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Review | Cannes 2022: Elvis movie review – Austin Butler as Elvis Presley is dazzling in Baz Luhrmann’s intoxicating rock ’n’ roll biopic

  • Austin Butler and Tom Hanks play the King and his shady manager Colonel Tom Parker in a crazy tale of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll
  • With Luhrmann’s theatrical style, the costumes, a long playlist of Elvis classics and Butler’s brilliant portrayal of the star, this biopic is a winner

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Austin Butler wows as Elvis Presley in a still from Elvis, directed by Baz Luhrmann. Photo: Warner Bros

4.5/5 stars

Baz Luhrmann is back with an intoxicating take on Elvis Presley. Who better than one of cinema’s great showmen to bring us a biopic of the king of rock ’n’ roll?

His theatrical brand of filmmaking, with all its crazed hedonism, in movies such as Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby, fits Elvis like a rhinestone-studded glove.

Premiering out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival, Elvis is a wild 159-minute ride that takes viewers from the singer’s early years in Memphis, Tennessee, through to his death in 1977, aged 42. In a film that never stops vibrating, it is as if the birth of rock’n’roll is happening right in front of you.

Fats Domino, Little Richard and other icons make appearances. But this is Elvis’ film, brilliantly embodied by Austin Butler, the young American who has already appeared in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Here, he stunningly captures Elvis’ stage presence, the cadence of his voice and his increasing loneliness.

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