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September 5 review – taut media procedural revisits Munich Olympics

Journalists take centre stage in Tim Fehlbaum’s tense thriller focusing on 1972’s infamous terrorist massacre through a TV crew lens

T he story of the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist massacre – in which 11 Israeli hostages were killed by the Palestinian Black September group, dying along with five of members of the group and one West German police officer – is retold by the Swiss director and co-writer Tim Fehlbaum as a taut, tense thriller. The film leaves it up to us to make what we will of modern parallels.

The situation is reinvented as a kind of media procedural, shown purely from the viewpoint of ABC TV’s sports division, who from their cramped, claustrophobic gallery found themselves in sole charge of broadcasting the events live to the world. The crew is seen wheeling a cumbersome studio camera in range of the athletes’ village to capture images, quarrelling with other American TV companies about satellite-feed space. They’re under pressure to make unchecked statements to make sure their rivals didn’t get the scoop, making split-second editorial decisions with zero news experience while grimacing at the banks of TV screens like Houston Mission Control watching Apollo 13. And they were only aware too late that they were directly influencing what was happening, on the edge of panic at the responsibility and the sheer postmodern nightmare of what was happening.

Actors play the shirtsleeved execs talking over each other and barking instructions into mics, effectively in dialogue with the actual presenters in archive TV clips. The fictionalised action is interspersed with this real footage and real broadcasters (our own British journalist Trevor McDonald is glimpsed).

It’s a really smart, involving, unassumingly written picture with something of James L Brooks’ Broadcast News and I couldn’t help think that maybe this is the film that Steven Spielberg could have made rather than Munich , his rather ponderous, Forsythian thriller about the aftermath, although the best film on the subject is surely still Kevin Macdonald’s Oscar-winning 1999 documentary One Day In September .

John Magaro plays the harassed young studio director Geoffrey Mason, running on nervous energy and unacknowledged euphoria as he improvises and effectively invents new live-transmission techniques as the chaos unfolds around him. Peter Sarsgaard is the executive Roone Arledge and Ben Chaplin the overseeing producer Marvin Bader. The French-Algerian actor Zinedine Soualem plays the engineer Jacques Lesgards; the film amplifying his Arabic ancestry to balance the Jewish newsroom presence. The German actor Leonie Benesch plays a fictionalised character, Marianne Gebhardt, the idealistic young assistant, mortified at the older generation’s sins, pressed into service to translate what was going on.

The film gives us ABC’s two nightmares: the team were at first triumphant as they got cameras and commentators into position to watch the initial attempts by local untrained German police, wielding military-grade rifles, to clamber over the rooftops and with the advantage of surprise storming the apartments where the hostages were held. They showed it live but their self-congratulation was short lived as they realised that the terrorists could watch it on their TVs too. Given that the German police were almost bizarrely incompetent and ill-trained (having turned down Israel’s request to send in their own special-forces team) it probably wouldn’t have worked. But who knows? Did ABC television change the course of history in the worst possible way?

And then once the hostages had been taken out of the Olympic village to a military airfield, the ABC team start listening to (heartbreakingly wrong) rumours that all the hostages were free, and taking their cue from a rash statement on West German state radio, encourage their presenters to recycle this false good news. Any nervousness they have is apparently cancelled by subsequent confirmation reports – but aren’t these confirmations simply taking their cue from the authoritative voice of America?

This is a film which succeeds because it does not burden itself with history or politics, or with their self-reflexive issues; it simply transcribes the professional callousness and voyeurism of live TV journalism concerned just to get the pictures and to wrap them up with a neat ending. The film moves more freely because of its willed unconcern with the historical implications of the Munich hostage massacre; modern audiences may feel the contemporary context makes it naive or obtuse. But it’s a muscular, well-made picture with the tang of cold sweat.

September 5 is out now in select US cinemas and will be out in the UK on 6 February

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Elvis review: Baz Luhrmann’s sweaty, seductive biopic makes the King cool again

In luhrmann’s fairytale vision, elvis’ manager (tom hanks) is the evil stepmother, while austin butler’s king is the princess locked in a tower.

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Dir: Baz Luhrmann. Starring: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Olivia DeJonge, Kelvin Harrison Jr, Shonka Dukureh . 12A, 160 minutes.

If we were to pull back the curtain on Elvis Presley, what would we even want to see? A soul stripped of its performance? Something cold and real behind the kitsch? I’m not convinced. America’s pop icons aren’t merely shiny distractions. They’re a culture talking back to itself, constantly interrogating its own ideals and its desires. I don’t think who Elvis was is necessarily more important than what Elvis represents. And, while you won’t find all that much truth in Baz Luhrmann ’s cradle-to-grave dramatisation of his life, the Australian filmmaker has delivered something far more compelling: an American fairytale.

“I am the man who gave the world Elvis Presley,” utters Tom Hanks ’s Colonel Tom Parker, his manager, as the curtain rises (literally) on Luhrmann’s expansive, rhinestone-encrusted epic. “And yet there are some who would make me out to be the villain of this story,” he adds.

Parker, who saw early promise in Elvis’s politically radical blend of country and R’n’B, slyly positioned himself as the sole overseer of the star’s creative enterprise – the man who won him a recording contract with RCA Records, who secured his merchandising deals and TV appearances, and who navigated him through a fairly brief but bountiful acting career. But Parker took far more in return. In 1980, a judge ruled that he had defrauded the Presley estate by millions. Some even blame him for pushing an overworked Elvis to the brink and ultimately contributing to his death.

For Luhrmann, the fairytale parallels couldn’t be more obvious. Parker is the evil stepmother, Elvis (here played by former child star Austin Butler ) is the princess locked in her tower – if that tower is, in fact, the vast and gilded stage of his Las Vegas residency. When Parker, a former carnival worker, first seduces Elvis to become his client, it’s in a literal hall of mirrors. That may sound a little absurd, but Luhrmann’s roots in the Australian opera scene have granted him a winning (though, to some, divisive) ability to deliver baroque stylings with a sincere, romantic sensibility.

I’ve always believed strongly in the purpose and necessity of Luhrmann’s outlandish visions – that it’s not enough simply to capture the grotesque consumption of The Great Gatsby ’s Jazz Age, but to prove that we, the audience, would be as weak to its charms as Fitzgerald’s protagonist, Nick Carraway. The same is true here, in the ways his subject is both seduced and betrayed by his own fame. And, anyway, Luhrmann’s always shot his films a little like Elvis performs – sweaty and kinetic, as the camera sweeps through the corridors of Graceland and through decades of his life with the fury of a thousand karate kicks.

​​Elvis will, and should, invite serious discussions about the musician’s outstanding legacy, and the film’s weakest spots speak mostly to how unsettled the debate around him still is. There’s certainly a lot to be said for how nervously the film tiptoes around his relationship with Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge), who was 14 when they first met. Can a film speak on behalf of a woman who’s still alive and able to share her own story? And where do we settle on the great debate of Elvis’s wider role in music history? Was his success really another chapter in white America’s long history of cultural appropriation, or did that early, rebellious appeal in fact prove to be a surprisingly powerful tool in the fight against segregation?

Luhrmann’s film arguably offers the most plausible, romantic ideal of Elvis, even if it turns him into something of a naïf trapped under Parker’s spell. He is always, in Parker’s narration, referred to as “the boy” and never “the man”. He is the sweet-souled, blue-eyed momma’s boy who just wants to buy his family a Cadillac and play the music of his childhood, which was spent in the Black-majority communities of Mississippi. Even at the height of Elvis’s fame, the film is careful to constantly bring us back to the Black artists who inspired him, either through the musician’s own words (and he was always deferential to his origins, to the very end) or through Matt Villa and Jonathan Redmond’s frenetic editing work. When singer-songwriter Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh) launches into her rendition of “Hound Dog”, a voice on the radio commands us to listen – this is the voice of Black America speaking.

By framing Elvis’s story through Parker’s, Luhrmann’s film is cannily able to take a step back from the intimate details of the musician’s life. Instead it views him as a nuclear warhead of sensuality and cool, someone stood at the very crossroads of a fierce culture war. Parker thinks he can turn him into a clean-cut, all-American boy for the white middle classes, compelling him to accept the draft, cut his locks, and go to war. Elvis resists, and his gyrating pelvis (captured in many, glorious, zooms to the crotch) helps fuel the burgeoning sexual independence of young women across the country. “She’s having feelings she wasn’t sure she should enjoy,” Parker notes, as the camera surveys one wide-eyed, lip-biting fan. Costume designer Catherine Martin – Luhrmann’s spouse, credited also as co-production designer and producer – dresses Elvis in an array of soft, dreamy pinks to sublime effect.

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To say that Elvis isn’t really so much about the real Elvis might sound like it’s taking the pressure off of Butler’s performance. But that’d be an entirely unfair judgement of what’s being achieved here – an impersonation of one of the most impersonated people on the planet, that’s at times uncanny without ever coming across as parody. Sure, Butler has the looks, the voice, the stance and the wiggle nailed down, but what’s truly impressive is that indescribable, undistillable essence of Elvis-ness – magnetic and gentle and fierce, all at the same time.

It’s almost odd to watch a performance so all-consuming that Hanks – the Tom Hanks – feels like an accessory. He’s all but buried underneath layers of prosthetics and a pantomime Dutch accent, seemingly cast only so that the warm smirk of America’s dad can trip a few people into questioning whether he’s really the villain of all this. Butler makes a compelling argument for the power of Elvis, at a time when the musician’s arguably lost a little of his cultural cachet. So does Luhrmann. So does the soundtrack, which is packed with contemporary artists (Doja Cat’s “Vegas” has sound of the summer written all over it). And while not everyone will be convinced by their efforts – I know that I’m ready for Elvis to be cool again.

‘Elvis’ is released in cinemas on 24 June

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Baz Luhrmann's Elvis is one of best films of 2022 so far

Baz Luhrmann's Elvis movie  has joined Top Gun: Maverick at the top of the US box office, taking a cool £30.5m over the weekend. Anyone contemplating a trip to see the high octane, much-publicised biopic this weekend may well baulk at its 2-hour 39 minutes running time. The kind of length usually reserved for bloated Marvel flicks or arthouse directors being over-indulged on Netflix, films above the two and half hour mark usually leave you wondering who, if anyone, actually edited this thing (likely answer: no one!).

But Luhrmann isn’t a typical director, and Elvis isn’t a typical rock and roll biopic. Yes, strictly speaking, it tells the story of Elvis Aaron Presley, from his unconventional upbringing in Memphis right through to his lonely death in a Vegas hotel room. But it also manages to tell the story of America in the ‘50s, ’60s and '70s, which as much as anything is really the story of the birth of popular culture, celebrity and the new, capitalism-fuelled concept of being a teenager. Elvis was the unwitting mascot for all three, and in some senses remains so.

The breadth of the narrative, combined with Luhrmann’s frenetic, singular editing style means that, somehow, a little under three hours in a movie theatre doesn’t drag. In fact, reports there’s a four-hour-long Director’s Cut of Elvis waiting in Baz’s vault somewhere is actually rather enticing, which as somehow who likes their movies closer to the 90-minute mark is something I never expected to say.

OK, the first ten minutes of Elvis is admittedly ‘a bit much’: a relentless assault of huge musical notes, zip-zoom camera work and feverish montages. The film seems to be begging you to stick around, in the same way the opening of Romeo and Juliet , the film that made Luhrmann’s name back in 1996, did ( Don’t worry , it seems to cry, I promise this is going to be fun!! ). For a Shakespeare adaptation, this made sense: its appeal to young people relied as much on not feeling like a school trip to the local theatre as it did on Leonardo DiCaprio’s then-new blonde locks. You sense a similar initial doubt with Elvis in how cool or appealing the film’s subject matter is, and perhaps with good reason: the singer hasn’t really had a relevant or cool-again moment since that Apple advert remix of 'A Little Less Conversation’ in 2002.

But then two things happen. First, the film calms down a bit and the pace begins to vary. You remember Luhrmann is now of veteran of big cinema in complete control of his craft, rather than a young buck out to make a splash. Like Elvis’s music, the film begins to move like a ballad in places and in others, an explosion of rock and roll. The scene of Presley’s first gig, in which women of various ages reacted to his obscene hip thrusts with spontaneous peels of pent-up excitement and/or sexual frustration, is a virtuoso five minutes of filmmaking worth the price of entry alone: utterly thrilling and very funny at the same time. Like the dawn-lit dog chase in No Country For Old Men , it’s a masterpiece short within a full-length movie. 

Which brings us to the other reason Elvis doesn’t only justify its long running time, but is comfortably one of the films of the year so far: Austin Butler . It’s hard to imagine a bigger potential banana skin of an acting role than Elvis Presley, a man so eclipsed by caricature and impression, you can forget he was real flesh and blood. Austin Butler doesn’t just pull it off but is absolute dynamite in the role, somehow embodying The King while at the same time emerging as an unmistakable new star in the cinematic sky. The voice and the look is all perfect, but the hubris and humanity he brings to Elvis is a revelation. Luhrmann has compared Butler's breakout to Leo’s back in 1996 , but in truth it’s an even stronger performance than the lovesick Romeo. You don’t want to take your eyes off him, and in his hands Elvis is rehabilitated before your eyes from pop culture punchline to the brooding but vulnerable icon people fell in love with in the first place.

There have been grumblings about Tom Hanks, who co-stars as Elvis’s manipulative manager Tom Parker. But a few superfluous bits of narration aside, in which a deathbed Parker throws chips around a dreamlike casino, I actually didn’t mind the role. Yes, Hanks wears a fat suit and adopts a strange accent, but he’s an intelligent enough actor not to turn Parker into a cartoon baddie, and overall it lends the film a welcome extra scope to see how he took Presley’s naivety and used it to destroy him. Olivia DeJonge is underused as Priscilla, which is sadly usually the way of things, and the film could do with a stronger strain of secondary characters, but all of this somewhat proves my point: despite being about the most spoofed man of all time, despite being nearly three hours long, Elvis is a film that leaves you wanting more, not less. 

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Elvis review: Baz Luhrmann brings The King to life in his signature pop style, with star turns from Austin Butler and Tom Hanks

Topic: Arts, Culture and Entertainment

Elvis is Luhrmann's sixth feature film in a career spanning three decades. ( Supplied: Warner Bros )

On July 31, 1969, Elvis Presley took to the stage of the International Hotel in Vegas for the first time, still riding the high of his electric 1968 TV special, which had revived his flagging career.

What was originally conceived of as a four-week residency at the hotel – a brand new, $60 million development, then the biggest in the world – would spin out into a seven-year stint, bracketing off the final chapter of Presley's tragically curtailed career, the theatre a witness to his descent into a state of narcotised, rhinestone-encrusted stupor.

But it had started off so well: the huge theatre and a blue-sky production budget had inspired Elvis to put together a show that achieved new heights of kitschy extravagance.

Bassist Jerry Scheff recalled Elvis' opening night nerves to Time: “His knee [was] going up and down like a piston, his hands dancing like butterflies”. ( Supplied: Warner Bros )

It's surely this Vegas-era Elvis – the jumpsuit-clad crooner, caped and spangled and accompanied by backup singers, a band, and a 40-strong orchestra – that called out to to Baz Luhrmann, himself an incorrigible showman with a bowerbird's eye for things that glitter and shine, and particularly those that are liable to break.

Taken collectively, his films advance a thesis that the greatest heartbreak is reserved for the most beautiful people – and who was more beautiful than the strange, pompadoured boy from Tupelo, Mississippi, with a voice like melting butter and those impossibly lascivious hips?

With Elvis, Luhrmann – whose last film took as its source material one of the signature works of American literature (The Great Gatsby, from 2016), and the film before that, the mythos of this entire nation (Australia, 2012) – gives the old bazzle-dazzle to what is perhaps his most iconic subject yet.

Butler auditioned by sending Luhrmann a tape of himself singing Unchained Melody and sings many of the early songs in the film. ( Supplied: Warner Bros )

For the story of Elvis Presley is no less than the story of rock 'n' roll, from the backwater shacks and steamy late night clubs of the American south to prime-time national television.

And Luhrmann bravely takes it all in his kaleidoscopic sweep: with its often-hyperactive camerawork, the film plays as a 159-minute musical roller-coaster ride through Elvis's 42 years. You're liable to get all shook up, if not from tenderness of feeling then possibly from motion sickness.

Stepping into the King's blue suede shoes (well, two-tone) is Austin Butler, a blue-eyed Californian whose previous credits are mostly limited to teeny-bopper TV. A relative unknown, he's able to disappear into the role in a way that a bigger player (like Michael Shannon, playing a paranoid, lonely King in 2016's Elvis & Nixon, for instance) couldn't – if not to the same degree as the enigmatic Michael St. Gerard, whose uncanny resemblance to Presley saw him cast in the role several times in the late 80s and early 90s.

Much like Kurt Russell, the one-time Disney teen idol who bagged the lead in John Carpenter's 1979 made-for-TV movie Elvis, Butler gives a performance that should grant him entrée to the pantheon of hot young silver screen stars, as the sweet, soulful centre of this Wonka-esque confection.

Luhrmann described the real-life Priscilla as "self-possessed" in press notes. "Olivia [DeJonge] immediately struck me the same way.” ( Supplied: Warner Bros )

And it's only fitting that Elvis maketh the star and not the other way around. Even if his name doesn't hold the charge it once did, it's still undeniable that he exerted an influence that would be unimaginable in today's atomised pop-cultural landscape. There can be no bigger name on the poster than "Elvis".

Less camouflaged, despite being packed in prosthetics, is Tom Hanks, hamming it up in a rare villainous role: the shady former carnie who went by the name Colonel Tom Parker is, as he crows in his voice over narration, "the man who gave the world Elvis Presley".

He might just be the man who killed him, too – not directly, but via the escalating demands he would place on his client, and then by way of ensuring his access to the pharmacopoeia that, for a time at least, would make it possible for Elvis to fulfil those demands.

Back in his sideshow days, before he moved into managing musical talent, the Colonel (as he tells us) specialised in the kind of attractions that elicited feelings the punters "weren't sure they should enjoy". The squeals that issue involuntarily from all the girls when the young Elvis shakes his hips on stage – "Well, that's alright, mama," he drawls – tell Tom Parker that this kid has an act he can do something with; here was "the greatest carnival attraction" he'd ever seen.

The story unfolds – in a prismatic fashion, zipping giddily back and forward in time – nominally from the Colonel's perspective: his wheedling narration is a bid for absolution, though scene after scene works to condemn him.

"We’re not making a judgement ... it’s up to the audience to decide what they think about the Colonel. He’s not easy to love," Luhrmann told IndieWire. ( Supplied: Warner Bros )

The film's sidelong look at its subject evokes Citizen Kane, perhaps cinema's definitive depiction of the process by which wild success transmutes into loneliness and narcissism. Like Kane, whose dying utterance of "rosebud" baffled even those who were once closest to him, Butler's Elvis – Luhrmann's Elvis – ultimately remains elusive; a larger-than-life figure able to be known only through so many layers of mediation – through his gold sunglasses and the camera lens.

"This ain't a nostalgia show," Butler's Elvis tells the musicians assembled on the International stage during rehearsal, and they launch into a beefed-up, flourish-laden version of That's All Right, the Arthur Crudup song that had been his debut single 16 years prior. (Crudup appears in the film played by Gary Clark Jr., his sultry blues an illicit thrill for the adolescent Elvis, played by Chaydon Jay.)

No one will be surprised to hear that Luhrmann's Elvis isn't a nostalgia show either – after all, the film is stamped with the golden insignia of the man who dressed Romeo in an aloha shirt and had a fin de siècle French courtesan sing Elton John.

The musical anachronism that felt egregious in The Great Gatsby, a story that is on some level about taste, plays better here – and I say this as someone who felt a pang of dread on seeing the words "Edge of Reality (Tame Impala Remix)" on the soundtrack listing.

The film premiered at Cannes in May this year and received a 12-minute standing ovation. ( Supplied: Warner Bros )

It works in part because there's a discernible logic to the more outré numbers: Doja Cat's Vegas, woven into a scene of Black nightlife on Memphis' Beale Street, gives Hound Dog back to Big Mama Thornton, the first artist to record the track (played on-screen by Shonka Dukureh); Eminem's The King and I, though confined to the credits, draws a line between two white artists raised in a Black milieu, who drew on a Black idiom.

But it's also because Elvis himself, once just a boy with "greasy hair" and "girly make-up" who dreamed of buying a hot pink Cadillac, always defied good taste. In his landmark 1968 TV special, he sandwiched a musical number set in a brothel between a gospel medley and a "kung fu spectacular" . The King didn't discriminate – and it's precisely for that reason that he would come to define rock 'n' roll.

Luhrmann is no Elvis Presley, but you gotta love a spirited impersonation.

Elvis is in cinemas from June 23.

Elvis: ‘a lively reminder’ of an extraordinary life

Baz Luhrmann’s biopic is spectacular but shallow

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Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic isn’t “as much of a trip” as his 2001 musical Moulin Rouge! , but “it’s never less than stimulating” to look at, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail – “a spectacle as much as a story”, with plenty of the director’s flourishes, including tricksy editing, split screen and slow-mo. Austin Butler assumes the title role, while Tom Hanks, in a fat suit and acres of prosthetic jowl, is scarcely recognisable as Colonel Tom Parker, Presley’s overbearing manager.

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The film covers most of Presley’s life, from his rise to fame in the mid 1950s to his death in 1977: we see him recording those early songs in Memphis; making movies; enlisting in the US army; meeting his future wife Priscilla (Olivia DeJonge); and finally, overweight and unhappy during his lengthy Vegas residency. The story will be familiar to many, but the film offers “a lively reminder” of an extraordinary life.

The trouble is, it’s less a film about Elvis than a “159-minute trailer for a film called Elvis ”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian . It feels like a “relentless, frantically flashy montage”, simultaneously “epic and negligible” with “no variation of pace”.

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The film has nothing profound to say about Presley’s character or music; it “retrofits” him with liberal sensitivities, skirts over the less savoury aspects of his life, and barely hints at the “failure and suffering”. Even in the “Fat Elvis” years, we only ever see “a decorous hint of flab”, and there’s no sight of the “yucky burger binges or the adult diapers”.

The film is oddly shallow, agreed Deborah Ross in The Spectator . Butler is a “charismatic” Elvis, but “we never get to look into his soul”; he’s just a “simple fella who wants to sing the music he loves”. Still, the film does “fizz along”, and though it’s very long, it’s never dull.

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The reviews are in for Baz Luhrmann's  Elvis , with critics voicing their thoughts on the first cinematic biopic of the legendary rock icon. Charting the life and career of Elvis Presley (Austin Butler) from his early years to his international status as the "King of Rock and Roll", the film will also explore Presley's problematic relationship with his manager , Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks). Featuring an ensemble cast that also boasts Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Olivia DeJonge, Luke Bracey, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Dacre Montgomery, the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and is slated to release in the United States on June 24.

Directed, co-produced, and co-written by Luhrmann, the biopic marks the Australian filmmaker's first movie in nine years following his 2013 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic drama The Great Gatsby . However, the director had been in talks to direct an Elvis Presley movie as far back as 2014, although there was no more development on the biopic until 2019, with production beginning in early 2020. Filming was then postponed in March 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with Hanks and his wife Rita testing positive, and didn't recommence until September of that year. But once completed, Elvis  gained praise from Presley's relatives , most notably from his daughter, granddaughter, and ex-wife.

Related: Baz Luhrmann's Elvis Biopic Could Fix The Great Gatsby's Mistakes

Now, the first reviews for Luhrmann's biopic are rolling in thanks to those who were able to catch the Elvis ' Cannes premiere. While most of the criticism is directed at the film's reluctance to explore Presley's life in more depth as well as its breakneck pace, the movie has been praised for Luhrmann's spectacular visual style and for Butler's convincing portrayal as the "King of Rock and Roll". Check-out extracts from some of the first reviews below:

Owen Gleiberman, Variety :

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.

David Ehrlich, IndieWire :

Luhrmann’s sensory overload has resulted in some of the most swooningly electric moments in modern cinema, from the fish tank sequence in “Romeo + Juliet” to the elephant medley in “Moulin Rouge!” and that fantastic party sequence in “The Great Gatsby,” but the hyper-romantic energy of those films helped braid the present into the past in a way that made them both feel more alive. “Elvis” discovers no such purpose. It finds so little reason for Presley’s life to be the stuff of a Baz Luhrmann movie that the equation ultimately inverts itself, leaving us with an Elvis Presley movie about Baz Luhrmann. They both deserve better.

Jim Vejvoda, IGN :

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a dizzying and at times even overwhelming chronicle of the rock icon. Austin Butler is stellar as Elvis, giving it his absolute all in every scene; truly, a star is born here. Tom Hanks cleverly plays against type as the manipulative and greedy Colonel Parker, a huckster who lucked into being the manager of what he saw as the greatest carnival freak show ever. While the supporting cast isn’t given as many dimensions as they could have been in say, a TV miniseries, Luhrmann tells Presley's story on a grand scale suited only for the big screen, delivering an epic yet intimate maelstrom of emotions, music, ideas, and eye candy. The film’s breathless pacing may befit the fevered lifestyle of a rock star, but it can also rush through necessary moments of dramatic reflection. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a wild ride clearly made with a big hunk o' love for its subject, and that zeal for capturing Presley’s humanity, both by its director and its star, outweighs the film’s excesses and shortcomings in the end.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian :

It’s not a movie so much as 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. 

Joshua Rothkopf, EW :

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.

Clarisse Loughrey, The Independent :

While you won’t find all that much truth in Baz Luhrmann’s cradle-to-grave dramatisation of his life, the Australian filmmaker has delivered something far more compelling: an American fairytale. 

David Rooney, THR :

If the writing too seldom measures up to the astonishing visual impact, the affinity the director feels for his showman subject is both contagious and exhausting. Luhrmann’s taste for poperatic spectacle is evident all the way, resulting in a movie that exults in moments of high melodrama as much as in theatrical artifice and vigorously entertaining performance. As for the big question of whether Butler could pull off impersonating one of the most indelible icons in American pop-culture history, the answer is an unqualified yes. His stage moves are sexy and hypnotic, his melancholy mama’s-boy lost quality is swoon-worthy and he captures the tragic paradox of a phenomenal success story who clings tenaciously to the American Dream even as it keeps crumbling in his hands.

For Luhrmann, these are familiar reviews that evoke critical opinions of his previous works, such as  Moulin Rouge! , Australia, and The Great Gatsby. These films also received praise for their distinctive style and creativity whilst earning criticism for having it come at the expense of the story. However, these assessments have often been at odds with wider public opinion as Luhrmann remains an extremely popular filmmaker with audiences, his unique style and typically romantic themes having established him as a profitable director and auteur. That being said, Elvis ' runtime is noticeably longer than most of his other films, which may well test audience enthusiasm when compared to films like Romeo + Juliet and Strictly Ballroom .

With  Elvis currently receiving divided reviews, it still seems that this is Luhrmann's most critically successful film since Moulin Rouge!.  As such, it seems likely that the rock and roll biopic will also do well financially when it is released in cinemas worldwide next month. However, given that the director seems to have his own devoted fanbase, and that  Luhrmann's unique visual style has proved divisive among audiences, it may be hard to tell how much influence this critical reception will ultimately have on Elvis 's overall performance.

More: Does Austin Butler Really Sing In Elvis?

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