The Snapshot: Phenomenal music numbers bring needed fun, style and reasoning to Robbie Williams’ life story, seen through the eyes of an ape.

Better Man

7 out of 10

14A, 2hrs 15mins. Music Biography Fantasy.

Directed by Michael Gracey.

Starring Jonno Davies, Robbie Williams, Steve Pemberton, Raechelle Banno, Kate Mulvany and Alison Steadman.

Better Man, at the very least, is the best musical biography movie with the main character depicted as a CGI chimpanzee that I’ve ever seen.

Robbie Williams’ life story is a mix of (literal) money business along with great showmanship and outstanding scenes of Williams’ music. Unlike the common knowledge of most musical biopics, it’s also enjoyable to actually learn something new about the main character and their real history.

Director Michael Gracey (best known for 2017’s megahit The Greatest Showman) has conceptualized the life of English pop star Robbie Williams in an unusual way. While it follows the expected formula of a singer’s life story as so many movies do, it quite unexpectedly features Williams through his life as a monkey.

At first, the idea didn’t make much sense. What’s the point of changing Williams’ species? What could it possibly add to the story? And how would it influence the rest of the film?

The answer is revealed early, however, and wisely reinforces the main theme. The real Williams narrates the film, describing how he’s regularly felt “othered” and misunderstood as a person through his public life. 

So the story is imagined in this Hollywood film as Williams not just living with his private self-imposed isolation, but with an obvious public one as well. Being a chimpanzee, it’s slightly familiar in his possible humanity, but as also unfamiliar with his struggle to identify with others now shown as an interspecies conflict.

Fortunately, none of this takes away from the heart of Williams’ story rising as a music superstar, nor does it overshadow the spectacular musical numbers and sequences.

I reviewed Michael Gracey’s work on his well-known The Greatest Showman, and I stand by my heavy criticism of the bad script and songs that pandered to the audience. But here, he’s got much richer and clearer writing that feels more nuanced and less stylized, which is a better match for his glamorous directing style.

Read more here: Review – The Greatest Showman is far from great

Gracey got his start as the director of music videos, and that skill is amplified here in Better Man with several truly inventive and eye-popping songs. “Rock DJ”, celebrating a new record deal, is one of my favourite scenes I’ve seen from any movie in the last year. It’s a single take of song and dance mayhem that’s gratuitously fun.

If you can get over the barrier of seeing Williams as a large ape, there’s great songs and a compelling (if overlong) story to see here. 

It’s still over-the-top, but most of it is also a lot of fun – and a great intro to a musical talent we here in North America have maybe overlooked for too long.

“Nahir,” a brooding, glamourized and sexed-up account of a notorious Argentine murder case, is a mystery thriller that aims for engrossing and immersive that never falls short of quite watchable along the way.

Screenwriter Sofia Wilhelmi and director Hernán Gu

erschuny take great pains — with flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks — to show us several versions of the title character’s account of what happened the fateful night in which she allegedly killed her allegedly abusive lover.

We’re treated to backstory which dissects the aloof and mysterious teen beauty who either planned a crime of lover’s revenge, carried it out and took some pains to cover up her involvement, or didn’t. Not in the ways the earliest versions of her account of that fateful night played out, anyway.

Valentina Zenera plays Nahir as a vain beauty confident in her allure, even at her (seen in a flashback) quinceañera. Nahir dreams of riding the premiere float at Gualeguaychú’s famed carnival parade and riding that to fame as a model.

Not that she says much of this out loud. Nahir is depicted as inscrutable, controlled and controlling. All the boys fancy her and no one gets more of her attention, and manipulation, than 20 year-old Federico (Simon Hempe).

Nahir says they’re broken up. Then they’re together. As the narrative jumps back and forth from “before the crime” (in Spanish with English subtitles) to “after the crime,” we see both their torrid affair — “torrid” at least in his eyes — and her “No, we weren’t dating” way of describing it to her friends and eventually to the cops.

Because one night, Federico rides his motorbike to his doom.

We see how Nahir takes the “news” of his death. “Poker-faced” barely does that reaction justice. We watch the early questioning, the tear she tries to summon up or fake with a tissue.

And we learn that Nahir’s adored and adoring Dad (César Bordón) is a pistol-packing police officer. If there’s one thing that’s become accepted wisdom the world over in recent years, it’s the idea that police in most any country all consider themselves experts in one thing — knowing what they can get away with, and how.

When Dad says “I’ll get you out of here…I’m working on it. You’ll be home by New Year’s,” Nahir believes it. Is it because of what she knows, or what she knows that he knows?

As we see Nahir’s (perhaps) ex-beauty queen mother (Mónica Antonópulos) primp and prep her for a pageant and for a TV prison interview, we pick up on the dynamic of the household and the narcissism of our heroine.

“No crying,” Mom insists before her interrogation. Or did she? Federico’s come-ons are punctuated with a macho “I get anything I want.” Dad wasn’t shy about showing his pistol to would-be stalkers who stare at Nahir in crowds. His icy “princesa” never betrays any emotion at any of this.

The court case reveals more than just the lovers’ exchanged “love of my life” texts. Protesters demand “justice” for Federico, but witnesses paint a more complicated picture of their on-and-off romance. And as her situation isn’t quickly resolved — one way or the other — and her “story” changes, we wonder what really happened.

I like the way the story’s jumps backwards and forwards in time to wrongfoot the viewer. We’re given just enough information to decide on guilt or innocence, and then new information is brought to light. Think again.

Now on Amazon Prime, “Nahir” was longer when it played in Argentina, and reviews of this “true” story there weren’t the best. Perhaps it’s tighter, as the Prime cut of the film is 14 minutes shorter. Or perhaps Argentines are more invested in the story and uninterested in the doubts “Nahir” suggests.

Zenere, underplaying in ways that hint at the character’s similarities to Amanda Knox — accused because she underreacts to news of a murder — makes her character believably guilty or possibly innocent. And whatever verdict, she ensures the narcissistic Nahir is never seen with a hair out of place or eye shadow and earrings that aren’t perfectly matched, even behind bars.

Rating: TV-16, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Valentina Zenere, Simon Hempe, Mónica Antonópulos and César Bordón

Credits: Directed by Hernán Guerschuny, scripted by Sofia Wilhelmi. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:48

Watch Red Rooms on Shudder

This new dark psychological thriller is written and directed by Pascal Plante, who previously made Les faux tatouages (2017) and Nadia, Butterfly (2020). While I feel I have to describe Red Rooms as slow-burn, it really doesn’t feel like a slow movie.

It packs a real punch. Just in a different way!

Every cast member in this movie delivers a strong performance, but for me, it’s still very much about Juliette Gariépy as Kelly-Anne. She’s the character we experience everything through. Even in long scenes, she’s always in the background. Watching and evaluating everything.

This is a Canadian movie (org. title: Les chambres rouges) which means the trial setting is different from the typical US setting. Instead, it’s more like the UK and French (for obvious reasons) trials you may have seen. However, this is another element that works perfectly.

Red Rooms premiered at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. After its premiere, it went on to screen at several leading global film festivals. Including the Fantasia Film Festival, Busan International Film Festival, and the BFI London Film Festival.

Red Rooms begins Streaming On Shudder on January 14, 2025.