elvis movie reviews 2022 rotten tomatoes

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
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!

About Rotten Tomatoes®
Login/signup

elvis movie reviews 2022 rotten tomatoes

Movies in theaters

Opening This Week
Top Box Office
Coming Soon to Theaters
Certified Fresh Movies

Movies at Home

Fandango at Home
Prime Video
Most Popular Streaming Movies
What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

93% Conclave Link to Conclave
94% A Real Pain Link to A Real Pain
95% Memoir of a Snail Link to Memoir of a Snail

New TV Tonight

100% Somebody Somewhere: Season 3
100% Lioness: Season 2
91% The Diplomat: Season 2
-- Wizards Beyond Waverly Place: Season 1
-- Tú también lo harías: Season 1
-- The Marlow Murder Club: Season 1
-- Buy It Now: Season 1
-- Finding Mr. Christmas: Season 1
-- One Shot: Overtime Elite: Season 2

Elvis Reviews

The story shows that the artist took elements from different musical styles such as gospel and blues, to fuse them with country music, rock and roll and even opera. All this through aesthetic characteristic of the director, like comics and the video clip

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Aug 21, 2024

Elvis is Baz Luhrmann’s best film since Moulin Rouge!, a frantic, kinetic and incredibly captivating biopic about the King of Rock and Roll.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 25, 2024

Director Baz Luhrmann’s sixth feature-length film “Elvis“ is officially the best superhero story of 2022.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 9, 2024

Elvis is a powerhouse of music, superb performances, and immaculate filmmaking. It’s a religious experience of a film. A spiritual exercise in movie making. One of the best films of the year – any year.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 3, 2024

The first twenty-some-odd minutes of this film is masterful at completely and utterly overloading the viewer.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 19, 2024

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

“Elvis” brings all of the glitz, rhinestones, and jumpsuits you’d expect in an Elvis film, but without the necessary complexity for a movie from 2022 about the “King.”

Maximalist filmmaker Baz Luhrmann , who abhors visual restraint and instead opts for grand theatricality, should be the perfect creator for a Presley biopic, but isn’t. Luhrmann tells us this icon’s story from the perspective of the singer’s longtime, crooked manager Colonel Tom Parker ( Tom Hanks ). After collapsing in his tacky, memorabilia-filled office, a near-death Parker awakens alone in a Las Vegas hospital room. The papers have labeled him a crook, a cheat who took advantage of Elvis ( Austin Butler ), so he must set the record straight.

From the jump, Luhrmann’s aesthetic language takes hold: An IV-drip turns into the Las Vegas skyline; in a hospital nightgown, Parker walks through a casino until he arrives at a roulette wheel. Carrying a heap of affectations, Hanks plays Parker like the Mouse King in “ The Nutcracker .” For precisely the film’s first half hour, “Elvis” moves like a Christmas fairytale turned nightmare; one fueled not by jealousy but the pernicious clutches of capitalism and racism, and the potent mixture they create.

It’s difficult to wholly explain why “Elvis” doesn’t work, especially because for long stretches it offers rushes of enthralling entertainment. In the early goings-on, Luhrmann and co-writers Sam Bromell , Craig Pearce , and Jeremy Doner meticulously build around Presley’s influences. They explain how Gospel and Blues equally enraptured him—a well-edited, both visually and sonically, sequence mixes the two genres through a sweaty performance of “That’s Alright Mama”—and they also show how much his time visiting on Beale Street informed his style and sound. A performance of “Hound Dog” by Big Mama Thornton ( Shonka Dukureh ), and the emergence of a flashy B.B. King ( Kelvin Harrison Jr.) furthers the point. Presley loves the superhero Shazam, and dreams about reaching the Rock of Eternity, a stand-in for stardom in this case. He’s also a momma’s boy (thankfully Luhrmann doesn’t belabor the death of Elvis’ brother, a biographical fact lampooned by “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”).

Though a biopic veteran, Hanks has rarely been a transformative actor. In this case, you can hear his accent slipping back toward Hanks. And the heavy prosthetics do him few favors, robbing him of his facial range—an underrated tool in his repertoire. And Hanks already struggles to play outright villains; shaping the story from his perspective takes the edge off of his potential menace. It’s a tough line for Hanks to walk, to be unsuspecting yet vicious. Hanks creates a friction that doesn’t altogether work, but feels at home in Luhrmann’s heavy reliance on artifice.

The most fascinating linkage in “Elvis” is the extrapolation of commerce and race. Parker is enamored by Presley because he plays Black music but is white. Elvis turns off the white Christian old, like the moribund country singer Hank Snow ( David Wenham ), and the homophobic men who consider him a “fairy.” Yet he excites the young, like Jimmie Rogers ( Kodi Smit-McPhee , both actors provide fantastic comic relief), and he has sex appeal. A wiggle, if you please. Luhrmann takes that wiggle seriously, showing sexually possessed, screaming women. Butler’s crotch, in precisely fitted pink pants and shot in close-up, vibrates. Harsh zooms, quick whip pans, and a taste for horniness (by both men and women) help make the early moments of this biopic so special. As does its anti-capitalist bent, which depicts how often labor, art, and ownership can be spit out and garbled in the destructive system.

Unfortunately, “Elvis” soon slips into staid biopic territory. We see the meteoric rise of Presley, the mistakes—whether by greed or naïveté—he makes along the way, and his ultimate descent toward self-parody. His mother ( Helen Thomson ) dies on the most hackneyed of beats. His father ( Richard Roxburgh ) quivers in the shallowest of ways. Priscilla ( Olivia DeJonge ) appears and is handed standard tragic wife material. The pacing slows, and the story just doesn’t offer enough playfulness or interiority to keep up.

But even so, the latter portions of Luhrmann’s film aren’t without its pleasures: The performance of “Trouble,” whereby Presley defies the Southern racists who fear his Black-infused music (and sensuality) will infiltrate white America, is arresting. Cinematographer Mandy Walker ’s freeze frames imitate black and white photography, like wrapping history in the morning dew. The performance of Elvis’ comeback special, specifically his rendition of “If I Can Dream” soars. During the Vegas sequences, the costumes become ever more elaborate, the make-up ever more garish, acutely demonstrating Presley’s physical decline. And Butler, an unlikely Elvis, tightly grips the reins by providing one show-stopping note after another. There isn’t a hint of fakery in anything Butler does. That sincerity uplifts “Elvis” even as it tumbles.

But all too often the film slips into a great white hope syndrome, whereby Presley is the sincere white hero unearthing the exotic and sensual Black artists of his era. B.B. King, Big Momma Thornton, and Little Richard (real-life supporters of Presley) exist solely as either bulletin board cheerleaders or alluring beings from a far-off land. While these Black artists are championed—an awareness by Luhrmann of their importance and the long and winding history of Black art moving through white spaces—they barely speak or retain any depth, even while a paternalistic Presley advances their cause.

The approach neither illuminates nor dignifies these figures. Instead, Luhrmann tries to smooth over the complicated feelings many Black folks of varied generations have toward the purported King. In that smoothing, Presley loses enough danger, enough fascinating complications to render the whole enterprise predictable. Because it’s not enough to merely have awareness, a filmmaker also has a responsibility to question whether they’re the right person to tell a story. Luhrmann isn’t. And that’s a failing that will be difficult for many viewers to ignore.

Luhrmann side-steps other parts of the Elvis mythology, including the age gap between Priscilla and Presley (the pair met in Germany when the former was 14 years old), and when Elvis became a stooge for Richard Nixon . Excluding the latter makes little sense in a movie concerning the commodification of Presley by capitalism and conservatism. Luhrmann wants to show the downfall of a doe-eyed icon by nefarious systems, but never pushes the envelope enough for him to become unlikable, or better yet, intricate and human.

That flattening easily arises from telling this story from Colonel Parker’s perspective. He doesn’t care about Black people, therefore, they exist as cardboard cutouts. He cares little for Priscilla, therefore, she has little personhood. And Parker certainly isn’t going to tarnish the image or brand of Elvis because it corrodes himself. These undesirable outcomes, facile and pointless, make logical sense considering the framing of the narrative. But what good is making a sanitized Elvis biopic in 2022? And truly, who really needs a further fortification of Presley’s cultural importance when it’s been the dominant strain for over 60 years? It’s another noxious draft in history clumsily written by white hands.

“Elvis” certainly works as a jukebox, and it does deliver exactly what you’d expect from a Luhrmann movie. But it never gets close to Presley; it never deals with the knotty man inside the jumpsuit; it never grapples with the complications in his legacy. It’s overstuffed, bloated, and succumbs to trite biopic decisions. Luhrmann always puts Butler in the best position to succeed until the credits, whereby he cuts to archival footage of Presley singing “Unchained Melody.” In that moment Luhrmann reminds you of the myth-making at play. Which is maybe a good thing, given Luhrmann’s misleading, plasticine approach.

Now playing in theaters.

Robert Daniels

Robert Daniels is an Associate Editor at RogerEbert.com. Based in Chicago, he is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association (CFCA) and Critics Choice Association (CCA) and regularly contributes to the New York Times , IndieWire , and Screen Daily . He has covered film festivals ranging from Cannes to Sundance to Toronto. He has also written for the Criterion Collection, the Los Angeles Times , and Rolling Stone about Black American pop culture and issues of representation.

Austin Butler as Elvis Presley
Dacre Montgomery as Steve Binder
Tom Hanks as Colonel Tom Parker
Olivia DeJonge as Priscilla Presley
Kelvin Harrison Jr. as B.B. King
Richard Roxburgh as Vernon Presley
Helen Thomson as Gladys Presley
Yola as Sister Rosetta Tharpe
David Wenham as Hank Snow
Luke Bracey as Jerry Schilling
Alex Radu as George Klein
Alton Mason as Little Richard
Xavier Samuel as Scotty Moore
Kodi Smit-McPhee as Jimmie Rodgers Snow
Natasha Bassett as Dixie Locke
Leon Ford as Tom Diskin
Baz Luhrmann

Writer (story by)

Jeremy Doner
Craig Pearce
Sam Bromell
Elliott Wheeler
Jonathan Redmond

Cinematographer

Mandy Walker

Now playing.

Here (2024)

Memoir of a Snail

Don’t Move

Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band

Black Box Diaries

Your Monster

Latest articles

Breakfast Is Served—Again: Alan Rudolph on the reissue of “Breakfast of Champions”

10 Great Horror Films from 2024 (and Where to Watch Them)

CIFF 2024: On the Legacy and Importance of The Spook Who Sat by the Door

Netflix’s Sharp “The Diplomat” Offers Escapism for Political Junkies

The best movie reviews, in your inbox.

Share full article

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..

The music industry is hoping Halloween can be the new Christmas.

Phil Lesh didn’t hold songs down. He lifted them higher.

Sean Combs’s empire: winnowed, but still weighty .

On “The Great Impersonator,” Halsey channels pop’s past.

Hear Lady Gaga’s dance-floor antidote and 9 more new songs on the Playlist .

an image, when javascript is unavailable

The Definitive Voice of Entertainment News

Subscribe for full access to The Hollywood Reporter

site categories

Austin butler and tom hanks in baz luhrmann’s ‘elvis’: film review | cannes 2022.

The King of Rock and Roll gets suitably electrified biopic treatment in this kinetic vision of his life and career through the eyes of the financial abuser who controlled him.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

Share on Facebook
Share to Flipboard
Send an Email
Show additional share options
Share on LinkedIn
Share on Pinterest
Share on Reddit
Share on Tumblr
Share on Whats App
Print the Article
Post a Comment

Austin Butler as Elvis Presley in ELVIS, 2022.

How you feel about Baz Luhrmann ’s Elvis will depend largely on how you feel about Baz Luhrmann’s signature brash, glitter-bomb maximalism. Just the hyper-caffeinated establishing section alone — even before Austin Butler ’s locomotive hips start doing their herky-jerky thing when Elvis Presley takes to the stage to perform “Heartbreak Hotel” in a rockabilly-chic pink suit — leaves you dizzy with its frenetic blast of scorching color, split screen, retro graphics and more edits per scene than a human eye can count. Add in the stratified, ear-bursting sound design and this is Baz times a bazillion.

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.

Full credits

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Out of Competition) Distribution: Warner Bros. Production companies: Bazmark, Jackal Group Cast: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Olivia DeJonge, Luke Bracey, Natasha Bassett, David Wenham, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Xavier Samuel, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Dacre Montgomery, Leon Ford, Kate Mulvany, Gareth Davies, Charles Grounds, Josh McConville, Adam Dunn, Yola, Alton Mason, Gary Clark Jr., Shonka Dukureh, Chaydon Jay Director: Baz Luhrmann Screenwriters: Baz Luhrmann, Sam Bromell, Craig Pearce, Jeremy Doner; story by Luhrmann and Doner Producers: Baz Luhrmann, Catherine Martin, Gail Berman, Patrick McCormick, Schuyler Weiss Executive producers: Toby Emmerich, Courtenay Valenti, Kevin McCormack Director of photography: Mandy Walker Production designers: Catherine Martin, Karen Murphy Costume designer: Catherine Martin Music: Elliott Wheeler Music supervisor: Anton Monsted Editors: Matt Villa, Jonathan Redmond Visual effects supervisor: Thomas Wood Casting: Nikki Barrett

THR Newsletters

More from The Hollywood Reporter

Imax ceo doesn’t deny talks with netflix to play greta gerwig’s ‘narnia’ on the big screen, sasha calle talks ‘in the summers’ and gets candid about ‘the flash’: “it was very heartbreaking”, ‘wicked’ “perfectly captures the magic” in first reactions praising ariana grande, cynthia erivo, channing tatum’s ‘roofman’ lands october 2025 release date, john krasinski returning to star in ‘jack ryan’ movie for amazon, what happens in vegas: thr’s hot list of the buzziest movies at afm.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

How “Elvis” Plays the King

An illustration of Elvis performing onstage while hands reach out for him. A sign reading Elvis is lit in the background.

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 wedding ring that lost itself .

How the World’s 50 Best Restaurants are chosen .

Did a scientist put millions of lives at risk—and was he right to do it ?

Linda Ronstadt has found another voice .

The Web site where millennial women judge one another’s spending habits .

The foreign students who saw Ukraine as a gateway to a better life .

An essay by Haruki Murakami: “ The Running Novelist .”

Elvis Gets Fresh Rotten Tomatoes Rating With High Audience Score

Your changes have been saved

Email is sent

Email has already been sent

Please verify your email address.

You’ve reached your account maximum for followed topics.

The New Flintstones Movie Already Sounds Better Than the Last One

Daisy ridley addresses disappointing star wars rey movie update, deadpool & wolverine concept art reveals new crowd-pleasing wolverine variants.

The new Elvis movie has arrived in theaters and it's coming out strong with its reviews, landing a fresh score at Rotten Tomatoes . When compiling the reviews of the review aggregator website's approved critics, Elvis currently sits with a fresh score of 78%. The audience score is quite a bit higher as it sits at 94%, a number that correlates with the recent A- grade bestowed to Elvis at CinemaScore.

"Austin Butler delivers a marvelous performance in this sparkling and extravagant spectacle about the life and career of the beloved King of Rock and Roll," writes Rene Sanchez of Cine Fin Fronteras in his review.

" Elvis is an irresistible sensation of music and style that serves as a flashy flick fit for a king," adds Film Inquiry's Mark McPherson. "The musical performances will obviously be a major draw but the stellar performances make it all the more intoxicating."

Some reviewers do have their qualms even if they largely enjoyed the film as a whole. Our own Julian Roman suggested that the focus was a bit too heavy on Col. Parker with not quite enough Elvis Presley.

"Luhrmann makes a mistake with Tom Hanks driving the story," Roman said. "Parker and Elvis are inexorably linked, but he's overrepresented here. I would have loved more of Elvis behind the facade. Instead, we see Elvis through Parker's eyes from start to finish. It's almost as if Luhrmann was afraid of giving Austin Butler narrative control... Tom Hanks will be divisive to audiences. He steals Austin Butler's thunder. No one wants to see a Col. Tom Parker movie."

The box office profits have been pretty kind to Elvis as well. The movie has performed higher than projections to debut with $30.5 million in domestic theaters. It managed to tie with Top Gun: Maverick to share the top spot at the box office.

Baz Luhrmann directed Elvis using a screenplay co-written with Jeremy Doner, Sam Bromell, and Craig Pearce. Starring Austin Butler as Elvis Presley and Tom Hanks as Col. Tom Parker, the film details the rise of Elvis through the eyes of his manager. Olivia DeJonge, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Kelvin Harrison Jr., and Kodi Smit-McPhee also star.

Related: Elvis: Why This Biopic in Particular Has Gotten Huge

Elvis Was Highly Praised by the Presley Family

No matter what the reviews at Rotten Tomatoes might say, Baz Luhrmann has already gotten glowing praise from the review that mattered most. Per Deadline, the director previously spoke about how the Presley family, including Priscilla Presley, Lisa Marie Presley, and Riley Keough, had all loved the film. As someone who was married to knew the real Elvis perhaps better than anyone, Priscilla's praise of Elvis was the best review Luhrmann could have possibly gotten.

“No review would ever mean the most to us than the woman who was married to Elvis Presley," he said. "[She said], ‘I just wasn’t ready for that. Every breath about Austin, every move, the spirit of the person, the humanity. If my husband were here today he’d look him in the eye and say ‘How dare you? You are me.'”

Luhrmann added, “He was a father, he was a husband, and a grandfather and a person, and they have children. The greatest review I got from them in my life; now there’s something they can look to that is the truth of the humanity of the man.”

Elvis is now playing in movie theaters.

Here's What The Rotten Tomatoes Reviews Are Saying About Elvis

An undeniable titan in the world of music, Elvis Presley thrived in other forms of entertainment as well. Most notably, he graced the silver screen many times throughout the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, cementing himself as a multimedia star. Despite his death in 1977, he lives on in pop culture with legions of fans across the globe. Therefore, you could likely imagine that director Baz Luhrmann's "Elvis," which features Austin Butler in the title role, won't struggle to find an audience — even though they've had to wait nearly a decade for the film to come to fruition.

"Elvis" has been in the production pipeline since 2014, when Luhrmann attached himself to the project (via The Wrap ). Sadly for those looking forward to it, nothing but radio silence ensued until Tom Hanks joined the fray in the role of Elvis' manager, Colonel Tom Parker , in 2019. Shortly after, word got out that Butler would play the "King of Rock and Roll," the supporting cast filled out, and principal photography began in early 2020. "Elvis" originally planned to debut in October of 2021 , but a cascade of COVID-19-related delays pushed it to the June 24, 2022 date.

Not only did Elvis Presley's wife, Priscilla Presley, already give the film a heartwarming endorsement , but their daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, gave it a stamp of approval , too. A few lucky critics also got to see the movie early, and as evidenced by its Rotten Tomatoes reviews, they have a lot to say about it.

Luhrmann's directorial flair and Butler's performance make Elvis a hit

"Elvis" boasts a 76% Rotten Tomatoes critic score with a consensus that reads, "The standard rock biopic formula gets all shook up in 'Elvis,' with Baz Luhrmann's dazzling energy and style perfectly complemented by Austin Butler's outstanding lead performance." That's an all-around impressive showing that the movie didn't earn by accident. In the eyes of many critics, "Elvis" has a lot going for it that makes it such a home run.

While explaining that it may take time for one to cozy up to "Elvis," Matthew Toomey of the Film Pie writes that once you do, you'll find it's a worthy tribute to a music legend. He also points to Butler's take on Elvis as an especially strong selling point that alone is worth the price of admission. Radio Times' Jayne Nelson offers praise for Butler as well, while mentioning how Luhrmann's famously flashy, colorful style couldn't have lent itself better to the production.

"The film is ultimately a fittingly over the top tribute to one of the most famous people in entertainment history," claims George Simpson for the Daily Express , though he asserts that one of the many Elvis-centric documentaries out there would serve you better as an exploration of his life story. Nevertheless, according to Zhuo-Ning Su of Awards Daily , "Elvis" has all the makings of an Oscars frontrunner — specifically in regard to Butler's performance and the movie's technical strengths.

Elvis doesn't have every critic tapping along with the beat

"Elvis" has won over many critics and earned itself mounds of early praise. At the same time, like any piece of media, it's not without its share of detractors. Plenty of those that got to check out the film ahead of its theatrical premiere weren't nearly as impressed by the final product as their contemporaries. Here's what some of them feel held "Elvis" back from achieving levels of greatness similar to those of its subject.

"As it is, this is just another exercise in Elvis impersonation, its upper lip twitching to no purpose," comments Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian , explaining that he found Austin Butler's approach to Elvis Presley serviceable but not necessarily intriguing. On the other hand, AwardsWatch's Adam Solomons enjoyed what Butler and, to some extent, Tom Hanks brought to the table. Still, they feel their efforts weren't enough to hold an otherwise messy feature together.

Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair presented similar sentiments in his review — titled "Austin Butler is the Only Thing That Works in Baz Luhrmann's 'Elvis'" — concluding with, "'Elvis' presents the spectacular, but has little to say when the lights are off and it's just the man, grasping to find purchase in the making of his own legacy." Slant Magazine's Jake Cole was particularly disappointed in the story's superficiality and lack of interest in exploring the nuances of Elvis' personal and professional downfall.

Time will tell how general audiences will respond to "Elvis" and all that it packs into its near-160-minute runtime. Surely we'll find out when it finally opens on June 24.

IMAGES

Elvis
Elvis (2022) Movie Review
Elvis (2022)
Elvis (2022 film)
ELVIS (2022) movie review
Elvis 2022 Movie Review

VIDEO

Elvis Featurette
Elvis (2022) Movie Review! (Tom Hanks, Austin Butler)
Elvis Exclusive Final Trailer
Baz Luhrmannâ€™s Elvis Trailer #1 (2022)
ELVIS MOVIE REVIEW 2022
Elvis Featurette

COMMENTS

Elvis - Rotten Tomatoes
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).
Elvis - Movie Reviews - Rotten Tomatoes
Elvis is Baz Luhrmann’s best film since Moulin Rouge!, a frantic, kinetic and incredibly captivating biopic about the King of Rock and Roll. Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 25, 2024
Elvis movie review & film summary (2022) - Roger Ebert
Elvis turns off the white Christian old, like the moribund country singer Hank Snow (David Wenham), and the homophobic men who consider him a “fairy.” Yet he excites the young, like Jimmie Rogers ( Kodi Smit-McPhee , both actors provide fantastic comic relief), and he has sex appeal.
Elvis (2022 film) - Wikipedia
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 77% of 398 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.8/10. The website's consensus reads: "The standard rock biopic formula gets all shook up in Elvis , with Baz Luhrmann's dazzling energy and style perfectly complemented by Austin Butler's outstanding lead performance."
‘Elvis’ Review: Shocking the King Back to Life - The New York ...
“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.
'Elvis' Review: Austin Butler & Tom Hanks in Baz Luhrmann's ...
The King of Rock and Roll gets electrified biopic treatment in Baz Lurhmann's kinetic vision of his life and career, starring Austin Butler.
Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis,” Reviewed | The New Yorker
Anthony Lane reviews the jukebox bio-pic, starring Austin Butler as Elvis Presley and Tom Hanks as his manager, Colonel Tom Parker.
Elvis review: 'A hyperactive sensory overload' - BBC
Warner Bros. Tom Hanks and Austin Butler star in Baz Luhrmann's new biopic of the iconic singer, which is "terrifically fun" at times, but too careful overall, writes Nicholas Barber. If you're ...
Elvis Gets Fresh Rotten Tomatoes Rating With High ... - MovieWeb
The new Elvis movie has arrived in theaters and it's coming out strong with its reviews, landing a fresh score at Rotten Tomatoes. When compiling the reviews of the review aggregator...
Here's What The Rotten Tomatoes Reviews Are Saying About Elvis
Warner Bros. "Elvis" boasts a 76% Rotten Tomatoes critic score with a consensus that reads, "The standard rock biopic formula gets all shook up in 'Elvis,' with Baz Luhrmann's dazzling energy...