic in the sense that “Heartbreak Hotel” is a Yelp review — works mightily to dispel this funerary gloom. Luhrmann, whose relationship to the past has always been irreverent and anti-nostalgic, wants to shock Elvis back to life, to imagine who he was in his own time and what he might mean in ours.

The soundtrack shakes up the expected playlist with jolts of hip-hop (extended into a suite over the final credits), slivers of techno and slatherings of synthetic film-score schmaltz. (The composer and executive music producer is Elliott Wheeler.) The sonic message — and the film’s strongest argument for its subject’s relevance — is that Presley’s blend of blues, gospel, pop and country continues to mutate and pollinate in the musical present. There’s still a whole lot of shaking going on.

As a movie, though, “Elvis” lurches and wobbles, caught in a trap only partly of its own devising. Its rendering of a quintessentially American tale of race, sex, religion and money teeters between glib revisionism and zombie mythology, unsure if it wants to be a lavish pop fable or a tragic melodrama.

The ghoulish, garish production design, by Catherine Martin (Luhrmann’s wife and longtime creative partner) and Karen Murphy, is full of carnival sleaze and Vegas vulgarity. All that satin and rhinestone, filtered through Mandy Walker’s pulpy, red-dominated cinematography, conjures an atmosphere of lurid, frenzied eroticism. You might mistake this for a vampire movie.

It wouldn’t entirely be a mistake. The central plot casts Elvis (Austin Butler) as the victim of a powerful and devious bloodsucking fiend. That would be Col. Tom Parker, who supplies voice-over narration and is played by Tom Hanks with a mountain of prosthetic goo, a bizarre accent and a yes-it’s-really-me twinkle in his eyes. Parker was Presley’s manager for most of his career, and Hanks portrays him as part small-time grifter, part full-blown Mephistopheles.

“I didn’t kill Elvis,” Parker says, though the movie implies otherwise. “I made Elvis.” In the Colonel’s mind, they were “the showman and the snowman,” equal partners in a supremely lucrative long con.

Luhrmann’s last feature was an exuberant, candy-colored — and, I thought, generally underrated — adaptation of “The Great Gatsby,” and the Colonel is in some ways a Gatsbyesque character. He’s a self-invented man, an arriviste on the American scene, a “mister nobody from nowhere” trading in the unstable currencies of wishing and seeming. He isn’t a colonel (Elvis likes to call him “admiral”) and his real name isn’t Tom Parker. The mystery of his origins is invoked to sinister effect but not fully resolved. If we paid too much attention to him, he might take over the movie, something that almost happens anyway.

Luhrmann seems more interested in the huckster than in the artist. But he himself is the kind of huckster who understands the power of art, and is enough of an artist to make use of that power.

As a Presley biography, “Elvis” is not especially illuminating. The basic stuff is all there, as it would be on Wikipedia. Elvis is haunted by the death of his twin brother, Jesse, and devoted to his mother, Gladys (Helen Thomson). Relations with his father, Vernon (Richard Roxburgh), are more complicated. The boy grows up poor in Tupelo, Miss., and Memphis, finds his way into the Sun Records recording studio at the age of 19, and proceeds to set the world on fire. Then there’s the Army, marriage to Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), Hollywood, a comeback broadcast in 1968, a long residency in Las Vegas, divorce from Priscilla and the sad, bloated spectacle of his last years.

Butler is fine in the few moments of offstage drama that the script allows, but most of the emotional action is telegraphed in Luhrmann’s usual emphatic, breathless style. The actor seems most fully Elvis — as Elvis, the film suggests, was most truly himself — in front of an audience. Those hips don’t lie, and Butler captures the smoldering physicality of Elvis the performer, as well as the playfulness and vulnerability that drove the crowds wild. The voice can’t be imitated, and the movie wisely doesn’t try, remixing actual Elvis recordings rather than trying to replicate them.

At his first big performance, in a dance hall in Texarkana, Ark., where he shares a bill with Hank Snow (David Wenham), Snow’s son, Jimmie (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and other country acts, Elvis steps out in a bright pink suit, heavy eye makeup and glistening pompadour. A guy in the audience shouts a homophobic slur, but after a few bars that guy’s date and every other woman in the room is screaming her lungs out, “having feelings she’s not sure she should enjoy,” as the Colonel puts it. Gladys is terrified, and the scene carries a heavy charge of sexualized danger. Elvis is a modern Orpheus, and these maenads are about to tear him to pieces. In another scene, back in Memphis, Elvis watches Little Richard (Alton Mason) tearing up “Tutti Frutti” (a song he would later cover) and sees a kindred spirit.

The sexual anarchy and gender nonconformity of early rock ’n’ roll is very much in Luhrmann’s aesthetic wheelhouse. Its racial complications less so. “Elvis” puts its hero in the presence of Black musicians including Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola), Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh) and B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who offers career advice. An early montage — repeated so often that it becomes a motif — finds the boy Elvis (Chaydon Jay) simultaneously peeking into a juke joint where Arthur Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.) plays “That’s All Right Mama” and catching the spirit at a tent revival.

There’s no doubt that Elvis, like many white Southerners of his class and generation, loved blues and gospel. (He loved country and western, too, a genre the film mostly dismisses.) He also profited from the work of Black musicians and from industry apartheid, and a movie that won’t grapple with the dialectic of love and theft that lies at the heart of American popular music can’t hope to tell the whole story.

In the early days, Elvis’s nemesis is the segregationist Mississippi senator James Eastland (Nicholas Bell), whose fulminations against sex, race-mixing and rock ’n’ roll are intercut with a galvanic performance of “Trouble.” Later, Elvis is devastated by the assassinations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (who was killed “just three miles from Graceland”) and Robert F. Kennedy. These moments, which try to connect Elvis with the politics of his era, are really episodes in his relationship with Colonel Parker, who wants to keep his cash cow away from controversy.

When Elvis defies the Colonel — breaking out in full hip-shaking gyrations when he’s been told “not to wiggle so much as a finger”; turning a network Christmas special into a sweaty, intimate, raucous return to form — the movie wants us to see his conscience at work, as well as his desire for creative independence. But Luhrmann’s sense of history is too muddled and sentimental to give the gestures that kind of weight.

And Elvis himself remains a cipher, a symbol, more myth than flesh and blood. His relationships with Vernon, Priscilla and the entourage known as “the Memphis mafia” receive cursory treatment. His appetites for food, sex and drugs barely get that much.

Who was he? The movie doesn’t provide much of an answer. But younger viewers, whose firsthand experience of the King is even thinner than mine, might come away from “Elvis” with at least an inkling of why they should care. In the end, this isn’t a biopic or a horror movie or a cautionary parable: It’s a musical, and the music is great. Remixed, yes, and full of sounds that purists might find anachronistic. But there was never anything pure about Elvis Presley, except maybe his voice, and hearing it in all its aching, swaggering glory, you understand how it set off an earthquake.

Like a lot of people who write about American popular culture — or who just grew up in the second half of the 20th century — I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Elvis. “Elvis,” for all its flaws and compromises, made me want to listen to him, as if for the first time.

Elvis Rated PG-13. Rock ’n’ roll, sex, drugs. Running time: 2 hours 39 minutes. In theaters.

A.O. Scott is a co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

Find the Right Soundtrack for You

Trying to expand your musical horizons take a listen to something new..

Our review of Taylor Swift’s “The Tortured Poets Department.”

Mdou Moctar ’s guitar is a screaming siren against Africa’s colonial legacy.

How “Stereophonic” made musicians  out of actors.

Judith Hill sang with pop royalty. Now she is composing her own story .

St. Vincent  dives headfirst into the darkness.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

How “Elvis” Plays the King

By Anthony Lane

Last year was not great for Elvis Presley. According to Forbes , which tallies up the take-home pay of the dead, he made a mere thirty million dollars in 2021—more than Arnold Palmer, it’s true, but less than Bing Crosby and Dr. Seuss. Elvis can rest easy, though. This year, his income could see a healthy spike, thanks to the latest Baz Luhrmann film, “Elvis,” which features Austin Butler in the title role. Presleyologists will learn nothing here, and purists will find plenty against which to rail. Less knowing viewers, however, may well be sucked in by Luhrmann’s lively telling of the tale. This is not a movie for suspicious minds.

Any fan of musical bio-pics will be familiar with the form: a hop, a skip, and a jump from one highlight to the next. (Some of the highs, needless to say, are lows.) In the case of Elvis, this means that we meet him in his youth—played by the striking Chaydon Jay, the rare intensity of whose gaze really does set the kid apart. Hurrying onward, we get a pit stop of Elvis as a truck driver, with his guitar swung up over his shoulder like a rifle; the cyclonic sight of Elvis onstage, pretty in pink, and whipping a crowd into a Dionysian froth; Elvis on the Steve Allen show, in white tie and tails, singing “Hound Dog” to a gloomy pooch; Elvis escaping to Beale Street, in Memphis, to hang out with B. B. King (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.) and to revel in Little Richard (Alton Mason); Elvis in Army uniform, looking impossibly spiffy and pitching his woo to Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), the daughter of a captain; Elvis lamenting the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy; Elvis lounging inside a vowel on the Hollywood sign, and being told that his career is “in the toilet”; Elvis performing in residence at the International Hotel, in Las Vegas, flush with renewed success; and Elvis sitting sadly in a limousine, beside a private jet, and saying to Priscilla, “I’m gonna be forty soon, ’Cilla. Forty .” Has the prospect of age never occurred to him until now? Two years later, he is gone, though the movie spares us the unlovely particulars of his end.

Guiding us through this strange saga, in which the most private moments feel like public property, is Colonel Tom Parker. As has long been established, he was not a proper colonel, or a Parker, or even a Tom. He was a Dutchman, Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk, who went to America and erected a new identity for himself, as breezily as someone putting up a big top. He became Elvis’s manager, magus, m.c., and (many would argue) terminator. Were Kevin Spacey not otherwise engaged, he’d be a natural fit for the part. Instead, it goes to Tom Hanks, with a sharpened nose, a shiny pate, and a cladding of false fat. For dedicated Hanksians like me, these are confusing times; compare the trailer for Disney’s upcoming “Pinocchio,” in which Hanks—Einstein wig, a hedge of mustache, and, I suspect, yet another nose—assumes the role of Geppetto. At present, for whatever reason, this most trusted of actors has chosen to seek cover in camouflage and to specialize in the pulling of strings, whether wicked or benign. As Parker says, in one of many voice-overs, “I didn’t kill him. I made Elvis Presley.” It’s a real boy!

How do you wish yourself upon a star? Simple. Parker takes Elvis on a Ferris wheel, stops at the top of the ride, and, like the Devil, sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world. “Are you ready to fly?” Parker asks. There is nothing subtle about the staging of such scenes, but then Luhrmann, as was evident in “ Moulin Rouge! ” (2001), makes a proud virtue of unsubtlety. Little is left unspoken or half concealed. Young Elvis, for instance, peering through a crack in a shack, spies a couple of dancers, writhing and perspiring to the lusty wail of the blues; he then runs to a nearby tent, sneaks inside, and enters a Black revivalist meeting, which gives him the Pentecostal shakes. The proximity of the two locations is frankly ludicrous, but it allows Luhrmann to hammer home his point: the Presley sound was forged in a double ardor, sacred and profane. You don’t say.

As with every chronicle, there are gaps where you least expect them. Thus, any Elvis addict is steeped in the lore of July, 1954—the late session at Sun Studio, in Memphis, when Elvis, together with Scotty Moore, on lead guitar, and Bill Black, on bass, was about to call it a night, dissatisfied with what they’d done so far. For a lark, they began messing around with an old number called “That’s All Right, Mama,” taking it at a driven but drumless lick. The producer, Sam Phillips, roused to action by what he was hearing, told them to start again. As earthquakes go, it was all the more potent for being so comically casual, and it cries out to be dramatized; imagine what Robert Altman or Jonathan Demme might have done with such a scene. But Luhrmann gives it barely a glance. He prefers spectacular set pieces, stretched out instead of whittled down. Hence the space that he grants to the famous comeback concert of 1968, with Elvis resplendent in black leather, and, later, to a large slab of Vegas-era pomp, with Elvis all aglow in studded white, like a naughty angel on the loose. The curious thing is that both events already exist as visual records. The first was a TV production, the most popular broadcast of the season, and the second was enshrined in a 1970 documentary, “ Elvis: That’s the Way It Is .” Both can be streamed whenever you please. Luhrmann may be kicking up a storm, but the thunder is nothing new.

Grab a bathroom break in the middle of “Elvis” and you could easily miss the speediest part of the film. This is a montage devoted to Elvis’s least purple patch, in which he headed west, at Parker’s urging, to be a movie star. The result included such immortal works as “Girls! Girls! Girls!” (1962) and “Clambake” (1967), and “Elvis” duly supplies its hero with a leading man’s lament. “I’m so tired of playing Elvis Presley,” he says. My guess is that Luhrmann, like other admirers, is so embarrassed by the sight of such doldrums that he wants to get ’em over with and sail on. Is he right?

Not entirely. Not if you follow the money. To ignore Elvis as a commercial machine, in his earning power as in his fabled spending, is to clean up the myth of the man, and to parse the box-office returns for 1961, noting that Elvis’s “Blue Hawaii” made more than “Judgment at Nuremberg” (and, indeed, more than “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), is to inch your way into the America of the time. The Mississippi Midas, who grew up as a mother-loving only child, of lowly stock, had somehow wound up here , crooning to his ukulele; it was a miracle of transfiguration, and who wouldn’t buy into that? Elvis’s movies are, among other things, a showcase of his manners, and that eager courtesy, too, is a selling point. Of the blazing affair that he had with Ann-Margret, when they made “ Viva Las Vegas ” (1964), all that survives in the film are sparks of merriment. He is flattened rather than deepened by the range of his paper-thin roles—cowboy, racecar driver, frogman, pilot, or, in “Tickle Me” (1965), a rodeo rider at an all-female ranch—and he appears to be physically airbrushed by the sheen of the screen. That is why Andy Warhol based a series of silvery prints on a still from “Flaming Star,” a 1960 Western, in which Elvis is posed as a gunslinger. His revolver is aimed toward us, and, if it’s loaded, it’s full of blanks.

All of which, to those who sensed the explosive charge of the earlier Elvis, is a travesty, a tragedy, and a kind of creative death. Greil Marcus, in his majestic essay “ Elvis: Presliad ,” refers to “the all-but-complete assimilation of a revolutionary musical style into the mainstream of American culture, where no one is challenged and no one is threatened.” The question is whether Luhrmann’s “Elvis” feeds that continuing process of absorption or strives to hold out against it. The film certainly looks provocative enough, with the camera refusing to sit still, the credits dripping with bling, and the Ferris wheel dissolving into the spinning label of a 45. Now and then, Luhrmann cheerfully slices up the frame like someone making a banana split. But aesthetic mischief, however hyperactive, is not the same as risk, and, given how the movie shies away from sex and drugs (we see a rattling handful of pills, hardly the pharmaceutical candy store of legend), what hope is there for rock and roll?

Well, there are flickers of danger in Austin Butler’s Elvis, as he advances to the brink of the stage, at a Memphis ballpark, and stokes the hysteria of the throng. (Parker is so alarmed that he summons the cops.) For the most part, though, what Butler brings out is the charm of the character, with his Hawaii-blue eyes, and his compliant lightness of heart. I didn’t quite believe in the tears that he sheds after his mother dies; on the other hand, the ease with which he embarks on rehearsals at the International Hotel, making nice to his thirty-piece band and to his backing singers, the Sweet Inspirations, rings joyfully true. He tickles us, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

In short, on the spectrum of those who have sought to incarnate Elvis, Butler belongs at the tender end—far from Kurt Russell, with his tough hide, in John Carpenter’s “ Elvis ” (1979), or from Nicolas Cage, who teams up with a club of skydiving Elvis look-alikes in “Honeymoon in Vegas” (1992), and whose whole career has been like a set of variations on the theme of Elvis. (For good measure, Cage also married Lisa Marie, Elvis’s daughter, though not for long.) But let’s face it: the first and the best Elvis impersonator was Elvis himself, and everybody who has played him since, on film and elsewhere, has just added another layer to the palimpsest, and thus to the meaning of the man. There is no ur-Elvis hiding below. We dream of being those folks who tuned in to Dewey Phillips’s slot on WHBQ, in July, 1954, and heard the King sing for the first time, and felt the ground shift beneath our feet; but we can never go back. That’s the way it is. ♦

New Yorker Favorites

A Harvard undergrad took her roommate’s life, then her own. She left behind her diary.

Ricky Jay’s magical secrets .

A thirty-one-year-old who still goes on spring break .

How the greatest American actor lost his way .

What should happen when patients reject their diagnosis ?

The reason an Addams Family painting wound up hidden in a university library .

Fiction by Kristen Roupenian: “Cat Person”

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Doreen St. Félix

By Lauren Michele Jackson

By Helen Shaw

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Trivia & Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

Movies / TV

No results found.

• What's the Tomatometer®?
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening this week
• Top box office
• Coming soon to theaters
• Certified fresh movies

Movies at home

• Fandango at Home
• Netflix streaming
• Prime Video
• Most popular streaming movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• Challengers Link to Challengers
• Abigail Link to Abigail
• Arcadian Link to Arcadian

New TV Tonight

• Dead Boy Detectives: Season 1
• The Jinx: Season 2
• The Big Door Prize: Season 2
• Knuckles: Season 1
• Them: Season 2
• Velma: Season 2
• Secrets of the Octopus: Season 1
• Thank You, Goodnight: The Bon Jovi Story: Season 1
• We're Here: Season 4

Most Popular TV on RT

• Baby Reindeer: Season 1
• Fallout: Season 1
• Shōgun: Season 1
• Under the Bridge: Season 1
• The Sympathizer: Season 1
• Ripley: Season 1
• 3 Body Problem: Season 1
• X-Men '97: Season 1
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV
• TV & Streaming News

Certified fresh pick

• Baby Reindeer Link to Baby Reindeer
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

DC Animated Movies In Order: How to Watch 54 Original and Universe Films

The Best TV Seasons Certified Fresh at 100%

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

‘Seen on Screen’ Podcast: A Celebration of Universal Stories 

Watch An Exclusive Pixar Studio Tour, Plus Inside Out 2 Secrets From The Set

• Trending on RT
• Challengers
• Play Movie Trivia

Elvis Reviews

Luhrmann overlooks a lot of the horrible things that happened during his legacy to create a version that is worthy of the big screen.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2023

There is no doubt in my mind that Elvis is a fine tribute that many fans won't regret watching, but it just gets in its own way and doesn't manage to stand as an exceptional one.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 31, 2023

The film gets in its way but is a good start for Butler’s growing career.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

The triumph of Elvis comes in the form of lead actor Austin Butler, who embodies the King from start to finish. Butler's performance brings life to an often cartoonish man, selling his soul to director Baz Luhrmann's trademark flash and flair.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Elvis is a strong effort from everyone involved, and is worth watching for Butler alone; he is a star. It's a wild ride that will undoubtedly provide fun, laughter and toe-tapping happiness.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 24, 2023

Colonel Parker describes Elvis as “the greatest show on earth.” If Butler’s performance manages to capture even an ounce of Elvis’ magic, Colonel Parker might just have been right.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

Austin Butler stars in a sensory experience so flashy and grandiose that it can only be described by the feeling it evokes: nausea.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Jul 21, 2023

It also shows Luhrmann continuing to swing for the fences. His "Elvis" captures the enormity of this pop culture phenomenon, with enough chutzpah to overcome the bumps in the road.

Full Review | May 30, 2023

Here’s the key problem: there are effectively two films playing out at the same time.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Apr 12, 2023

There’s just no reason for its nearly 160-minute runtime; but the music is fantastic.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Mar 31, 2023

Butler here is a co-auteur in a way usually closed to biopics in which the lead actors are more famous than Butler is, and so we never lose them in their roles as other famous people.

Full Review | Mar 16, 2023

Another flat one sided look at a rock idol that’s never bold enough to challenge our perceptions of them.

Full Review | Feb 17, 2023

Rarely do we see a performance that is so electric that as soon as the film gets over, one rushes to search about the actor instead.

Full Review | Jan 31, 2023

A dazzling opulence of color, set design, and musical presentations.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jan 24, 2023

Butler’s explosive interpretation of Elvis – from the physical gesticulations to the big, burly voice – humanized The King, pulling down the bright lights to show us the distressed man behind the immortal God of Rock.

Full Review | Jan 16, 2023

...a disappointing misfire that squanders its host of appealing attributes.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jan 7, 2023

The story of the King has been told many times, but nothing like Baz Luhrmann's sensational, impressionistic take on Elvis Presley (played with pitch-perfect resonance by an explosively charismatic Austin Butler).

Full Review | Jan 3, 2023

Austin Butler blew us all away as Elvis and still is.

Full Review | Dec 27, 2022

Elvis has one of the best lead performances this year from Austin Butler. The singing, the set design, the recreation of iconic moments, and the engaging performances are insane! Hanks plays one of the most despising characters he's ever attempted also!

Full Review | Original Score: 9.5/10 | Dec 26, 2022

Let’s just give Austin Butler his Best Actor Oscar now. This young man has range to spare. Wow!

Full Review | Original Score: FIVE STARS | Dec 21, 2022

‘Elvis’ Review: Baz Luhrmann’s Biopic, Starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks, Is a Stylishly On-the-Surface Life-of-Elvis Impersonation Until It Takes Off in Vegas

It's a spectacle that keeps us watching but doesn't nail Elvis's inner life until he's caught in a trap.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

• ‘Uncropped’ Review: An Enticing Portrait of James Hamilton Makes You Wonder: Is He the Greatest New York Photographer Ever? 2 days ago
• ‘Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver’ Review: An Even More Rote Story, but a Bigger and Better Battle 7 days ago
• Why I Wasn’t Scared by ‘Civil War’ 2 weeks ago

Elvis Presley , with the exception of the Beatles, is the most mythological figure in the history of popular music. That makes him a singularly tempting figure to build a biopic around. But it also makes telling his story a unique challenge. Everything about Elvis (the rise, the fall, all that came in between) is so deeply etched in our imaginations that when you make a dramatic feature film out of Elvis Presley’s life, you’re not just channeling the mythology — you’re competing with it. The challenge is: What can you bring to the table that’s headier and more awesome than the real thing?

Baz Luhrmann ’s “Elvis” is a fizzy, delirious, impishly energized, compulsively watchable 2-hour-and-39-minute fever dream — a spangly pinwheel of a movie that converts the Elvis saga we all carry around in our heads into a lavishly staged biopic-as-pop-opera. Luhrmann, who made that masterpiece of romantically downbeat razzle-dazzle “Moulin Rouge!” (and in 20 years has never come close to matching it), isn’t interested in directing a conventional biography of Elvis. And who would want him to? Luhrmann shoots the works, leaping from high point to high point, trimming away anything too prosaic (Elvis’s entire decade of churning out bland Hollywood musicals flashes by in an eye-blink). He taps into the Elvis of our reveries, searing us with the king’s showbiz heat and spinning his music — and how it was rooted in the genius of Black musical forms — like a mix-master across time.

Yet “Elvis,” for all its Luhrmannian fireworks, is a strange movie — compelling but not always convincing, at once sweeping and scattershot, with a central figure whose life, for a long stretch, feels like it’s being not so much dramatized as illustrated.

Popular on Variety

Austin Butler , the 30-year-old actor who plays Elvis, has bedroom eyes and cherubic lips and nails the king’s electrostatic moves. He also does a reasonably good impersonation of Elvis’s sultry velvet drawl. Yet his resemblance to Elvis never quite hits you in the solar plexus. Butler looks more like the young John Travolta crossed with Jason Priestly, and I think the reason this nags at one isn’t just because Elvis was (arguably) the most beautiful man of the 20th century. It’s also that Butler, though he knows how to bring the good-ol’-boy sexiness, lacks Elvis’s danger . Elvis had a come-hither demon glare nestled within that twinkle of a smile. We’ve lived for half a century in a world of Elvis impersonators, and Butler, like most of them, has a close-but-not-the-real-thing quality. He doesn’t quite summon Elvis’s inner aura of hound-dog majesty.

Luhrmann has always had the fearlessness of his own flamboyance, and from the first moments of “Elvis,” which take off from an outrageous bejeweled version of the Warner Bros. logo, the film lets us know that it’s going to risk vulgarity to touch the essence of the Elvis saga. There’s a luscious opening fanfare of split-screen imagery, showing us how Elvis loomed at every stage, but mostly as the decadent Vegas showman who flogged his own legend until it was (no pun intended) larger-than-life.

But the way that Butler comes off as more harmless than the real Elvis ties into the key problem with the film’s first half. Luhrmann is out to capture how Elvis, the smoldering kid whose hip-swiveling, leg-jittering gyrations knocked the stuffing out of our sexual propriety, with his thrusts and his eyeliner and his inky black hair falling over his face, was a one-man erotic earthquake who remade the world. Yet Elvis’s transformation of the world was, in fact, so total and triumphant that it may now be close to impossible for a movie to capture how radical it was. With its over-the-top shots of women at Elvis’s early shows erupting into spontaneous screams, or throwing underwear onstage, plus scandalous headlines and finger-wagging moral gatekeepers growing hysterical over how Elvis was busting down racial barriers or promoting “indecency,” “Elvis” keeps telling us that it’s about an insurrectionary figure. The irony is that Luhrmann’s style is too ripely sensual, too post-Elvis, to evoke what the world was like before Elvis.

We see Elvis as a boy sneaking into a Black tent-show revival, fusing with the writhing gospel he encounters there, or hearing Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.) sing “That’s All Right Mama” in a slow high blues wail. Then we hear what Elvis did with that music, syncing it to his own speedy spirit. Elvis stole the blues, all right, or at least borrowed them, but the movie shows us how he frosted them with a bouncy layer of country optimism and his own white-boy exhibitionism. The film dunks us in Elvis’s blue-suede bliss and then checks us, after a while, into his heartbreak hotel. In a way, though, I wish that Luhrmann had told Elvis’s story in the insanely baroque, almost hallucinogenic fashion of “Moulin Rouge!” For all the Elvis tunes on the soundtrack, the film doesn’t have enough musical epiphanies — scenes that blow your mind and heart with their rock ‘n’ roll magic.

And what “Elvis” never quite shows us, at least not until its superior second half, is what was going on inside Elvis Presley. For a while, the film plays like a graphic novel on amphetamines, skittering over the Elvis iconography but remaining playfully detached from his soul. Instead, it filters his story through the point-of-view of his Mephistophelean manager Svengali, Col. Tom Parker, who is played by Tom Hanks , under pounds of padding and a hideous comb-over, as a carny-barker showman with a hooked nose and a gleam of evil in his eye.

By framing “Elvis” as if it were Parker’s self-justifying story, the movie structures itself as a tease: Will it really show us that Parker, as he claims in his voice-over narration, has been given a bum rap by history? That he not only made Presley’s career but had his best interests at heart? No, it will not. Yet Luhrmann, in presenting the Dutch-born, never legally emigrated Parker (née Andreas Cornelis van Kuijk) as a master flimflam artist who saw himself as the P.T Barnum of rock ‘n’ roll, revels in a certain fascinating ambivalence. Hanks, with his mustache-twirling accent and avaricious gleam, makes Parker a cousin to Jim Broadbent’s nightclub impresario in “Moulin Rouge!” — a corrupt showman who will do and say anything to keep the show going. Parker latches onto Elvis in 1955, then stage manages his career to within an inch of its life. Elvis, turned into the Colonel’s hard-working show horse, becomes a victim of Stockholm syndrome; no matter how much he sees through the Colonel’s schemes, he can’t bring himself to quit him. Yet he spends the rest of his life rebelling against him.

The movie shows us how Elvis’s career, after its volcano eruption in the mid-’50s, became a series of defeats and escapes. To calm the controversies that Elvis first inspired, the Colonel repackages him as “the new Elvis” (read: a singer of family-friendly ballads), which only makes Elvis miserable. To further defuse the attacks upon him, Parker, in 1958, encourages Elvis to go into the Army as a way to clean up his image. Stationed in Germany, Elvis meets the teenage Priscilla — but it’s one of the film’s telling flaws that the actress who plays her, Olivia DeJonge, registers strongly in an early scene but scarcely has the chance to color in her performance. Given the film’s epic ambition, the script of “Elvis” (by Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, and Jeremy Doner) is a weirdly bare-bones affair. Hanks delivers a performance that’s a luscious piece of hambone duplicity, but why aren’t there more piercingly written scenes between Elvis and the Colonel? Or Elvis and Priscilla? The Colonel should have been a great character, not a succulent trickster cartoon. If these relationships had been enriched, the story might have taken off more.

That Luhrmann compresses most of the 1960s into a two-minute campy montage, which parodies Elvis’s life as if it were one of his movies, is the clearest sign that “Elvis” is no orthodox biopic. The film’s second act leaps ahead to Elvis’s 1968 comeback special — the filming of it, and the backstage politics, which involve Parker promising NBC that they’re going to be getting a Christmas special, a plan we see undermined at every turn by Elvis and the show’s director, Steve Binder (Dacre Montgomery). The comeback special was, of course, a triumph, but the way Luhrmann tries to package it as a drama of sneaky rebellion doesn’t quite come off.

What comes off with startling power is the final third of the movie, which is set in Las Vegas during Elvis’s five-year residence at the International Hotel. For years, it became a cliché to mock Elvis for having embraced the shameless Middle American vulgarity of Vegas: the shows that opened with the “Also Sprach Zarathustra” fanfare from “2001,” the karate moves, the brassy orchestral sound of songs like his reconfigured “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” And, of course, he was on drugs the whole time. What Luhrmann grasps is that the Vegas years, in their white-suited glitz way, were trailblazing and stupendous — and that Col. Parker, in his greedy way, was a showbiz visionary for booking Elvis into that setting. The film captures how Elvis did some of his greatest work as a singer there, apotheosized by the avid ecstasy of “Burning Love.”

Yet as “Elvis” dramatizes, Vegas also became Presley’s prison, because Parker nailed him to a merciless contract, and for the most scurrilous of motivations: The Colonel needed Elvis at the International to pay off his own mountainous gambling debts, even if that meant that the singer, offstage (and, ultimately, onstage), became a slurry, pill-popping ghost of himself. Our identification with Elvis only deepens as we realize that he’s “caught in a trap.” The film’s richest irony is that Butler’s performance as the young Elvis (the one who’s far closer to his own age) is an efficient shadow of the real thing, but his performance as the aging, saddened Elvis, who rediscovered success but lost everything, is splendid. He’s alive onstage more than he was doing “Hound Dog,” and offstage, for the first time in the movie, Elvis becomes a wrenching human being. Luhrmann has made a woefully imperfect but at times arresting drama that builds to something moving and true. By the end, the film’s melody has been unchained.

Reviewed at Warner Bros. Screening Room (Cannes Film Festival, Out of Competition), May 13, 2022. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 159 MIN.

• Production: A Warner Bros. Pictures release of a Bazmark Production, Jack Group Production production. Producers: Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Gail Berman, Patrick McCormick, Schuyler Weiss. Executive producers: Toby Emmerich, Courtenay Valenti, Kevin McCormick.
• Crew: Director: Baz Luhrmann. Screenplay: Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner. Camera: Mandy Walker. Editors: Matt Villa, Jonathan Redmond. Music: Elliott Wheeler, Elvis Presley.
• With: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia DeJonge, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Dacre Montgomery, Luke Bracey, Natasha Bassett, David Wenham, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Xavier Samuel, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Gary Clark Jr.

More From Our Brands

National enquirer boss says trump knew details of stormy daniels’ payoff, a chinese billionaire just spent more than $250 million on lavish mansions spanning half the globe, ncaa names nil registry partner after five-year process, be tough on dirt but gentle on your body with the best soaps for sensitive skin, orphan black recap: what happens in rehab doesn’t stay in rehab, verify it's you, please log in.

• Entertainment
• Baz Luhrmann’s <i>Elvis</i> Is an Exhilarating, Maddening Spectacle—But One Made With Love

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis Is an Exhilarating, Maddening Spectacle—But One Made With Love

B az Luhrmann’s movies—even the great ones, like his 1996 Shakespeare-via- Tiger Beat romance Romeo + Juliet , or The Great Gatsby, from 2013, a fringed shimmy of decadence and loneliness—are loathed by many for what they see as the director’s garishness, his adoration of spectacle, his penchant for headache-inducing, mincemeat-and-glitter editing. But in 2022, in a culture where long-form series storytelling reigns supreme, Luhrmann’s devotion to two-and-a-half-hour bursts of excess is pleasingly old-fashioned, like a confetti blast from a cannon at a county fair. It’s true that his movies don’t always work, or rarely work all the way though, and that’s certainly the case with Elvis, his sequined jumpsuit of a biopic playing out of competition at the 75th Cannes Film Festival . At times it’s barely a movie—the first hour or so is exceptionally fragmented and frenetic, as if Luhrmann were time-traveling through a holographic rendering of Elvis Presley’s life, dipping and darting through the significant events with little time to touch down. But through all the arty overindulgences, one truth shines through: Luhrmann loves Elvis so much it hurts. And in a world where there’s always, supposedly, a constant stream of new things to love, or at least to binge-watch, love of Elvis—our American pauper king with a cloth-of-gold voice—feels like a truly pure thing.

Luhrmann and his co-writers Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce and Jeremy Doner use the story of Elvis’ supremely crooked manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, lurking beneath prosthetic jowls), to frame the larger, more glorious and more tragic story of Elvis. Though he was born in Tupelo, Mississippi—his identical twin, Jesse Garon, died at birth— Elvis grew up poor in Memphis, adoring and being adored by his mother, Gladys (Helen Thomson). Luhrmann shows us Elvis as a preadolescent, splitting his time between a juke joint and a revival tent down the road. (Too young to get into the former, he could only peer through a crack in the wall, entranced by the Black blues guys performing inside.) These are the twin poles of young Elvis’ life, the foundation for all that came after, and Luhrmann connects them in one extremely stylized shot: in Elvis world, gospel and blues are literally connected by one dirt road. This junior version of Elvis goes back and forth freely, drinking deeply from one well before moving to the other, and back again.

His rise happens quickly, and before you know it, he’s become the Elvis we know, or the one we think we know: he’s played by Austin Butler, who goes beyond merely replicating Elvis’ signature moves (though he’s terrific at that); he seems to be striving to conjure some phantasmal fingerprint. For long stretches of the movie, Butler’s Elvis doesn’t really have many lines: we see him, in his pre-fame years, jumping out of the truck he drives for a living and walking down a Memphis street, swinging a guitar in one hand a lunchbox in the other. Did the real-life Elvis actually do this? Doubtful. But isn’t it exactly what you want to see in a movie?

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

Before long, our movie Elvis has landed a slot performing on the Louisiana Hayride, and Sam Phillips over at Sun Studios—who specializes in “race records,” music made by Black performers—takes a chance on him at the behest of his assistant, Marion Keisker, who hears something in the kid. Elvis cuts a record. Then he’s jiggling onstage in a loose pink suit, its supple fabric hiding more than it reveals, but even so, the world gets a hint at the secrets contained therein. The girls, and most of the boys, too, go nuts.

Butler conjures the guilelessness of Elvis’ face, his soft yet chiseled cheekbones, the look in his eyes that says, “I’m up for anything—are you?” He and Luhrmann hop through the major events of Presley’s life, sometimes going for long stretches without taking a breath. Elvis is exhausting, a mess; it’s also exhilarating, a crazy blur you can’t look away from. (Catherine Martin’s costume and production design is, as always, exemplary—period-perfect but also brushed with imaginative flourishes.) We see Elvis shopping at his beloved Lansky Brothers, lured in because one of his favorite musicians, B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) shops there. We see him succumbing to the dangerous manipulations of Colonel Parker, and later kicking against them, most notably as he mounts his 1968 comeback special. (He was supposed to put on a garish Christmas sweater and sing some piece of holiday dreck, not become the stuff of legend in a black leather suit that, you just know, would be hot to the touch if only you could get close enough to it.)

But as we know, Elvis loses that fight. Colonel Parker sends a quack known as Dr. Nick to pump him full of drugs, to keep him on his feet even as he’s going out of his mind. The tragedy escalates. Does Luhrmann show us the real Elvis, or is he just re-embroidering the Elvis who already lives in our imagination? The answer seems to be that Luhrmann sees equal value in fact and myth. Though Elvis more or less follows the facts as we know them, there are moments of invention that are piercing. When Elvis’ long-suffering wife Priscilla (played by Olivia DeJonge ) finally leaves him, he chases after her, rushing down the staircase at Graceland in pants and a purple robe, a drugged-out mess. She can’t take it anymore; she’s got to leave, and she’s taking little Lisa Marie with her. Elvis stands there in bare feet, begging her not to go. And when he realizes he can’t stop her, he says, more in defeat than in hopefulness, “When you’re 40 and I’m 50, we’ll be back together—you’ll see.” Even if Elvis never really uttered that line, its map of romantic longing had long been written in his voice. In Elvis, when Butler sings, it’s Elvis’ voice that streams out, in lustrous ribbons of recklessness, of ardor, of hope for the future. That voice is a repository of every joy and misery that life could possibly hold.

Read More: He’ll Always Be Elvis: Remembering the ‘King’ 40 Years On

When the trailer for Elvis was released, a few months back, the responses on social media, and among people I know, ranged from “That looks unhinged! I’m dying to see it!” to “I can’t even look at that thing,” to “What accent, exactly, is Tom Hanks trying to achieve?” (The movie, incidentally, explains the unidentifiable diction of this man without a country, and probably without a soul.) In the movie’s last moments, Luhrmann recreates one of the saddest Elvis remnants, a live performance of “Unchained Melody” from June of 1977, just two months before his death. Butler, his face puffed out with prosthetics, sits at a grand piano littered with Coca Cola cups and a discarded terrycloth towel or two. The song, a swallow’s swoop of longing, begins pouring out of Elvis’s wrecked body—but as we watch, Luhrmann pulls a mystical switch, and footage of the real Elvis replaces the magnificent Butler-as-Elvis doppelgänger we’ve been watching. For a few confusing moments, the real Elvis is no longer a ghost—he has returned to us, an actor playing himself, and we see that as good as that Butler kid was, there’s no comparison to the real thing.

But the feeling of relief is fleeting. Elvis , now gone for more than 40 years, is a ghost, no matter how passionately Luhrmann and Butler have tried to reconstitute his ectoplasm. The only consolation is that when a person is no longer a person, he is at last free to become a dream. In the final moments of Elvis, Luhrmann returns his beloved subject to that world, like a fisherman freeing his catch. “Lonely rivers flow/to the sea, to the sea,” the song tells us, as the true Elvis swims back to his home of safety—he’s better off as a dream, maybe, safe from everyone who might hurt or use him. But for a few hours there, he seemed to walk among us once again, a sighting that no one would believe if we tried to tell them. But we saw him. We really did. And then he slipped away, having had enough of our claim over him, if never enough of our love.

Correction, July 5

The original version of this story misstated the film’s screenwriters; Jeremy Doner was omitted.

Sign up for More to the Story , TIME’s weekly entertainment newsletter, to get the context you need for the pop culture you love.

More Must-Reads From TIME

• The 100 Most Influential People of 2024
• Coco Gauff Is Playing for Herself Now
• Scenes From Pro-Palestinian Encampments Across U.S. Universities
• 6 Compliments That Land Every Time
• If You're Dating Right Now , You're Brave: Column
• The AI That Could Heal a Divided Internet
• Fallout Is a Brilliant Model for the Future of Video Game Adaptations
• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Contact us at [email protected]

Breaking News

Review: Austin Butler is the King incarnate in Baz Luhrmann’s manic, hip-swiveling ‘Elvis’

• Show more sharing options
• Copy Link URL Copied!

Why hasn’t there been a great Elvis biopic yet? Well, Austin Butler wasn’t around to star as the King of Rock ’n’ Roll. At the center of Baz Luhrmann’s sprawling pop epic “Elvis,” a film as opulent and outsize as the King’s talent and taste, Butler delivers a fully transformed, fully committed and star-making turn as Elvis Presley. The rumors are true: Elvis lives, in Austin Butler .

Swirling around Butler’s bravura performance is a manic, maximalist, chopped-and-screwed music biopic in which Luhrmann locates Elvis as the earth-shaking inflection point between the ancient and the modern, the carnival and the TV screen, a figure of pure spectacle who threatened to obliterate the status quo — and did. Luhrmann takes Presley’s legacy, relegated to a Las Vegas gag, and reminds us just how dangerous, sexy and downright revolutionary he once was. He makes Elvis relevant again.

Butler leaves it all on the screen, embodying the raw, unbridled sexual charisma of Elvis onstage. He is jaw-dropping, nearly feral in his portrayal of Presley’s most memorable musical performances, from his early days to his 1968 comeback special and his Vegas shows, and Luhrmann shoots and edits these scenes to capture not just Butler’s performance up close but also the powerful impact Elvis had on his fans.

Written by Luhrmann, Jeremy Doner, Sam Bromell and Craig Pearce, the film crams Elvis’ entire career into two hours and 39 minutes of breathless filmmaking, focusing on the energy and emotional beats of Elvis’ journey, as well as his exploitation at the hands of his manager, Col. Tom Parker ( Tom Hanks , heavily made up in prosthetics).

It’s 2022. Does Elvis Presley still matter?

Baz Luhrmann’s splashy “Elvis” biopic attempts to make the King relevant to a new generation. But 50 years after Presley’s last Top 10 hit, is it too late?

June 23, 2022

Luhrmann editorializes on top of that, using a heavy hand in the edit to continually remind us of Elvis’ roots and motivations, and the cultural importance of his ground-breaking career. Contemporary music on the soundtrack links Presley’s performance of Black music to the popularity of modern hip-hop; snippets of Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears hits remind us that Elvis paved the way for teen idols and that his story is also a cautionary tale.

The first part of the film, focusing on his breakout as a pretty white boy from Memphis, Tenn., who sang the blues, is fast, loose and dynamic, a whirlwind of honky-tonks, tent revivals, Beale Street blues and country music shows. The pace is frantic; it can’t sit still in the same way that Elvis can’t keep still when he’s singing, overcome by the music. Cinematographer Mandy Walker’s camera never stops moving, pulling us into this whirlwind of newfound fame, the wheels of the machine turning faster than Elvis can keep up.

The speed and overstimulation is heady and intoxicating, a stark aesthetic and emotional contrast to later chapters in Elvis’ career. The Hollywood days are a montage of color and costume, an inauthentic facade, as he sells out to corporations and the bottom line. In the last section, Elvis is stultified and oppressed, sapped of color and life, isolated in his “golden cage” at the International Hotel in Vegas.

The story is told from Parker’s perspective, a curious choice, though it serves a greater narrative purpose. From his perspective, we understand the spectacle that is Elvis; the colonel nearly licks his chops at the sight of this newest carnival attraction: a handsome, erotic, racial-boundary-crossing young man with a rough croon and a jet-black forelock who can make teenage girls scream. With visions of merchandise dancing in his head, the colonel turns Elvis into a global icon, but as “Elvis” argues at every turn, the colonel tamed the singer’s unruliness and artfulness, forcing him into cheesy movie musicals and relentless touring.

How ‘Elvis’ star Austin Butler lost — and found — himself in the King of Rock ’n’ Roll

Austin Butler poured everything he had into playing Elvis. The actor shares the grief, music and obsessive research that went into his portrayal.

June 24, 2022

Parker is the architect of Elvis’ downfall, extracting everything he can, clipping his wings, sanding down this culture-shifting force and offering him up as a titillating morsel of entertainment, the soul behind the talent tossed into the money-making machine and ground to dust.

The colonel’s narration and Hanks’ cartoonishly evil performance serve as a signed confession of guilt, as Luhrmann gives us Elvis as a Christ-like figure, a sainted martyr of rock ’n’ roll crucified on the cross of capitalism and greed.

While Butler humanizes Elvis, Luhrmann deifies him and argues that he possessed far more radical potential, both musically and politically, than he was allowed. His swiveling hips and jiggling knees weren’t just a portent of boy bands and pop icons to come — “Elvis the Pelvis” also threatened to usher in the sexual revolution and desegregate the South all at once, pushing rock ’n’ roll into the mainstream while starting the very first “culture war.”

“Elvis” isn’t just a reinvigoration of the Elvis myth. It’s also a resurrection of the King himself. Left the building? Not if Baz Luhrmann has anything to say about it.

Rating: PG-13, for substance abuse, strong language, suggestive material and smoking Running time: 2 hours, 39 minutes Playing: In general release June 24

More to Read

Granderson: Your U.S. history class needed a film like ‘Rustin’

Feb. 24, 2024

From king to dark prince: Austin Butler and Denis Villeneuve on their new ‘Dune’ villain

Feb. 22, 2024

Bob Marley biopic ‘One Love’ takes the bite out of ‘Madame Web’ at the box office

Feb. 19, 2024

Only good movies

Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Review: In ‘Unsung Hero,’ a family’s musical success story comes to life via the clan itself

April 25, 2024

Review: In the sexy, adrenalized ‘Challengers,’ tennis competitors don’t skimp on the foreplay

Nicole Kidman on making ‘Birth’ and why she chooses films that aren’t a ‘soothing bath’

Casting directors from Anne Hathaway films deny ‘gross’ chemistry tests during auditions

April 24, 2024

Elvis (2022)

• User Reviews
• The elvis songs
• Terrible pacing and editing. The first half of the movie gave me nausea it felt like everything was going at supersonic speed and the second half was much slower.
• Tom hanks was simply miscasted. Sorry but his fake dutch accent is not believable at all and its simply annoying to listen to. He should not have been in this movie. Also it felt like he was the main character and Elvis was a side character in his own movie. Tom hanks had too much screen time and his performance was quite bad.
• modern trap rap songs in a film about Elvis Presley seriously?? What is wrong with the people who made this film? I simply dont understand the choice of some of the songs.

Awards | FAQ | User Ratings | External Reviews | Metacritic Reviews

• User Ratings
• External Reviews
• Metacritic Reviews
• Full Cast and Crew
• Release Dates
• Official Sites
• Company Credits
• Filming & Production
• Technical Specs
• Plot Summary
• Plot Keywords
• Parents Guide

Did You Know?

• Crazy Credits
• Alternate Versions
• Connections
• Soundtracks

Photo & Video

• Photo Gallery
• Trailers and Videos

Related Items

• External Sites

Related lists from IMDb users

Recently Viewed

• Warner Bros.

Summary The film explores the life and music of Elvis Presley (Austin Butler), seen through the prism of his complicated relationship with his enigmatic manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks). The story delves into the complex dynamic between Presley and Parker spanning over 20 years, from Presley’s rise to fame to his unprecedented stardom, a ... Read More

Directed By : Baz Luhrmann

Written By : Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner, Baz Luhrmann

Where to Watch

Colonel Tom Parker

Austin Butler

Olivia DeJonge

Helen thomson, richard roxburgh.

Kelvin Harrison Jr.

David Wenham

Kodi Smit-McPhee

Jimmie rodgers snow.

Luke Bracey

Jerry schilling.

Dacre Montgomery

Steve binder, gary clark jr., arthur 'big boy' crudup, sister rosetta tharpe.

Natasha Bassett

Dixie locke.

Xavier Samuel

Scotty moore, alton mason, little richard, shonka dukureh, big mama thornton, pentecostal singer, david gannon, charlie hodge, shannon sanders, pentecostal pastor, pentecostal singer, critic reviews.

• All Reviews
• Positive Reviews
• Mixed Reviews
• Negative Reviews

User Reviews

Related movies.

Lawrence of Arabia (re-release)

The Passion of Joan of Arc

My Left Foot

12 Years a Slave

The Social Network

Schindler's List

The Irishman

The Wild Child

We Were Here

Reversal of Fortune

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

The Act of Killing

The Look of Silence

Related News

2024 Movie Release Calendar

Jason dietz.

Find release dates for every movie coming to theaters, VOD, and streaming throughout 2024 and beyond, updated weekly.

Every Zack Snyder Movie, Ranked

With the arrival of Zack Snyder's latest Rebel Moon chapter on Netflix, we rank every one of the director's films—from bad to, well, less bad—by Metascore.

Every Guy Ritchie Movie, Ranked

We rank every one of the British director's movies by Metascore, from his debut Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels to his brand new film, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

April Movie Preview (2024)

Keith kimbell.

The month ahead will bring new films from Alex Garland, Luca Guadagnino, Dev Patel, and more. To help you plan your moviegoing options, our editors have selected the most notable films releasing in April 2024, listed in alphabetical order.

DVD/Blu-ray Releases: New & Upcoming

Find a list of new movie and TV releases on DVD and Blu-ray (updated weekly) as well as a calendar of upcoming releases on home video.

• Search Please fill out this field.
• Newsletters
• Sweepstakes
• Movie Reviews

Cannes review: Electrifying Elvis delivers the icon like never before

Director Baz Luhrmann recaptures his Moulin Rouge! mojo with a hip-swiveling profile loaded with risk and reward.

Senior Editor, Movies

Can it be that we really don't know Elvis anymore — not as the seismic force that shook people and remade the popscape? Barring those who actually lived through it (a group to be envied), that's almost certainly the case. Baz Luhrmann 's Elvis , a dazzling, splatter-paint evocation of the myth and the man, does a mighty job of bringing us closer to what that revolutionary moment must have felt like. It may not be slavishly devoted to the facts (this isn't your typical birth-to-deather), but as with Todd Haynes 's glam fantasia Velvet Goldmine , the movie achieves something trickier and more valuable, mining shocking intimacy from sweeping cultural changes.

Luhrmann, an inspired stylist who somehow managed to freshen up The Great Gatsby , doesn't make us wait long for the first of these jolts. Before unleashing a glimpse of his Presley, we hear the voice emanating off a percolating debut single, "That's All Right," then we follow a shadowy figure taking the stage at a 1954 concert, the emphasis on mystery and discovery. By the time Austin Butler stares down the lens and melts it (his revelatory performance, fully lived-in and vulnerable, never plays like imitation), Luhrmann has hooked us by the strangeness of it all: the slicked hair, the androgynous makeup, the girls in the audience uncontrollably leaping to their feet.

Already we've seen Elvis' snoozy country-music competition ( Kodi Smit-McPhee plays one of these casualties, almost a fan-fictional variation on his gangly creation from The Power of the Dog ), and there's no contest. "It was the greatest carnival attraction I'd ever seen," murmurs narrating uber-manager-to-be Colonel Tom Parker (a stunty, half-successful Tom Hanks ), and a thesis snaps into place, one that Luhrmann, himself an impresario, develops in a screenplay credited to him and three other contributing writers: This is story about salesmanship, onstage and off.

Elvis crystallizes as a media-minded showdown between Parker's product manager — he convinces the naïve Presley to commit exclusively on a Ferris wheel, if the circus metaphor wasn't clear enough — and an increasingly willful and visionary artist. Luhrmann's filmmaking style follows suit, beginning in a flurry of look-at-me zip pans and crotch zooms, Presley making his meteoric way up the marquee posters, then deepening into intense fourth-wall piercings as Butler's Elvis thirsts for authenticity. (The director's ear for jolting modern musical juxtapositions remains in full flower, with new contributions by Doja Cat , Shonka Dukureh and Gary Clark Jr. , among others; Presley's own classics are creatively remixed, covered, and sometimes even modulated into minor keys.)

Not a perfect lookalike (and that's fine), Butler does extremely well by the music and stage moves, but he's even more compelling during Presley's post-Army Hollywood years, presented as dissatisfied ones. Elvis has an extended centerpiece that you can't quite believe arrives in a major studio movie: a behind-the-scenes exfoliation of Presley's landmark 1968 TV comeback special, during which Parker's dreams of wholesome Christmas entertainment collide with an increasingly politicized singer, shaken by the recent assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. ("He's not even wearing the sweater!" a panicky executive barks in the control room, confronted by Butler's leather-clad, gospel-belting Presley.)

As fun as Elvis often is, it scores some remarkably sharp points, particularly regarding Presley's unfaked love of Black musicians, and the appropriations that fueled his crossover success. Of the many biopics to enshrine the King (and Elvis eclipses them all), none has featured a triple split-screen montage charting the performance of a single song back to its blues-shack roots. (Even the serious Presley documentaries don't cement the point as clearly as Luhrmann does.) "Too many people are making too much money to put you in jail," a shrewd B.B. King ( Waves ' Kelvin Harrison Jr.) tells Presley at one of his low points; the line is scalding.

For a filmmaker sometimes criticized for skimming the surface, Luhrmann uses the material to go as deep as he does wide. Sometimes Elvis feels like a lost Oliver Stone film from his daring 1990s heyday: a big-canvas exploration of debauched American appetites. Fittingly, the Las Vegas years slacken a bit, televisions getting bulleted and pills chased. Still, Luhrmann makes room for Nixonian paranoia, especially in one hushed conversation with estranged wife Priscilla ( Olivia DeJonge ). "I never made a classic film I could be proud of," Elvis, a James Dean fan, tells her. Fans of Blue Hawaii will wince, but something equally rare has come to pass — a portrait of a serious man trapped in an unserious life. Grade: A–

Related content:

• Lisa Marie Presley praises Austin Butler's performance in Elvis biopic: 'Absolutely exquisite'
• Elvis the god is born in new Elvis trailer
• Cannes Film Festival 2022 preview: 12 movies not to miss
• Cannes review: Several David Bowies combine into one artist in the essential Moonage Daydream

Related Articles

‘Elvis’ Is Ecstatic, Jittery, Horny, Tireless, and Tragic. Just Like the King

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

It’s been a while since I felt beaten up by a movie. Leave it to Baz Luhrmann to end that lucky streak. And with a movie about Elvis Presley , no less — hardly a subject to approach casually. Elvis , in the epic tradition of all of Luhrmann’s work, is a brash, overwhelming experience. It’s a carnival in movie form: a grand, restless, swirling contraption that’s as grotesque as any bloody-mouthed geek and as uncomfortably poignant as a sad clown. It’s too much. Yet if it were any less excessive, it wouldn’t be as doggedly effective as it often is. Elvis begins at the end — not of Presley’s life, but of the life that consumed and distorted it: Colonel Thomas Parker, his longtime manager. Played by a jowly and insistently unappealing Tom Hanks , Parker is the grandmaster of the tragic spectacle to follow. He is our narrator and admonisher, the man with the megaphone and the whip. A bedridden nobody with the movie starts, Parker can barely get this story out without being haunted by his own memories, particularly of a moment when, late in Elvis’ life, the performer is practically sleepwalking from exhaustion, and Parker says, “ The only thing that matters is that that man gets up on that stage tonight .” There he is: the King (played by a sensational Austin Butler) sprawled on the ground, barely alive and being pumped with fluids so that he can be trotted out on stage like a reanimated corpse. 

It’s no wonder Parker’s narration of this story, which frames the entire movie, bears the gutless stench of a deathbed confession. Parker tells us that the death of Elvis was in large part the fault of the public’s love and adoration, its unceasing need for more , to which Elvis became as addicted as he was to the barbiturates and alcohol that spelled his certain downfall. We already know better. Colonel Parker is preparing us for a story of Elvis’ rise and fall, which is in turn the story of his own rise and fall. Man, myth, and legend are collapsed into one hip-heaving, acutely talented, blue-eyed soulster whose tragedy is preordained by the fact that his story still belongs to the man who bled it dry. If you want the usual biopic bullet points, this movie’s got them. But we should know by now that the director of Moulin Rouge and The Great Gatsby will not give it to us in a straight line. This is, yes, the story of Elvis’ life, from impoverished and troubled birth to premature, unglamorous death. But every stop along the way is given the weight of a totalizing, world-shaking event: Before Elvis gets big , he’s already big. His wandering into a Black church and catching the spirit as a shoeless child in Tupelo, Mississippi, rings out with the audacious grandeur of an event that will change the course of history — which, in its way, it was. Elvis hits the necessary details, carves out the storied, prominent eras in Elvis’ personal and professional life: his Beale Street era, his Hollywood era, his time in the military, his courtship of and marriage to Priscilla Presley (Olivia DeJonge), his fated run at Vegas’ International Hotel, and on and on, flashing backward to his origin and forward to the long aftermath of his death, when we meet Parker again and are forced to remember just who it is that’s telling this story. When it works, it’s contagious. We largely have Austin Butler to thank for that. How Butler survived this role, with all of its ecstatic rebounds and tireless, jittery, sweat-stained feats of performance, is a mystery. Maybe the best thing you can say about Elvis is that the movie knows what it has. Luhrmann’s movie doesn’t need an Elvis impersonator. It needs an actor who can survive the movie — who can not only stand out from Luhrmann’s heavy sensationalism, but who can also convince us that beneath all the shiny surfaces and visual outbursts, there’s a person. Butler’s Elvis is a convincing performer — you believe, quite incredibly, that this is a man people couldn’t take their eyes off of — but he’s also credibly flawed, and daring. 

Editor’s picks

The 250 greatest guitarists of all time, the 500 greatest albums of all time, the 50 worst decisions in movie history, every awful thing trump has promised to do in a second term.

He’s also tasked with oozing sex appeal, and this works, too. Elvis is an incredibly horny movie. It has to be. You aren’t getting this story right if we cannot believe that the man’s hip-shaking was worthy of his being labeled a public enemy. Luhrmann of course has to drive the point home with energetic tastelessness, dialing up the ooh’s and aah’s until they resemble outright orgasms. Butler’s job is to make that plausible: He has to meet Luhrmann blow for blow. The movie’s makeup and costuming team gives him a deft assist, caking him in sweat as thick as motor oil when he’s performing and squeezing him into criminally tight jeans meant to get the imagination going. In the end, it’s still up to Butler to do all of this and give Luhrmann’s style the soul it needs to make it all make sense. 

The Long, Crazy, Never-Ending Story of 'Hound Dog'

Regina king wants people to know shirley chisholm's good fight, ziggy marley on critics' response to 'one love' biopic: 'they were looking for a different story'.

Elvis is an entertaining movie about the man’s sex appeal and a pretty good movie about his life, even as it never dials things back enough for anyone to catch a breath. Luhrmann’s zigzagging, triumphantly kitschy style suits his subject. But a movie about Elvis made on this scale, even by a director like Luhrmann, whose work isn’t immediately recognizable as political, is saddled with other responsibilities. This is, after all, a story inseparable from the history and public sentiment that surrounded Presley. That includes the political efforts to ban him, but it also includes the attitudes behind those efforts — the Black styles and sounds that made even the white Elvis threatening. He’s credited with a sexual awakening among young people, it’s true, but he was also a vehicle for Black music finding its way onto white radio stations, Black movement slipping into white living rooms. 

Maybe unsurprisingly, then, Elvis puts more than a little effort into settling the matter of Elvis and race — Elvis and Black musicians, that is. It starts with that early memory of him slipping into Black spaces as a child and being caught up in the music that he would grow to love. It puts some of his most famous songs — Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” for example — back into the mouths of the Black musicians who first wrote them. It situates Elvis the man as an appreciator of that music, a joyous recipient and beneficiary, not the thief many have claimed him to be over the years. Elvis the legend, meanwhile, becomes inseparable from the music he loved. Even the movie’s engagement with the history and politics of Elvis’ moment seems to come back to this. We get news of the deaths of JFK, RFK, and MLK, as we must. But in that last case, what registers more urgently is Mahalia Jackson’s performance at the fallen civil rights leader’s funeral — a curious moment that starts with the funeral telecast playing in the background of Elvis and Priscilla bickering (yet again) before Mahalia’s voice catches Elvis’ attention. What arises after this is the era of Elvis getting back to his roots, in a way, juggling the need to make political statements, as his performances in defiance of obscenity laws plainly did, with his desire to play it safe and stay out of it. B. B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola Quartey), Little Richard (Alton Mason), Arthur Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.), Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh), and Mahalia Jackson (Cle Morgan) flow into and out of this movie with an ease that amounts to more than inspiration for Elvis. They’re seen performing at length, with Elvis often watching; by the time he performs the covers of Black music that would come to define his career, we’ve already been educated on the source. Even a couple of the needle-drops sprinkled throughout modernize Elvis’ tunes by way of hip hop and other styles that point back to Black music, just as, in the movie’s depiction, Elvis openly points back to that music. This doesn’t quite amount to a confrontation with the problem at hand, which isn’t only a matter of theft or inspiration, but of profit. On this subject, the movie imbues its throng of legendary Black musicians with world-weary understanding. It underestimates their anger, more invested in Elvis’ appreciation of them. Whether that’s a useful trade-off will depend on us. Elvis is in many ways, about “us” — the people out there in the crowd that the King, in his International Hotel performances, would make a point of gazing back at, turning up the house lights to give faces to the anonymous throng of superfans staring up at him in the dark. It’s another of the more effective threads in this movie — Elvis’ relationship to the masses. Luhrmann’s movies are overripe with basic scenes that seem to have been shredded and put back together by a madman with a poisoned genius for finding ecstasy in even the smallest things. Watching Elvis feels a little like being electrocuted. But as a document of the loving masses, and of the thrill of seeing Elvis perform, this is all apt. As is the central tragedy of the film. In the end, we’re back in that hospital room with Parker, hearing the full, winding arc of his choice to sell out his and Elvis’ souls. He grafted both of their fates into a contract that would render Parker into both Faust and the devil and Elvis into a dying machine, performing to his last breath with the helplessness of a man who seems to have no choice, but whose fatigue never dulled his love for giving all he had to give. It’s an exhausting movie. That probably means that it’s doing something right.

Harvey Weinstein Survivors Saddened by Overturned NY Conviction: ‘Disappointing for All of Us’

• "Ugh"
• By Nancy Dillon

'Hollywood Con Queen': See First Trailer for Docuseries About Scam That Shocked the Film Industry

• By Daniel Kreps

'Baby Reindeer' Is TV's Latest Tortured-Poet Show

• Truth Be Told
• By Alan Sepinwall

Sacha Baron Cohen Passages Redacted From Rebel Wilson's Memoir in U.K.

• By Emily Zemler

'Shōgun' Exits Not With a Bang But a Whisper — and a Place in TV History

• FINALE DESTINATION

Most Popular

Anne hathaway says 'gross' chemistry test in the 2000s required her to make out with 10 guys: that's the 'worst way to do it' and 'now we know better', how quentin tarantino's 'the movie critic' fell apart, sources claim hugh jackman’s worrying behavior may have something to do with his breakup, first queen elizabeth ii memorial statue unveiled, with a smile and three corgis, in england, you might also like, ‘the heart of rock and roll’ review: huey lewis and the news jukebox musical is easy to like, harder to love, ‘rupaul’s drag race’ queen trixie mattel releases whimsical gay-mer makeup collection inspired by arcade games, the best yoga mats for any practice, according to instructors, anne hathaway says ‘princess diaries 3’ development is ‘in a good place’, nfl stadium naming rights help brands half the time, study says.

Rolling Stone is a part of Penske Media Corporation. © 2024 Rolling Stone, LLC. All rights reserved.

Verify it's you

Please log in.

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Pop Culture Happy Hour

• Performing Arts
• Pop Culture

In 'Elvis,' an icon remains an icon, and little else

Aisha Harris

Austin Butler as Elvis. Warner Bros. Pictures hide caption

Austin Butler as Elvis.

The conundrum facing every biopic about an extremely famous person – the kind of person who truly represents that now overused and diluted term "icon" – is in teasing the human out from underneath all that iconography. Beyond nailing the "look" or "sound," however one might interpret it, does this figure who's been referenced, impersonated, and memed ad nauseum feel like a real person again? Does the exercise result in a better understanding and/or appreciation of their work and what made them iconic in the first place?

A lot of biopics have trouble solving this conundrum. And few, if any, can fully avoid falling into hagiography, which is probably the most common trapping of the genre. Elvis , director and co-screenwriter Baz Luhrmann's dizzyingly absurd take on the life of Elvis Presley (Austin Butler), doesn't just fail at making the so-called King of Rock and Roll into a three-dimensional human being; it actively plunges him further into the recesses of memedom, while making his legacy out to be far less interesting than it actually is.

Listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify .

Tom Hanks, and a bizarre Euro-ish accent rivaling the cast of House of Gucci , star as Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis's longtime manager who turned out to be little more than a huckster with a shady past. "The Colonel," as he's known, is both our narrator and nefarious villain who ruthlessly exploits Elvis, though he refuses to see himself as such. In the film's whirlwind of an opening sequence, the aging and ill Colonel insists it's not true he's responsible for the superstar's premature demise at the age of 42: "I made Elvis Presley." He may as well be twirling a wiry handlebar mustache.

From there, Elvis is primarily interested in returning to one loaded and mighty dull question: What, or who, really killed Presley?

To "answer" this, of course, we've got to go back to the beginning, and hit as many of the key points in Presley's history as possible – his early exposure to Black blues and gospel as a boy growing up in Mississippi and Tennessee; his stratospheric rise as a rock and roll sex symbol; the death of his beloved mother Gladys (Helen Thomson); his legendary 1968 TV special, his first of several comebacks; the drug addiction, and so on. In typical Luhrmann fashion, Elvis cycles through almost all of these events and others at breakneck pace, relying upon turbulent split-screen laden montages and the Colonel's signposting voiceover to do most of the heavy lifting in the storytelling department. If you've seen the movie's trailer, imagine all those elisions and quick cuts and dramatic flourishes, but over the course of a nearly three-hour runtime.

This approach can make for some raucous, energetic sequences powered by Butler's dynamic recreations of the performances – the hips wiggle with ease, and according to Luhrmann, it's mostly Butler himself singing those vocals. When he's offstage and the pressures of reality take over, however, the character of Elvis gets lost in the aesthetic cacophony or bogged down by clunky attempts to turn him into a tragic, uncomplicated hero at the mercy of a menacing manager. For one, his relationship and eventual marriage to Priscilla Presley is sanded down to ignore the fact that she was 14 years old –10 years his junior – when they first met.

Judy Garland at 100: A starter guide beyond the Yellow Brick Road

These are the summer movies NPR critics are looking forward to

Elvis also tentatively flirts with his place at the intersection of politics, casting him in familiar light as a rebel whose gyrations and interpretations of "Negro music" incensed white parents and lawmakers, while being sure to note how sad he was about the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Yet curiously, Luhrmann couldn't find room – in a nearly three-hour movie! Did I mention this already? – to fold in that infamous meeting with President Nixon in 1970, where Presley, by then an elder statesman by pop music standards, railed against hippies and drug culture, which could have been an interesting dramatic contrast to explore.

Shonka Dukureh as Big Mama Thornton in Baz Luhrmann's new Elvis . Warner Bros. Pictures hide caption

Shonka Dukureh as Big Mama Thornton in Baz Luhrmann's new Elvis .

More frustrating, though, is how Elvis treats its subject's relationship to Black music and culture. Luhrmann and his co-writers know it's a facet that can't be ignored, but what is clearly intended to serve as tribute to Presley's Black predecessors and contemporaries plays out instead as lip service. Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh), Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola Quartey), B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), and Little Richard (Alton Mason) all pop up here and there in bit parts to draw out the lineage and demonstrate how Presley was embraced by Black communities in his early years. But if a viewer goes into this movie knowing little to nothing about Presley, they'll come away believing it was as simple as that, because the film consciously avoids the more fraught legacy he's had as the white "king" of a genre rooted in Black tradition.

'Pleasure': A young woman's matter-of-fact pursuit of porn stardom

There's no mention of the widespread rumor that he once said "the only thing Negroes can do for me is buy my records and shine my shoes," a rumor that persisted for decades and no doubt helped cement him as little more than a cultural appropriator in the eyes of many. Concrete evidence of this failed to materialize, and it was shot down by Presley himself in an interview with the Black magazine Jet , where he added that "rock and roll was here a long time before I came along. No one can sing that kind of music like colored people." But excising any criticisms or apprehensions from Black artists in the script ultimately does a disservice to him and the inherent nuances in how his art has been received.

As tedious and surface-level as this whole exercise is, it's not boring. Big time Luhrmann fans and Presley fans alike will find enough to latch on to here; it's a movie brimming with nostalgia and admiration for its subject, complete with a Moulin Rouge -like mashing up of classic songs from the catalog with new interpolations by modern artists like Doja Cat and Diplo. (I'd argue that's more effective in Moulin Rouge and Luhrmann's ambitious series about the birth of hip-hop, The Get Down , where the characters have more time to develop in the midst of the vibrant, showy production.)

Yet by the end, a gaudy gloss remains coated upon the man, myth, and legend, Elvis. The movie's answer for what killed Presley, metaphorically speaking, will come as no surprise to anyone who's ever watched a biopic about a pop star. The zany excesses of Elvis just aren't enough to cover over the paint-by-numbers idolatry.

• Austin Butler
• Baz Luhrmann
• Elvis Presley

In ‘Elvis,’ Baz Luhrmann brilliantly floods our senses with arresting sights and sounds

The director’s trademark razzle-dazzle surrounds tom hanks as an oily colonel tom parker and austin butler, electrifying as the king..

“Elvis” star Austin Butler plays the singer in every stage of his career, starting with the hip-swiveling rocker who made the girls swoon.

Warner Bros.

The numbers vary from Internet source to Internet source, but the general consensus seems to be there were something like 200 Elvis Presley impersonators in the world at the time of the King’s death in 1977 and the number has grown to at least 35,000 today. And we’re not even including all the actors who have portrayed Elvis on TV and in the movies, from Kurt Russell to Jonathan Rhys Meyers to David Keith to Don Johnson to Harvey Keitel to Michael Shannon to Val Kilmer as the Elvis apparition who advises Christian Slater’s Clarence in “True Romance.”

So one can’t help but ask: With every chapter of the man’s life and times already so deeply etched into the pop culture landscape, do we really need another movie about the man and the myth and the legend that was Elvis Presley?

In the case of “Elvis,” the answer is a resounding YES, thanks to the gloriously excessive, razzle-dazzle direction of Baz Luhrmann (“Romeo + Juliet,” “Moulin Rouge!”), a smoldering star turn performance from Austin Butler as the title character and a sure-to-be-polarizing but fantastically eccentric spin on Colonel Tom Parker, courtesy of a nearly unrecognizable Tom Hanks. This is 2 hours and 39 minutes of screen-popping, candy-colored, highly stylized, fever-dream showmanship that serves as a Greatest Hits compilation touching on the many, many permutations of Elvis, from malleable country bumpkin to sex symbol icon to B-movie star to seemingly irrelevant near has-been to the Comeback King to Las Vegas icon to his death at the age of 42, and it’s such a sprawling, amazing rollercoaster ride that it’s difficult to process the fact Presley has been dead longer than he was with us.

If you thought the magnificently flamboyant Luhrmann was well-suited to put the flashiest of spins on “The Great Gatsby,” you can imagine what he does with the made-for-overkill mythology of Elvis — and from the moment we see a bejeweled version of the Warner Bros. Pictures logo, we know Luhrmann is going to flood our senses with a nonstop medley of arresting sights and sounds, never taking his foot off the directorial gas pedal. (Who wants to see a version of Elvis unplugged, am I right?)

“Elvis” is told through the skewed, self-serving, huckster’s perspective of Colonel Tom Parker, who was not a colonel and was born Andreas Cornelis van Kujik in the Netherlands (hence the strange Dutch/Southern hybrid accent), an admittedly great showman and promoter who latched onto Presley early on and rode his show pony into the ground, allegedly bilking Presley of millions and maneuvering him into making all sorts of deals that benefitted Parker first and Presley a distant second. Parker keeps trying to convince us he’s not the villain in the story, as he we see him always lurking backstage, always making side deals to line his pockets or cover his gambling debts, always in the middle of everything while looking out for himself first, always spinning things with his almost cartoonishly evil cadence.

Tom Hanks is nearly unrecognizable as Elvis’ wheeler-dealer of a manager, Colonel Tom Parker.

Luhrmann employs a sparkling array of visual and aural tactics, from period-piece graphics to sepia-toned flashbacks, from nostalgic color schemes to swooping camera movements to split screens and cool and creative match-cut transitions. We know Elvis didn’t write his own material and we know he appropriated the sounds of gospel and blues from Black artists, and perhaps more than any previous Presley biopic, “Elvis” continually acknowledges that, with the likes of BB King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), Little Richard (Alton Mason), Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.) and Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola Quartey) getting their moments.

Still, the film’s fate rests on the shoulders of Austin Butler, who flashed serious movie-star potential as the evil fool Tex Watson in Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” and is mesmerizingly strong here. Butler doesn’t do an Elvis impersonation, but he does a stunningly good job of capturing the hip-swiveling, pink-suited Elvis who makes girls swoon and scream in a comedically effective early sequence; the ’60s Elvis who starred in a series of forgettable and dopey movies; the brilliant performer who made one of the most memorable pop-star comebacks of all time in a 1968 TV special, and the lost and borderline self-parodying Karate King who sweated and toiled on the Vegas stage and only occasionally touched greatness. Butler is an electric performer who shines in the spotlight when Elvis is onstage, but he also infuses Presley with an empathetic humanity and vulnerability. We know the man was hardly a saint, but we understand his sins.

Hanks’ characterization of Colonel Tom Parker is a big swing for someone who has held the unofficial title of America’s Most Likable Movie Star for more than 30 years. Some might argue he’s miscast, but I found the performance to be suitably oily, for despite Parker’s protestations, he IS the villain of the story. Even as Parker constantly reminds us that he “made” Elvis Presley (and there’s an element of truth to that), we see that time and again, he also contributed to the destruction of the man.

Still, for all its tragic elements and the heartbreak of an ending we know is coming, “Elvis” is a brilliant celebration of an artist who left a lasting and huge footprint on our culture.

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Elvis review – Baz Luhrmann’s squeaky-clean King is shaking no one up

Incurious yet frantic, Luhrmann’s spangly epic is off-key – and Austin Butler flounders in those blue suede shoes

B az Luhrmann has given us another pointless explosion of super-spangly sparkles in celluloid form – exactly the same sparkles he sprinkled over the Moulin Rouge and Jay Gatsby in previous films. And just as Alan Partridge said his favourite Beatles album was The Best of the Beatles, so Luhrmann has given us a film built around what he imagines is the best of Elvis Presley.

It’s not a movie so much as a 159-minute trailer for a film called Elvis – a relentless, frantically flashy montage, epic and yet negligible at the same time, with no variation of pace. At the end of it all, you might find yourself pondering the eternal questions: what does Luhrmann think of Elvis’s music? Does he, for example, prefer some Elvis songs to others? Has he listened to any of Elvis’s songs all the way through? Or does he shut down Spotify after 20 seconds once he reckons he’s got the gist?

These issues arise because of the weirdly incurious approach here to Presley’s music and his life, featuring a competent but not especially inspired performance from Austin Butler as the pelvis-swivelling, American-youth-deranging King himself. The film really wastes its one potential trump card: a human toad performance from Tom Hanks as his creepy and parasitic manager Colonel Tom Parker, who exploited him ruthlessly and refused to let him tour abroad, finally turning him into a bloated rhinestone parody in an unending cash-cow Vegas residency while the rest of the world moved on. (The soundtrack absolutely hammers the “caught in a trap” line from Suspicious Minds in case we miss the point.)

But Luhrmann is clearly unwilling or unable to explore the dysfunctional Jekyll-and-Hyde relationship between the Colonel and Elvis in case any sort of dark or sad mood predominates. Colonel Tom is a kind of repeating cameo in Elvis’s life and Luhrmann is even less interested in Parker’s inner self than in Elvis’s – the Colonel’s own wretched post-Elvis life and death are shrugged off in the closing credit titles.

We get the basics of Presley’s career: the early days of hardship, the profound influence of black music, the blues and gospel; his days on the hayseed country circuit before signing for Parker, the huge Elvismania success, the shrewd decision to calm moral-majority fears by doing two years military service in Germany, marriage to Priscilla, the bubblegum movies, the televised 1968 Comeback Special and the long Vegas goodbye.

There are some tiny unpredictable touches – such as a hint that Elvis secretly inflamed young gay men in the States as well as straight women. But otherwise it sticks to a defanged version of the script. There is, for example, not really any such thing as Fat Elvis here. He stays sweaty but reasonably svelte until almost the very end, when we see a decorous hint of flab. But we don’t see the yucky burger binges or the adult diapers. Luhrmann is at all times concerned to rescue Elvis from irony and failure and suffering.

And how about that legendary encounter with the one US president that Elvis really did admire – Richard Nixon – when the King was cordially received in 1970 at the White House because he demanded presidential action on the country’s infatuation with degenerate lefties like the Beatles? Nothing. That isn’t shown.

This version of Elvis, with retrofitted liberal sensitivities, is always breaking off what he’s doing to look stunned at the TV reporting the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy, and to be soulfully devastated at the loss of these American icons. Well … maybe. But the film erases his actual Republican sympathies. Also erased, as it happens, is Ann-Margret, his Viva Las Vegas co-star, with whom he had a poignant, illicit relationship for about a year.

Why do the film at all? The rationale would appear to be – and might in earlier versions of the script have been – the poisonous bromance or toxic father-son relationship between Parker and Presley. But how about a film about the Colonel, with Elvis taking a secondary role? That would have been genuinely new and Hanks would have sold it superbly. As it is, this is just another exercise in Elvis impersonation, its upper lip twitching to no purpose.

• Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
• Cannes 2022
• Cannes film festival
• Elvis Presley
• Baz Luhrmann
• Period and historical films

Comments (…)

Most viewed.

• Stranger Things Season 5
• Deadpool and Wolverine
• The Batman 2
• Spider-Man 4
• Yellowstone Season 6
• Fallout Season 2
• Entertainment

Elvis review: Baz Luhrmann’s ridiculous, sublime biopic

The first time we get a good look at the title character of Baz Luhrmann’s caffeinated Wikipedia spectacular, Elvis , he’s stepping out of the shadows and onto a stage in Louisiana, ready to perform for a crowd totally unaware that they’re about to witness the coronation of the future king of rock ’n’ roll. Decked out in pink from shoulders to ankles, the 19-year-old heartthrob hesitates, and the audience, smelling blood, heckles him. But then Elvis Presley (Austin Butler) launches into the opening notes of what will become his first national hit, Baby, Let’s Play House , and as he belts and strums, his body lurches and thrusts. He moves as if struck by lightning, and the electric current passes through the whole venue, jolting awake the young women in attendance, their libidos instantly sparked by his suggestive country-preacher gyrations.

Too many biopics to count include a star-is-born moment like this one. But Luhrmann, the irrepressible carnival-barker glutton behind Moulin Rouge and The Great Gatsby , stages the sequence with a hellzapoppin’ flair that pushes it past cliché, on to parody, and then beyond that still, to a fever pitch of cartoon hysteria. A thunderbolt of electric guitar embellishes the song, sacrificing historical realism on the altar of cross-era, arena-rock glory. And the girls don’t just scream. They explode into a kind of involuntary rapture, as if possessed by the spirit of Presley’s raw animal magnetism. Supercharging a stock music-drama convention, Luhrmann reaches for the heights of myth: The rise of a radio god as a one-man sexual revolution, releasing all the pent-up frustration of America’s youth and halving history in the process.

That kind of energy dominates Elvis . On paper, the movie is pure biographical boilerplate, connecting 25 years of bullet points in the life and career of the bestselling solo recording artist of all time. Yet Luhrmann is no accountant or hall-of-fame historian. Right from the start, he cuts the music biopic into a mad flurry, caricaturing its familiar beats, tackling its obligations through a scrapbook collage of headlines and crowd shots and split-screen action. Elvis is structured like a nearly three-hour sizzle reel. It doesn’t so much have scenes as suites. It moves .

Luhrmann’s MTV overdrive approach might be as strategic as it is pathological. Elvis can only cover all the ground it needs to cover at warp speed, telling elements of its decades-spanning true story through implication and shorthand. The rise to fame. The battle against scandalized moral scolds. The subsequent backlash to the compromised, pastor-friendly Elvis, which is basically the singer’s Dylan-goes-electric moment in reverse. Elvis races through all of it. Meanwhile, the King’s career in Hollywood is relegated to a single, stylish Technicolor montage. His service overseas is omitted entirely.

• Watch Austin Butler transform into Elvis in new behind-the-scenes video
• Austin Butler brings back the King in first Elvis trailer

To the extent that this maximalist Graceland revue has a dramatic center, it’s the initially symbiotic, increasingly parasitic relationship between Elvis and his infamously exploitative manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks). The script, an obvious patchwork of drafts by Luhrmann and others, starts the story with Parker catching scent of the superstar at an embryonic stage. (His discovery that the million-dollar voice on the radio belongs to a white man is accompanied by a hilarious smash zoom into Hanks’s face, disguised by a fake nose and animated with shock and the lust of opportunity). Parker ends up seducing Elvis into a contract at the fairgrounds, issuing his Faustian pitch at the top of a Ferris wheel. Among other things, this is an innocence lost story: One montage of many crosscuts Elvis losing his virginity with shots of his mother fretting.

What Parker calculated was the immense commercial potential in Presley’s culture vulturing, the way he repackaged for a white audience the sound and moves of the Black artists he listened to in his youth. Elvis naturally foregrounds that aspect of the musician’s rags-to-riches story, even folding it into the Walk Hard tropes it energizes: As the King struts to the stage, Luhrmann cuts to footage of a preteen Presley spying on a barnyard performance by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup , a truer contender for the title of rock ‘n’ roll’s father. Later, a thrillingly assembled sequence depicts Elvis literally walking between white and Black America, at home on the lawn of a plantation and on Beale Street. The film grasps the true threat conservatives saw in Elvis — their fear of not just his exaggerated sexuality but also of the Black culture on which he was lucratively capitalizing.

Parker narrates the film, repeatedly insisting that Elvis’s eventual decline and death were a product of his tireless devotion to putting on a show, even as what we see puts the blame more squarely on the conniving, controlling guidance of his manager. That’s a potentially ingenious angle, to frame the story around the unreliable deflections of its villain. Hanks, though, is unusually, almost impressively atrocious in the role. The casting makes sense in theory, weaponizing the essential paternal decency of our most trustworthy Hollywood star into a manipulation tactic. But even a movie this outrageously heightened can’t support the fat-suit absurdity of Hanks’s performance, which compounds ghoulish Austin Powers makeup with a truly bizarre, vaudeville Nordic accent that sounds almost nothing like how the real man really talked. Hanks is simply too ridiculous to take seriously here, and his scenes tilt the film precariously close to sketch comedy.

Butler, sweating profusely though a rotating wardrobe of famously fashionable getups, fares better as The King. It’s a print-the-legend performance, all swagger and pinup-boy posturing, with much more attitude — and sex appeal — than psychology. But that suits a biopic with a greater interest in the seismic legend of Elvis than who he really was under all the supernova charisma and sequined white jumpsuits. That Butler sometimes resembles not so much Elvis as any number of flash-in-the-pan acts indebted to the artist’s style only reinforces Luhrmann’s implied conception of rock history as a game of telephone, distorting the original voice with each new delivery or generation. 

Elvis is everywhere, the film asserts — an idea it communicates through a soundtrack that slows down and airs out big hits like “Fools Rush In,” remixing them into a series of ghostly hymns echoing out of the pop-culture consciousness. The director of Moulin Rouge has also, of course, stocked his jukebox with anachronistic needle drops, alternating hip-hop with modern covers of The King to underscore how Elvis’s original act of appropriation is just one chapter in the twisting path of American popular music. It’s a more successfully drawn connection than the film’s numerous attempts to place Elvis against the tumultuous background of mid-century breaking news. Perhaps Hanks is really around to fortify the Forrest Gump associations of a script that periodically drifts to a television set and the assassinations reported on it.

After two-plus hours of relentless supercut summary, the film slows and runs out of steam. An essential component of the Elvis story is the downfall portion of it — those final ignoble years in Vegas, when the man ran out of comebacks, got hooked on pills, and became a prisoner to his casino residency and the vice grip Parker had on his pocketbook. It’s where the plot has to go, but in dutifully dramatizing the last act of this life, Luhrmann sucks all of the wild-man enthusiasm out of his material. The final act is a laborious slump into a tragically foregone conclusion, capped by obligatory archival footage.

Where it comes alive, before that, is on stage. Here, Butler’s sultry costume-party approximation of a luminary gels with Luhrmann’s cut-a-second restlessness to produce something like a monument to the mythology of Elvis. The movie gets by, for so much of its bloated running time, on the ecstatic, foolhardy reverie of its showmanship — the way it channels the King’s stomping stage presence through a breathless rush of image and sound, trying to whip the audience into the same frenzy that Elvis inspired in his own life. How, Luhrmann wagers, can we measure the life of this monumental, destabilizing figure through anything less than a head-spinning extravaganza? Here and there, the excess of his vision pays off, shifting from exhausting to exhilarating.

Elvis opens in theaters everywhere Friday, June 24 . For more reviews and writing by A.A. Dowd, visit his  Authory page .

Editors' Recommendations

• Spielberg and Hanks revisit World War II in Masters of the Air’s first trailer
• Austin Butler breaks the rules in the new Elvis trailer

A quartercentury after it first premiered, The Sopranos retains a remarkably strong foothold over the television landscape. The show shaped what's become known as antihero TV, and it remains one of the very best shows of its kind to ever air. We're no longer in the Golden Age of TV, but there are still plenty of modern shows that owe at least a small debt to what The Sopranos was able to pull off.

While none of these series is exactly like The Sopranos, we've gathered three great shows that have something in common with that show. Whether you're just finishing up your first watch or have seen the show hundreds of times, these shows may help to fill the hole that it leaves behind. Better Call Saul (2015-2022) Official Season 6 Trailer | Better Call Saul

One of the great ironies of Hollywood – that great, self-celebrating monstrosity – is that it is reflexively embarrassed by itself. Most movies that are set in Los Angeles or are about the film industry either actually endeavor to spend most of their time outside L.A., like Preston Sturges’ peripatetic movie-biz satire Sullivan’s Travels or, if they must stand pat in the City of Angels, resign themselves either to conspicuous grime (á la Training Day) or conspicuous kitsch (á la Clueless).

Filmmakers often shy away from truly incarnating L.A., which makes sense for a town that is comprised largely of strivers from elsewhere who are there not by preference for the locale, but due to deep-seated inclination toward stardom. But despite themselves, the great L.A. movies often end up glorifying that flat-top land of pavement and promise, thereby creating the legend that has supplanted the reality in the world’s estimation of California’s most populous city. Here is a list of 10 of the best L.A.-set films, limited to one film per director. 10. La La Land (2016)

Netflix is one of the most popular streaming services in the world, with nearly 250 million subscribers. And just what do those people tend to watch? In particular, what is the most popular movie on Netflix? Each week, the streaming service releases a list of its 10 most-watched movies over a recent seven-day period to keep subscribers in the loop regarding its most popular titles.

Zack Snyder is back in the top 10 with Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver, the second film in his space opera series. Despite Snyder's popularity, the new Rebel Moon film could not unseat What Jennifer Did, which is the No. 1 movie for the second straight week. New additions to the top 10 include the comedy Knocked Up at No. 8 and the action movie Anna at No. 2. Below, we've listed the top 10 movies in the U.S. from April 15 to April 21, along with general information about each film, such as genre, rating, cast, and synopsis.

• Movies & TV
• Featured Categories

Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime Try Prime and start saving today with fast, free delivery

Amazon Prime includes:

Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.

• Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
• Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
• Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
• A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
• Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
• Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access

Important:  Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.

Return this item for free

Free returns are available for the shipping address you chose. You can return the item for any reason in new and unused condition: no shipping charges

• Go to your orders and start the return
• Select the return method

Image Unavailable

• Sorry, this item is not available in
• Image not available
• To view this video download Flash Player

Elvis [DVD]

• Prime Video $3.79 — $14.99
• Blu-ray $13.79

Purchase options and add-ons

Frequently bought together.

Similar items that may deliver to you quickly

From the manufacturer

From Oscar-nominated visionary filmmaker Baz Luhrmann comes Warner Bros. Pictures' drama Elvis, starring Austin Butler and Oscar winner Tom Hanks. The film explores the life and music of Elvis Presley (Butler), seen through the prism of his complicated relationship with his enigmatic manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Hanks). The story delves into the complex dynamic between Presley and Parker spanning over 20 years, from Presley's rise to fame to his unprecedented stardom, against the backdrop of the evolving cultural landscape and loss of innocence in America. Central to that journey is one of the most significant and influential people in Elvis's life, Priscilla Presley (Olivia DeJonge).

Product Description

A thoroughly cinematic drama, Elvis's story is seen through the prism of his complicated relationship with his enigmatic manager, Colonel Tom Parker. As told by Parker, the film delves into the complex dynamic between the two spanning over 20 years, from Presley's rise to fame to his unprecedented stardom, against the backdrop of the evolving cultural landscape and loss of innocence in America. Central to that journey is one of the significant and influential people in Elvis's life, Priscilla Presley.

Product details

• MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ PG-13 (Parents Strongly Cautioned)
• Package Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.52 x 5.28 x 0.59 inches; 2.08 ounces
• Director ‏ : ‎ Baz Luhrmann
• Media Format ‏ : ‎ DVD, NTSC
• Release date ‏ : ‎ September 13, 2022
• Actors ‏ : ‎ Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Olivia DeJonge, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh
• Studio ‏ : ‎ WARNER HOME VIDEO
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0B5BKF2M8
• Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ USA
• Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 1
• #27 in Drama DVDs

Videos for this product

Click to play video

Elvis 4K UHD Unboxing

BobsMovieReview

Honest Review Elvis

Elvis [4K UHD]

Studio Distribution Services US - Operations Team

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

Reviews with images

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

Top reviews from other countries

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Sell on Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Become an Amazon Hub Partner
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

Austin Butler Adopts Boundaries for His Role in Dune That He Lacked During Elvis Filming

I n transitioning from his immersive portrayal of Elvis Presley to taking on the role of Feyd-Rautha in the upcoming “Dune” sequel, actor Austin Butler admits that he had to set a personal limitation for himself—one that was absent during his tenure as ‘The King.’ “I’ve dedicated myself extensively to ‘Elvis,’ dwelling in that reality incessantly for three years,” Butler admits. Nevertheless, he clarifies that replicating this methodology with Feyd “would be detrimental to the relationships with my family and friends.” “Dune” director Denis Villeneuve, who was also participating in the interview, jested that Butler’s complete absorption into the character of Feyd-Rautha throughout production would pose issues for him as well.

While Butler does not directly state that his Elvis performance was exacting on him, he has previously conveyed to Variety that for the duration of the Baz Luhrmann film, he ejected his family from his life. “I was immersing myself with Baz and then off to Australia,” he revealed in an interaction with Janelle Monae for Variety. “There were periods I was incommunicado. And when I eventually conversed, my mind was exclusively fixated on Elvis. His voice was basically my voice all this while.” Butler also shared with GQ , “It’s possible to become disconnected from your true self, which I certainly encountered post-Elvis — the quandary of self-identification.”

FAQ About Austin Butler’s Acting Approaches

What was Austin Butler’s approach to portraying Elvis Presley?

Austin Butler immersed himself completely in the world of Elvis Presley, to the point where he was thinking about Elvis constantly day and night and even spoke in his voice for extended periods.

Why did Austin Butler decide to establish boundaries for his role in “Dune”?

He recognized that using the same method acting technique he applied for “Elvis” could have negative impacts on his personal relationships and potentially his emotional well-being.

Did Austin Butler interact with his family during the filming of “Elvis”?

No, he did not see his family for 3 years while filming “Elvis” and would spend long periods without talking to anyone as he prepared for the role.

Has Austin Butler encountered challenges with method acting?

Yes, he described an experience of losing touch with his own identity after finishing the film “Elvis,” indicating a struggle with the intense nature of method acting.

Austin Butler’s dedication to his craft is evident in the way he completely immersed himself into the role of Elvis, an endeavor that came with significant personal sacrifices. However, learning from this experience, Butler has chosen a different tactic for his involvement in “Dune,” setting boundaries to maintain the health of his personal life and mental state. His reflections on these acting methodologies speak volumes of the delicate balance actors must strike between their art and their lives outside of the characters they embody.

The post Austin Butler Adopts Boundaries for His Role in Dune That He Lacked During Elvis Filming appeared first on Kevin Hearld .

Elvis 70 : The Motion Picture (2024)

Cast & Crew

Movie details, featured news.

Popular Drama Movies

Movie Reviews

Follow Moviefone

Movie trailers.

More From Forbes

Elvis presley’s chart record has been matched once again.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

(Original Caption) Elvis Presley runs a comb through his famous tresses at the Draftee Receiving ... [+] Depot here on March 24th. The songster is scheduled for a trip to the G. I. barber on March 25th, where the key to his locks will probably be found.

Future and Metro Boomin are back at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 this week with their latest collaborative album, We Still Don’t Trust You . In achieving this feat, Future reaches a major milestone and ties with some of the most successful men in music history.

As We Still Don’t Trust You launches in first place on the Billboard 200, Future collects his tenth No. 1 album. Only a very small number of artists have accrued double-digit leaders, and Future is now in some truly incredible company.

With a tenth No. 1 album to his credit, Future is now tied with both Elvis Presley and Eminem. The three men share the title of being the solo male acts with the fifth-most champions on the Billboard 200.

Jay-Z continues to lead the charge in this specific group, having charted 14 No. 1s on the Billboard 200, which is still the most among solo male artists...though he may not sit alone in first place for much longer.

Drake is coming for Jay-Z’s crown, and quickly. The Canadian hip-hop musician has scored a lucky 13 No. 1s on the Billboard 200 already. He adds to that sum regularly and is sure to do so again in the next year or two whenever he releases another full-length project.

Huawei s Pura 70 Ultra Beats iPhone With Pioneering New Feature

The juan soto trade has helped both the yankees and the san diego padres, four reportedly hurt after army horses run loose through central london.

Two superstars are tied for the third-most champions on the Billboard 200. Bruce Springsteen and Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) have both collected 11 No. 1s on the competitive tally.

Future has added to his total twice in less than a month. He and Boomin delivered a pair of collaborative projects, and both debuted atop the Billboard 200. First, We Don’t Trust You reigned, and now We Still Don’t Trust You is enjoying its moment in the spotlight.

We Still Don’t Trust You launched in first place on the Billboard 200 thanks to 127,500 equivalent units shifted. That sum is nearly half of what its predecessor managed, which opened at No. 1 on the chart with 251,000 equivalent units shifted just a few weeks ago.

• Editorial Standards
• Reprints & Permissions

• INTERNATIONAL
• SCI & TECH

• LIVE STREAM

Amar Singh Chamkila: A movie about the Elvis of Punjab

Petrol, diesel prices set to fall in Pakistan

Sc orders removal of barriers from govt, private buildings, rana sanaullah refuses shehbaz’s offer to join government: sources.

Way back when in the 1950s, the famous Saadat Hasan Manto was accused of the depiction of obscenity in his plays in the early years of Pakistan. It was worked by the name of Thanda Gosht, Kholdo , and Upar Neeche Darmiyaan that had landed the writer in trouble.

However, Manto was fortunate to not face prison time and had the liberty to escape from these charges. He became one of the most iconic writers of the Indian sub-continent with both the nations India and Pakistan having his documentary produced and hailed.

  View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Netflix India (@netflix_in)

But everyone is not as lucky as Manto in terms of fighting for the liberation of thought and expression. 122 km from Lahore, in the city of Meshampur in the Indian Punjab, A Raunchy Punjabi singer and his wife were shot dead for producing and singing vulgar Punjabi songs.

It was the year 1988 When Amar Singh Chamkila and his wife Amarjot arrived at a traditional Akhara (Event) to perform. As soon as they left the car, they both got shot along with two other members of their crew.

The assassination was a clear response to Amar Singh Chamkila’s obsession with performing highly sexual and objectifying Punjabi songs despite threats from the extremists.

36 years after the brutal death of Chamkila, we see a Bollywood film coming forth hailing the Punjabi singer as some sort of a revolutionary.

Amar Singh Chamkila was directed by Imtiaz Ali. We all are familiar with Imtiaz from his iconic works of Rockstar, Jab We Met, and Love Aaj Kal. This movie about the Punjabi cult artist is being claimed as his best work so far.

The movie takes us of his rise to being a household name, his rags to riches ascend to interior stardom that took him mainstream all the way to Canada and the UK. The movie depicts his conflict with religious extremists.

The main character of Amar Singh Chamkila has been played by Diljit Dosanjh. This is not the first time Diljit has portrayed this character. He did it first in his movie 2023 Punjabi movie by the name of Jodi. The versatile Pareeniti Chopra took on the role of his late wife Amarjot Kaur.

Both Diljot and Pareeniti struck an appealing balance in the movie. Their chemistry was subtle, decent, and highly in sync. The actors have dwelled well into the narratives provided to them. They connect highly with their audiences and represent the charm Imtiaz Ali’s movies are known to convey.

The storyline is deep and highly emotional. We hear about the main character right after his demise when he is gunned down along with his wife and two other team members. His acquaintances hail him as a God like a powerful figure who won the hearts of millions and who swayed the crowd with his not-so-decent songs.

Amar Singh Chamkila’s justification for producing songs of such standard was the environment he grew up in. We the the immorality of the interior Indian Punjabi society back in those days. The interesting thing is that Amar Singh himself is the only artist producing these songs. There’s a line of well-known artists alongside him. Many turned against him because of his novice fame.

Imtiaz Ali hasn’t been biased on this character. He has simply portrayed what was the truth about him. Amar Singh Chamkila isn’t a nice guy, he is a human being who feels different from many other characters in Imtiaz Ali’s universe. But aren’t we all different?

Don’t we all have our stories to tell? In which we’re the main characters and there are many shades of us. These shades can change the perspective others have of us, just like they changed the ones who view Chamkila and his wife.

That is what Imtiaz Ali’s movies are about. I personally think he aims to explore the stories of famous and ordinary people because when a particular life is explored, it turns out to be much more interesting to hear and see.

The movie further dives into the turbulent lifestyle of the singer. The moment he gets his first stage to perform a major singer fails to appear to come back to Punjab from Canada despite the threats and advice from his friend to remain there. Amr Singh Chamkila turns out to be a man of dedication, a rebel against the norms, a fighter for his expression, and someone who is no longer afraid to let others down.

We see Chamkila’s fearless attitude in front of some Sikh religious leaders when he promises them not to smoke. As soon as he sits in his car and they stand outside to bid him farewell, the hero takes out a cigar and lights it up in front of them.

The movie comes with signature elements of thoughtfulness and focus. It’s for serious viewers even though it comes with a few punches of humor.

Unfortunately, this flick is for the OTT platforms to rule with. If it had been released in theatres, the statistics would have been more definite to judge its commercial success. Right now, the only way to predict it is the movie being listed among the top 10 most watched categories on Netflix.

Will the PML-N led govt be able to steer Pakistan out of economic crisis?

MORE STORIES

Several pakistan airports to get new coos, police arrest robber ‘red-handed’ in karachi, whatsapp warns ceasing operations in india over privacy rules, police arrest 67 suspected buyers of stolen goods in..., robbers loot citizens using minors in karachi, ileana d’cruz addresses speculations about secret marriage, ihc judges’ letter: sc forms new bench, asim azhar deletes instagram posts, unfollows everyone.

ARY NEWS brings you 24/7 Live Streaming, Headlines, Bulletins, Talk Shows, Infotainment, and much more. Watch minute-by-minute updates of current affairs and happenings from Pakistan and all around the world!

• TERMS & CONDITIONS

ARY NETWORK

DOWNLOAD NOW!

© 2024 ARYNEWS.tv. All Rights Reserved.