Amyl and the Sniffers have always appreciated any small bit of good news. Even when the Australian punk rock quartet recorded its charmingly raw debut EP, “Giddy Up,” in a single night and released it online in 2016, the initial 100 streams were reward enough.
“To us, that was massive,” says singer Amy Taylor, aka “Amyl,” with a grin. “We get one play on local community radio and we’re like, ‘We’re massive. We’ve made it.’ You get a support slot in a 200-capacity room, we’re like, ‘We’ve made it.’ It’s really hard to get a perspective bigger than what we can see. … We’re very much appreciative of what’s happening rather than thinking about what might happen so much.”
Amyl and the Sniffers feel the same way about their third album, “Cartoon Darkness,” released Oct. 25, a potent collection of snarly, ecstatic rock tunes and the occasional ballad. Its first single, “U Should Not Be Doing That,” quickly earned millions of Spotify listens and heavy rotation for its music video (1.6 million views on YouTube alone), showing Taylor and a new companion stomping across Los Angeles as she sings lyrics of defiant self-worth.
“I am trying my best to get it on,” she sings, in her distinctively combative, percussive, very Australian voice. “Not everybody makes it out alive / When they are young.”
Fans are drawn to the Sniffers’ sound and attitude, which taps into the rowdy spirit of first-generation punk rock, along with a feisty, euphoric blond singer moving nonstop and usually dressed in a bikini top and shorts. The album comes two months after the band opened for a Foo Fighters concert at BMO Stadium in August, followed days later by two sold-out shows at the Fonda Theatre in Hollywood.
Advertisement
“Right now I think they’re the best rock band on the planet,” says Nick Launay, producer of “Cartoon Darkness,” in a phone interview. Launay has frequently worked with modern rock acts such as the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Idles and Nick Cave, but his career stretches back to the early U.K. punk and postpunk scenes.
“If they had been around in the ’70s, they would’ve been just as important back then,” he declares of the Sniffers. “They would’ve given everybody a run for their money.”
Launay says his mission in the studio was simply to fully capture the urgency of the band’s live shows. Aside from that, the new album’s 13 songs show a noticeable evolution to their punk rock sound, which remains connected to their early pub-crawling days without getting in the way of growth and the increasing power of their delivery.
“I think we’ve always been confident,” says Taylor. “It’s just that we’ve gotten better. Even when we weren’t very good, we were confident, but now the skills are slowly catching up to the confidence.”
Amyl and the Sniffers perform the second of two sold-out nights at the Fonda Theater in Hollywood, Calif. (Left to right) Guitarist Declan Mehrtens, singer Amy Taylor, and drummer Bryce Wilson.
Advertisement
(Steve Appleford/Steve Appleford)
The Aussie quartet is gathered on a recent afternoon around a Griffith Park picnic table, where a small herd of little kids makes a racket on the grass nearby. Taylor is dressed in a short black leather jacket, matching shorts and knee-high boots with stiletto heels. Pinned to her chest is a 2 Live Crew button.
Her three male bandmates are stylishly scruffy and tattooed rockers: guitarist Declan Mehrtens, drummer Bryce Wilson and bassist Gus Romer. Earlier this year, Taylor and Mehrtens moved to the U.S. and found places in L.A., while the others theoretically remain based in Melbourne. That kind of distance between bandmates might seem like a problem for a thriving rock act, but they’ve rarely been apart this last year, with only short breaks between recording the album, shooting music videos, a U.S. tour, then linking up again in Australia.
“We’ve been together this year pretty much every day, it feels like,” says Wilson.
Advertisement
Taylor adds, “We see each other all the time. It’s such an international project, we don’t live anywhere anyway.” She turns to Romer and Wilson and adds, “They might live in Australia, but it’s just where they store their crap.”
Los Angeles already feels very much like home to the singer and the guitarist. Mehrtens decided to move here after enjoying a Dodgers-Padres postseason game, and Taylor has befriended local rockers including Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Arrow De Wilde of Starcrawler.
They are back on the road for a European tour that started Nov. 3 in Dublin and return for a North American tour in the spring.
Their work with producer Launay began by recording two songs last year at Sunset Sound, including “U Should Not Be Doing That,” released as a single in May. In the lyrics, Taylor pushes back against the naysayers that she says the band has faced at every step.
Advertisement
“At the end of the day, nothing’s really stopped me, and nothing probably will because I like doing it more than I care about what other people think,” Taylor says with casual defiance.
The new album opens with the driving noisy rock riffing of “Jerkin,’” as Taylor pushes back against haters with boasts and joyous profanity: “Last time I checked, I got success / Cuz the losers are online and they are obsessed / Typin’.”
There’s also the crazed racket of “Motorbike Song” and the alluring ballad “Big Dreams,” written on acoustic guitar and matched in tone by a wistful music video directed by longtime collaborator John Angus Stewart. The clip has each of the band members on the back of motorcycles cruising across a wide-open desert landscape.
Guitarist Declan Mehrtens of Amyl and the Sniffers poses for a portrait a the Old Zoo in Griffith Park, in Los Angeles.
(Steve Appleford)
Advertisement
Out front, Taylor sings from the back of a chopper, her vocals understated and almost resigned as she laments for those who feel stuck in place: “It isn’t easy when the town’s full of broken hearts / Can you be holding on any tighter? / Just take a breath and get out of this place / I know you can just get yourself together.”
There are hip-hop influences too, says Taylor. “Beastie Boys was big on this album,” she explains, “just ’cause they’re awesome and their phrasing is cool and we listen to a lot of them.”
Along the way, their producer has learned how to interpret what he calls “Amy Language.”
As one example, while Launay was mixing tracks for 2021’s “Comfort to Me,” Taylor was unhappy with the sound of “Hertz,” calling the song mix “too Lambo” — short for the luxury sports car Lamborghini. So she sent Launay a picture of a Subaru doing doughnuts on the asphalt as a better example to follow. “Like that,” she wrote him, “only driven by a hot Aussie chick … but she’s a politician.”
“Even though that sounds like crazy instructions, I knew exactly what she meant,” says Launay, who lived in Australia for a decade. “I mixed it rawer, wilder, sexier and put a couple of clever bits in there, sent it to her, and she goes, ‘Yep, that’s it. Next!’”
Advertisement
Taylor grew up there in Mullumbimby, a small hamlet in northern New South Wales, and a town she describes as “dirty hippie, no shoes, like antivax, organic food.” Rapper Iggy Azalea is also from there, and left for the U.S. at age 16. Azalea’s mother had a cleaning business that Taylor’s mom worked for briefly.
The band began in a house shared by Taylor, Mehrtens, Wilson and former member Calum Newton in beachside St. Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne. Taylor worked at a supermarket and had purchased a used drumkit for about $50 that she kept in her bedroom.
Singer Amy Taylor of Amyl and the Sniffers poses for a portrait a the Old Zoo in Griffith Park, in Los Angeles.
(Steve Appleford)
“We went to live music all the time — five, six nights a week,” says Taylor of their nightlife habits. “There’d be lots of house parties and bands would play in the backyard. I would freestyle rap a lot at the parties. It was my party trick. If it was a house show, I’d be like, can I get on the mic? Some bands were playing and I’d just like yelp words.”
Advertisement
That impulse evolved into forming a band. “We kind of wanted to sound like a B-52’s when we started,” says Taylor. “But we just couldn’t play good enough. So we sounded like this. But we liked the aggression of the music.”
As a new group, they were part of an Aussie garage-band scene with contemporaries like the Cosmic Psychos, Drunk Mums and Dumb Punts. At those first club performances, it was largely an older crowd turning out, no doubt connecting the Sniffers’ racket to their memories of early punk rock. “When we first started it’d probably be like 80% men over 50 — like looking out at a bloody dozen eggs,” she says of the gathering of gray and bald heads.
Their crowds have evolved a lot since then. During their two-night run at the Fonda, the dance floor was filled with young fans whom Taylor happily describes as “young frothers, just frothing about life, like rabid frothing,” she says with a laugh. “They’re excited and they’re young and they’re drinking for the first time and they’ve got mullets and they’re like, ‘Yeah!’ Our crowd’s usually very excitable people in the same way that I’m excitable.”
One more thing has changed: For most of the band’s career, Mehrtens spelled his last name as “Martens,” partly for simplicity’s sake but also because he wore Doc Martens boots. He adopted “Dec Martens” as a kind of punk rock alias, like the Germs’ Darby Crash or Pat Smear. He’s reverted to the correct spelling as a sign that the band has lasted well beyond its initial existence as a lark among friends.
“When I did that, I didn’t know that we were going to be getting three, four … albums in,” he says of his earlier nickname. “Now there’s visas involved, and I want people to know that it’s me who’s on the album.”
Advertisement
Being in the band also has changed Taylor’s perspective on many things. Now that she’s an accomplished lyricist, she pays more attention to the written word.
“I hated books. Now I love reading books and read all the time,” the singer says, then adds with a laugh, “Before, my God, I only had like 20 words in my vocabulary. Now I’ve got at least a hundred, so that helps. I love the riddles of phrasing and trying to get phrasing in a different kind of puzzle-y way.”
Romer jumps in, adding with a grin, “Sometimes she has a new big word and I’m very impressed.”
Babygirl Director: Halina Reijn 2AM, Man Up Films In Theaters: 12.25
I’m going to take a slight risk here and perhaps shatter the image that so many of my friends and readers have of me as a smoldering volcano of virile manhood. I’m not a widely acknowledged expert on the subject of female sexuality, and as such, I couldn’t quite relate to Babygirl, but I’m pretty sure that’s a big part of the point of it.
The film follows Romy Mathis (Nicole Kidman, The Hours), a successful career woman who has seemingly achieved everything: she’s the CEO of a Manhattan robotics company, she’s happily married to a loving husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas, Evita, The Mask of Zorro), and has two teenage daughters, Isabel (Esther McGregor, Bleeding Love, The Room Next Door) and Nora (Vaughan Reilly, The Hunger Games:The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes). There’s an area of Romy’s life that has always been lacking, however: she’s never felt satisfied sexually or been able to explore her need to be submissively dominated, as Jacob refuses to indulge in such sexual behavior. Enter Samuel (Harris Dickinson, Triangle of Sadness, Where The Crawdads Sing), a perceptive young intern who follows a vibe he’s sensing from Romy and starts subtly challenging her boundaries. It’s not long before the electricity between them ignites into a torrid secret relationship, as the controlling Samuel nicknames her “Babygirl” — a name he uses only when she’s met his approval — and Romy, at last, unbridles her long suppressed desires.
Advertisement
It would be very easy to dismiss Babygirl as another tawdry affair movie, and frankly, if it had been made by a man, it very likely would be. But writer-director Halina Reijn (Bodies Bodies Bodies) is going for something deeper. This is a sex-positive feminist look at the way society teaches women to approach their “role” in the act of sex, and it’s a story of self discovery. Similar themes were explored in the 2022 Sundance hit Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, which was also directed by a woman, and unless you’re our next Vice President, it’s hard to argue that female filmmakers being supported in telling such stories that lead to open discussion is overdue. It’s also a provocative and intriguing choice to explore more complex and taboo sexual dynamics in a non-judgemental, thoughtful way that just possibly may not have been definitively captured in Fifty Shades of Grey. It may not be comfortable for everyone — it certainly wasn’t for me — and yet, that doesn’t mean it should be dismissed.
Kidman’s fearless performance is spellbinding and impossible to look away from as it is often awkward to watch, and it may nab her a second Oscar. Dickinson, a magnetic and interesting young actor, is quite a presence here, definitely commanding the screen and making his character far more believable than I expected him to be. I must admit that I found myself tangentially distracted by some of the casting: for example, the choice to have Ewan McGregor’s daughter play Kidman’s daughter made my mind jump frequently jump to Moulin Rouge! Whenever I considered that Kidman spent 11 years married to Tom Cruise, I found it easy to buy that submission was her thing, and also that she’d never been properly satisfied, but where the movie lost me was in the casting of Banderas as Jacob. I can remember when 80% of the women and at least 20% of the men I hung out with were instantly brought to orgasm simply by his accent, much less by sharing a bed with him for decades, but I digress. The ensemble is stellar all around, but there’s no question that it’s Kidman’s show all the way through.
Babygirl may fall more into the category of a movie I admired than one I thoroughly enjoyed, yet there’s no denying that it provoked a response, a lot of thinking and some fascinating conversations I’ll eventually have as soon as I find someone I’m not terrified to talk about it with. It’s a bold and penetrating price of art (I regretted the choice of that word even before I typed it), and one of the most daring films I’ve seen in some time. –Patrick Gibbs
Read more film reviews: Film Review: Sonic The Hedgehog 3 Film Review: Nosferatu
The behind-the-scenes machinery of modern Hollywood burst into the open over the weekend as actor Blake Lively filed a legal complaint accusing her “It Ends With Us” director and co-star Justin Baldoni of harassment and creating a hostile on-set working environment. Also included in the complaint are allegations that Baldoni hired crisis PR operatives to wage a sophisticated online smear campaign against Lively as the movie was being released last summer.
As detailed in exhibits accompanying the legal filing, crisis management expert Melissa Nathan responded to a request from Baldoni by saying, “You know we can bury anyone.”
An adaptation of the popular novel by Colleen Hoover, the romantic drama “It Ends With Us,” details an abusive relationship. Released by Sony Pictures, the film has grossed more than $350 million worldwide.
Below is a primer on the key figures involved in the scandal.
Blake Lively
Advertisement
Lively had her first breakout role in 2005’s “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants” and its 2008 sequel. She reached a new level of stardom thanks to her leading role in the hit television series “Gossip Girl,” running from 2007 to 2012. Since then she has appeared in films such as “The Age of Adeline,” “The Shallows” and “A Simple Favor.”
In 2012, Lively married actor and producer Ryan Reynolds, which has increased her visibility and fame, as has her close friendship with superstar musician Taylor Swift. Lively made a cameo appearance in Reynolds’ 2024 hit “Deadpool & Wolverine” and said in an interview that her husband had rewritten a scene in “It Ends With Us.” Lively has more than 45 million followers on Instagram.
In a statement, Lively said of the complaint, “I hope that my legal action helps pull back the curtain on these sinister retaliatory tactics to harm people who speak up about misconduct and helps protect others who may be targeted.”
Justin Baldoni
Baldoni is an actor, director and producer who first gained broader attention by appearing on the CW series “Jane the Virgin” from 2014 to 2019. He previously directed the 2019 romantic drama “Five Feet Apart” and the 2020 biographical drama “Clouds.”
Advertisement
Baldoni married actress Emily Foxler in 2013. He is also the co-host of the podcast “Man Enough,” described as exploring “what it means to be a man today and how rigid gender roles have affected all people.” Baldoni has nearly 4 million followers on Instagram.
Among the allegations against Baldoni are comments about Lively’s weight, including reaching out to her personal trainer, as well as physical touching and sexual remarks without consent. Lively requested that no more “sex scenes, oral sex or on camera climaxing” be added outside of what was already in the script.
In the filming of a scene in which her character gives birth, Lively alleges that she was pressured into being mostly nude from the chest down and that many non-essential crew members were on set as she was left exposed in a vulnerable position. Additionally, Baldoni cast a personal friend to play the OB-GYN in the scene, which Lively described as “invasive and humiliating.”
In a statement, Bryan Freedman, an attorney who represents Baldoni, Wayfarer Studios and its representatives, called Lively’s allegations “another desperate attempt to ‘fix’ her negative reputation which was garnered from her own remarks and actions during the campaign for the film. … These claims are completely false, outrageous and intentionally salacious with an intent to publicly hurt and rehash a narrative in the media.”
Of the alleged smear campaign Freedman added, “What is pointedly missing from the cherry-picked correspondence is the evidence that there were no proactive measures taken with media or otherwise; just internal scenario planning and private correspondence to strategize which is standard operating procedure with public relations professionals.”
Advertisement
On Saturday, after the allegations were made public, Baldoni was dropped by talent agency WME, which also represents Lively.
Wayfarer Studios
After his five-year stint on “Jane the Virgin,” Baldoni launched his own production company in 2019. He has cited his Baha’i faith as one of the inspirations behind launching the company, whose stated mission is to “champion inspirational stories that act as true agents of social change.” Its first project, Baldoni’s directorial debut “Five Feet Apart,” a romantic drama about two cystic fibrosis patients, was released that year. It was his work on the film that Baldoni said convinced Colleen Hoover, author of “It Ends With Us,” to grant his company the rights to her book.
Wayfarer is also behind Baldoni’s weekly podcast, “Man Enough,” which aims to explore gender roles and avoid “polarizing and demonizing men and masculinity.” The studio also produced “Will & Harper,” the Netflix documentary about Will Ferrell’s road trip with his transgender best friend Harper Steele, which recently made the shortlist for a potential Academy Award nomination.
Jamey Heath
Advertisement
Heath, who is named as one of the defendants in Lively’s legal complaint, is Baldoni’s close friend and colleague. In addition to serving as the chief executive officer of Wayfarer Studios and as producer on “It Ends With Us,” he is a co-host of the “Man Enough” podcast. Like Baldoni, the father of four is also a member of the Baha’i faith.
According to Lively’s complaint, on Jan. 4, 2024, Heath was part of a small meeting of “It Ends With Us” collaborators where Lively alleged that the producer and Baldoni had engaged in “inappropriate conduct” on set. Lively claimed that Heath pressured her to “simulate full nudity” in a birth scene and showed her a video of his wife in labor “fully nude … with her legs spread apart.” When Lively expressed alarm, she said, Heath replied that his wife “isn’t weird about this stuff.”
Heath insisted on taking a meeting with Lively while she was “topless and having body makeup removed,” according to the legal document. Though he agreed to keep his back turned to her, she said, he instead stared directly at her.
Steve Sarowitz
Sarowitz, the billionaire co-chairman of Wayfarer Studios, is one of the primary financiers of Baldoni’s production company, investing at least $125 million in the venture. He amassed his fortune after taking his payroll firm, Paylocity, public in 2014; he is now worth a reported $2.7 billion. Sarowitz is also a member of the Baha’i community.
Advertisement
Lively’s complaint alleges that at the New York premiere of “It Ends With Us” in August, Sarowitz said he was “prepared to spend $100 million to ruin the lives of Ms. Lively and her family.” Further, the document says, Sarowitz “flew in for one of his few set visits” on the day that Lively was filming the birth scene where she only had a “small piece of fabric covering her genitalia.”
Jennifer Abel
Abel, founder and CEO of RWA Communications, is the publicist for Baldoni and Wayfarer. In July, she founded her own public relations company after serving as a partner at the communications firm Jonesworks. Her client roster is relatively small; Baldoni and actor Jameela Jamil are the most well known names she represents.
Lively’s legal complaint includes dozens of private text messages and emails between Abel, Baldoni and other communications experts that the actor claims show intent to destroy her reputation. According to those messages, Baldoni first expressed concern to Abel in May that Lively’s on-set allegations could go public. That was when Baldoni noticed that Lively’s husband, Ryan Reynolds, had blocked him on social media, the complaint says.
“HE BLOCKED YOU?! Is he a 12 year old girl?!” Abel texted Baldoni, per the document. “We can put the plan down on paper … to make sure we have all of the documentation needed of what happened on set, who witnessed what and who would be our Allies to go on background if needed to shut down her claims.”
Advertisement
By then, the complaint alleges that Abel was already in touch with a crisis communications expert, Melissa Nathan, relaying that Baldoni “wants to feel like [Lively] can be buried.”
Melissa Nathan
Nathan, co-owner and CEO of the Agency Group, was officially brought in by Abel in July to work for Baldoni, according to Lively’s complaint. The document says Nathan quoted the actor a fee of up to $175,000 for three to four months of her work.
The Agency Group then created a “scenario planning” document for Wayfarer to be implemented if Lively were to make her “grievances” public. According to this document, which was cited in Lively’s complaint, one idea was to float the narrative that Lively involved Reynolds in the filmmaking to “create an ilmalance [sic] of power between her” and Baldoni. The PR firm also suggested reminding reporters that Lively has a “less than favorable reputation in the industry” and has “issues” working with Leighton Meester, Anna Kendrick and Ben Affleck.
A month before starting her work with Wayfarer, Nathan in June announced the launch of her own public relations firm after departing Hiltzik Strategies, the crisis PR firm where she was executive vice president.
Advertisement
Nathan’s new company is partially owned by Ithaca Media Ventures, according to corporate registration records filed in California. Ithaca is owned by HYBE America, whose CEO is entrepreneur and former talent manager Scooter Braun. HYBE America is one of the Agency Group’s clients, along with Johnny Depp, Logan Paul and Drake.
Jed Wallace
According to Lively’s complaint, Wallace is a public relations contractor from Austin, Texas, whom the Agency Group hired to “seed and influence” negative social media discussion about the actor.
In an Aug. 9 text message referenced in the complaint, Nathan relays to Abel that Wallace said “we are crushing it on Reddit.” A day later, the alleged messages show, Abel compliments Wallace “and his team’s efforts to shift the narrative” about Baldoni.
Scooter Braun
Advertisement
Braun, the former manager of Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, now runs the U.S. arm of the South Korean entertainment company HYBE. HYBE America is a co-founder of Nathan’s company, the Agency Group, and one of its clients.
Braun has also been engaged in a years-long public dispute with Swift, who is one of Lively’s best friends. The battle between the singer and the executive began in 2019, when Braun acquired the record label Big Machine, which held the rights to the master recordings for Swift’s music from her 2006 self-titled debut to 2017’s “Reputation.” Swift responded by launching the “Taylor’s Version” series of rerecordings and rereleases of those albums.
In Lively’s complaint, Nathan sends a June text message telling the Wayfarer team that she is aware the actor “does have some of the TS fanbase so we will be taking it extremely seriously.”
Later, in the Agency Group’s “scenario planning” document, the company says its team could explore “planting stories about the weaponization of feminism and how people in BL’s circle like Taylor Swift, have been accused of utilizing these tactics to ‘bully’ into getting what they want.”
Times staff writer Matt Hamilton contributed to this report.
You really can’t make a traditional biopic anymore. If there’s not something different about your film, audiences just won’t accept it these days. Cradle to the grave just doesn’t work. You either need to zoom in on a specific period in your subject’s life or tackle the genre in a different manner. With Better Man, the story of Robbie Williams has a hell of a hook, one I know most people were not expecting. It sounds bonkers, and it is, but somehow, it works.
Better Man is able to distinguish itself by taking the piss out of how traditional this biopic would otherwise be. Williams is a superstar singer, sure, but the rise, fall, and redemption angle has been done so many times before. What makes it so unique here? Well, if you’re somehow not aware, Williams is depicted at all times as a CGI chimpanzee. No one calls attention to it, ever. To everyone else, it’s just Williams. To us, and to the man himself, it’s a chimp telling his tale. Readers, it livens things up in a way that damn near stunned me.
Paramount Pictures
We meet Robbie Williams (Jonno Davies for motion capture, Williams himself for the voice) as a boy (or as a young chimp) trying to impress his performer father Peter (Steve Pemberton). That will be a through line for his whole life, especially when Peter leaves to seek his own success. Left with his mother and grandmother, he’s not much of a student, but he is a showman. Eventually, that sheer force of personality makes him a part of a boy band that blows up, managed by the dismissive Nigel Martin Smith (Damon Herriman), beginning his rise to stardom.
As he becomes more and more famous, Williams becomes a drunk and drug addict, romances Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno), and gets into all sorts of trouble, all the while having Peter come in and out of his life. It’s all the sort of thing you’d get bored by, if not for the man himself having so much charisma, plus…yeah, he’s a monkey the whole time. In addition, there’s a sneakily emotional ending that works way better than you’re expecting, too.
Paramount Pictures
Having Robbie Williams voice his CGI self while Jonno Davies plays him through motion capture works so much better than you’d expect it to. Truly it does. They combine to never call attention to the gimmick or to their work, instead capturing the cinematic portrait of the man. It’s real strong teamwork. That’s important, too, since the other performances more or less fade into the background. Steve Pemberton is solid, but he’s in and out of the narrative. In addition to Raechelle Banno and Damon Herriman, supporting players here include Tom Budge, Frazer Hadfield, Anthony Hayes, Kate Mulvaney, Alison Steadman, and more.
Director/co-writer Michael Gracey is emboldened by the ape aspect, which puts the film’s tongue firmly in cheek, even when covering all the expected territory. Along with co-writers Oliver Cole and Simon Gleeson, Gracey does the greatest hits, both in terms of the life story and the music. The script is nothing to get too excited about, but Gracey’s direction, which manages to never call extra attention to the chimp, is a highlight. I was not a fan of The Greatest Showman, but Gracey has won me over here. Plus, Williams himself has such personality, that shines through, helping to keep the flick from ever seeming plodding.
Better Man works because it dares to be different in one sense. The biopic aspect is more or less standard issue, but the CGI chimp, alongside Williams’ charisma, is undeniable. Plus, while the original song Forbidden Road is no longer Oscar eligible, it’s a lovely tune at the end. If you’re a Robbie Williams fan, this is a must see. Everyone else? Prepare for something more fun than you might be expecting.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/25789444/1258459915.jpg "OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever says the way AI is built is about to change")
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23951353/STK043_VRG_Illo_N_Barclay_3_Meta.jpg "Meta’s Instagram boss: who posted something matters more in the AI age")
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24924653/236780_Google_AntiTrust_Trial_Custom_Art_CVirginia__0003_1.png "Google’s counteroffer to the government trying to break it up is unbundling Android apps")
