Reactions to the new Elvis movie by Baz Luhrmann are beginning to roll in, praising the upcoming documentary about the iconic musician.

What are people saying about Baz Luhrmann’s new Elvis movie?

Luhrmann’s newest movie based on Presley isn’t like the the 2022 biopic he made that starred Austin Butler. Instead, his new documentary, EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, features long-lost footage of Presley from his residency in Las Vegas from 1969 and through the 1970s, as well as previously unseen footage from other tours from Presley’s life.

The film recently had its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, and according to those who have seen it, it’s one of the more exciting concert films ever made. According to Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, the movie is “a revelation,” and captures “just how intoxicating Elvis Presley was when he began to perform live in Las Vegas in 1969 and the early ’70s.”

TheWrap’s Steve Pond echoed those sentiments, calling the documentary “not revelatory for people who’ve seen the existing films from the era, it’s the most imaginative, generous and entertaining look at a time in which Elvis’ comeback still had real life to it.”

The New York Post’s Johnny Oleksinski also had high praise for the movie, calling it a “rousing musical act” that also dives into the persona of Elvis as well. “For those who do not have a room in the house devoted to Elvis memorabilia, or care a lick about the guy, EPiC is still an energizing experience. To my mind, there’s nothing better than observing the greatest artists of all time do what they do best — unvarnished.”

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert has no official wide release information as of yet.

Sydney Sweeney transforms into a boxing pioneer in David Michôd’s Christy, a real-life drama shamelessly engineered to attract Academy attention.

Sydney Sweeney plays Christy Martin (née Salters) across several decades, from her humble beginnings in West Virginia to the top of the female boxing world. Originally a basketball player, her victory in a strongwoman competition garners the attention of a local boxing trainer, who quickly realises he has something special on his hands. Cue a move to Florida, a change of coach, and the beginning of a historic career as one of the greatest ever professional female boxers. Along the way, she struggles through toxic relationships, drug addiction and a fight for fair pay as she almost single-handedly puts the women’s sport on the map. 

Sweeney’s performance will be the one on everybody’s lips, and not without good reason; her physical transformation is pretty remarkable and Christy’s brash attitude and propensity for foul language are quite the gear change from the star’s demure public persona. She’s especially endearing as the plucky teen discovering that boxing is ‘her thing’, with a precious look of disbelief on her face each time her arm is raised to signal another win, but inhabits the character convincingly through every phase of her life. All that said, there’s nothing Sweeney does here that tops Margot Robbie’s turn as the similarly cocksure sportswoman Tonya Harding in 2017’s I, Tonya.

Ben Foster is appropriately sleazy as Jim Martin, Christy’s coach and then husband (25 years her senior), whose tough love approach in the ring descends into outright physical and emotional abuse at home. When our protagonist seeks help from her Christian conservative mother (Merritt Wever), the latter is just happy she isn’t dating women anymore and sides with Jim. She only appears in a handful of scenes, but Wever is a chilling presence. Chad L. Coleman is on hand with some much-needed comic relief, playing the renowned boxing promoter Don King. His Eddie Murphy-esque performance seems to have spilled over from a different film entirely, one that I’d happily watch.

The fights and training montages are perfectly well shot; boxing is one of the most cinematic sports after all, and the oppressiveness of Christy’s home life is conveyed through smart lighting and a foreboding score from Antony Partos. Aesthetically speaking, there’s no moment when the film puts a notable step wrong, but its obsessive safeness is what renders it so lifeless at times. When the marriage takes an even darker turn in the final act, the violence is partially obscured in the name of good taste and the effect muted. It’s shocking stuff of course, but I’d have felt just as much revulsion if I’d read an account of events on Wikipedia instead.

It’s a good thing Christy boasts such a strong cast, who just about overcome a flaccid script and tame visual direction. This textbook inspirational story feels blatantly engineered to attract Academy attention, and yet may still fall short in the age of Everything Everywhere All At Once and Anora. While the story of Christy Martin is well worth telling, a game changer like her deserves something more radical than this.

David Michôd’s Christy (2025) was screened at TIFF on September 5, 2025 and will be released in US theatres on November 7, 2025. In the U.K., the film will be screened at the BFI London Film Festival on October 17.

The biopic is the vulgar but necessary tribute inherently populist cinema pays to more traditional, higher-brow art. Scholars and snobs might sneer at these films, and especially the way they love to transmute childhood trauma into creative drive, all in the service of a tidy narrative arc. But we secretly sort of love them too, especially when they’re a little tacky, and preferably accurate enough to offer the cinematic equivalent of a well-edited Wikipedia page or, for the more serious-minded, a scholarly biography. It helps if the subject, in addition to being admired and talented, if not sympathetic, had a dramatic and interesting life, like mentally imbalanced painter Vincent Van Gogh. Even better: a life we know very little about, like playwright and poet William Shakespeare, making plenty of room for fictional invention.

Given that the writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was not famous in his lifetime, it’s remarkable that we know as much about him as we do. Indeed, it’s a miraculous fluke that we know his work at all given that he instructed his friend and literary executor Max Brod to destroy all his writings and personal letters after he died. Luckily, Brod was, in some ways, the world’s worst literary executor — although he did risk his life at points to smuggle the work out of Czechoslovakia as he escaped Nazis to make his way to Palestine, as dramatized in Franz, Agnieszka Holland’s excellent new biopic.

In fact, as far as I can work out, this may be the only proper, life-spanning biopic made so far about Kafka, although there are several films that turn him into a character caught in a world much like his own absurdist, menacing fiction (see Steven Soderbergh’s 1991 exercise Kafka) or ones that memorialize a small slice of Kafka’s bio. (German directors Judith Kaufmann and Georg Maas’ The Glory of Life focuses on the last year of the writer’s life, for instance.)

Holland, whose last film Green Border was one of her best, seems to know conventional biopics are inherently cheesy, and risk being boring and shapeless if they plod chronologically through the subject’s life. Plus, she has to contend with the fact that Kafka’s life wasn’t especially eventful on the surface. He grew up in an affluent German-Jewish family in Prague; had a rocky relationship with his overbearing father Hermann, but a better one with his mother and sisters; worked in the legal department for an insurance company; got engaged but broke it off and never married; caught tuberculosis and died, aged 40.

His writing, to which he was devoted, was the most interesting thing about him, an intensely rich and motley life of the mind. Only his near contemporary, the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens (who survived into old age), who weirdly enough also was a lawyer for an insurance company, rivals Kafka in terms of the inverse proportion of literary originality and canonical significance to dullness of life story.

In order to surmount the challenges the raw facts present his biopic-makers, Holland, screenwriter Marek Epstein, editor Pavel Hrdlicka and the team have opted to create a ludic, kaleidoscopic montage film that flits like a fevered mind around the subject’s life and beyond, leaping decades with a single cut.

That said, the structure never feels random; there are obvious causal connections. For instance, we see young Franz (played as a child by Daniel Dongres) being “taught” to swim by his father (a superb Peter Kurth) by being chucked into a river after just a few lessons, compelled to sink or swim (he sinks). That scene is directly followed by flash-forwards to tourists in the present day admiring a riverbank spot where the adult Kafka would always rest after a swim. Similarly, a section that touches on how prolific a letter-writer the adult Franz was (now played by Idan Weiss, a dead ringer for the real Kafka but also a subtle, gifted performer) then cuts to a tour guide (Emma Smetana) at the Kafka museum pointing out that, in sheer weight, his personal papers are dwarfed by the mountain of wood pulp about him produced over the years.

Indeed, Holland takes a puckish delight — one that Kafka would probably have been equally amused by — in showing how this introverted, neurasthenic perfectionist has become an icon in modern-day Prague, with burger restaurants, statues, tours, tourist traps and all manner of tchotchkes pedaled in his name.

Nevertheless, the film strives to offer a rounded portrait of Franz that gets across his intellect, his sense of humor (there’s a great scene where he reads, smiling broadly throughout, passages from The Trial to a room of guffawing peers), and his complex emotional inner life. A fair amount of screen time is devoted to his tortured relationship with Felicie Bauer (a tender Carol Schuler), the Berlin-based relative of Brod’s to whom Kafka proposed. Not long before their engagement was to be officially announced, Franz became besotted with Felice’s best friend Grete Bloch (Gesa Schermuly) and started writing letters to her, an absurd romantic farrago that would seem farcical if it weren’t so very sad. The closest the film comes to a happy-ish ending is the limning of his later affair with married journalist Milena Jesenska (Jenovefa Bokova), a relationship that at least made him happy for a time.

Even with its two hour-plus running time, Franz feels dense but nimble, Tomasz Naumiuk’s cinematography often in motion, or static as the characters flow frenetically from room to room within the frame, especially in the Kafka family home. We come to appreciate why Franz would crave silence so as to be able to pursue his craft. Even so, the original score by Mary Komasa and Antoni Komasa Lazarkiewicz, supplemented by sadcore indie tracks by Trupa Trupa, is a presence throughout, acting like a sonic glue that holds the chronologically disparate sequences of the film together while adding a distinct modernity to the tone.

However, it will be newcomer Weiss’ intense, playful, sweet rendition of Kafka that people will remember this film for — a portrait of a complicated man who lived mostly in his head but was capable of tenderness with friends and lovers. Also, Franz doesn’t minimize the centrality of Kafka’s Jewish identity and Zionist beliefs, but neither does it pander in any way to any particular audience. The fact that almost none of his family survived the Holocaust is not neglected. But the film doesn’t dwell on that part of the story, all of which unfolds long after Franz’s death.

The tense near-final scene where Brod just escapes the scrutiny of a Gestapo officer on a train, with all of Kafka’s papers in his satchel, is all you really need to know about the rise of fascism that Kafka foretold in a way. Similarly to his writings, Franz the film is interested in a distilled, abstracted meditation on power, the law, control and desire that transcends the banal borders of realism.