LOS ANGELES, Feb. 16 (UPI) — EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, in theaters Friday, is a movie worthy of The King. Especially in IMAX, the concert documentary captures the magnitude of Presley’s charisma, performance and sense of humor.

Director Baz Luhrmann assembled footage from Presley’s 1969 to 1977 Las Vegas residency, including 16mm footage from the 1972 documentary Elvis on Tour and 8mm footage from Graceland to provide context for the concert.

All of the footage still looks like it was captured in the ’60s and ’70s. It hasn’t been restored to an inauthentic state.

However, the material that fills the entire IMAX screen makes that aesthetic towering. Even with front row seats, Presley never looked that big.

But, much of the concert footage, particularly a performance where he’s wearing the iconic white jumpsuit, is presented in the 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio. The sound actually immerses more clearly than many concerts because it is calibrated for a movie theater.

Though the narration is culled from Presley’s own soundbites, there isn’t any earthshattering revelation. He explains how his shaking dance moves developed alongside rhythm and blues music.

He dodges questions about Sun Records and his movie prospects in press conferences. Priscilla and baby Lisa Marie only appear in one brief section, but he appears happy and loving in those moments.

The rehearsals reveal the most about Presley’s character. He interacts with the band, makes performance decisions and cracks jokes.

Presley approached performing with good humor. The show is organized but he’s having fun with it and with his partners.

He uses humor on stage, too, but with his band, he is a lot more familiar than when he’s playing to the nosebleed section in an arena. So EPiC shows Presley adapting his humor to both settings.

The set list includes all-time hits like “That’s All Right,” “Hound Dog,” and “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” some of his gospel and more than one Beatles cover.

Presley performs “Burning Love” when it’s new, and coordinates with the band on how to conclude the live performance, which simply fades out on the record.

He gives a lot of female fans full kisses, so whatever they paid for front row seats they got their money’s worth. He doesn’t engage lustfully, and indeed his attention to young and disabled fans reinforces his good heart.

For a performer as well documented as Presley, EPiC envelops viewers in his energy. Even when there is overlap with other Presley material, EPiC‘s presentation elevates it to new heights.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.

Thor Moreno’s 2026 semi–found footage thriller Van Life presents a compelling premise that ultimately struggles to sustain its feature-length ambitions. The film follows Zoe (Kelsey Osborne), a law school dropout who abandons her conventional path to pursue solitude and self-discovery in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. When Zoe goes missing and an official search effort turns up empty, her brother (Adam Meirick) begins his own investigation. His discovery of Zoe’s abandoned cell phone offers a fragmented window into her final days — footage that gradually reveals her journey from quiet adventure to psychological and physical peril.

Drawing clear inspiration from the survivalist introspection of Into the Wild and the escalating dread of The Blair Witch Project, Van Life sets out to explore the dangers of isolation in an era where even solitude is mediated through digital self-documentation. Zoe’s travel vlog initially captures the beauty and tranquility of the Northern California wilderness, but as her recordings continue, the tone darkens, suggesting that something far more unsettling may be stalking her beyond the reach of her camera.

Osborne delivers a grounded performance that anchors much of the film’s early momentum, and the found-footage cinematography makes effective use of the region’s stark landscapes to create a persistent sense of unease. Unfortunately, the film’s pacing undermines these strengths. Much of the narrative unfolds at a languid pace, with genuine tension and horror elements not emerging until the final act. By the time the film’s more overt scares arrive, the earlier promise of its premise has largely dissipated. A post-credits scene offers little in the way of narrative or thematic resolution.

The film is also hampered by several distracting inconsistencies. Most notably, despite its title and repeated dialogue references to Zoe purchasing a van to facilitate her travels, she is instead shown driving a Subaru hatchback throughout the film. No van in the film. While this discrepancy does not directly impact the plot, it creates an avoidable disconnect between the film’s premise and its on-screen reality.

Additional logical gaps — including the improbable recovery of Zoe’s phone months after her disappearance in a snow-covered wilderness, and the apparent existence of an active vlog audience unknown to both her family and law enforcement — further strain the film’s credibility.

Van Life contains the foundations of an effective suspense narrative: a likable central character, an evocative setting, and a timely thematic focus on curated independence in the digital age. However, its execution rarely capitalizes on these elements in a way that justifies its runtime. The material might have been better served in a more concise format, where its atmospheric strengths could be emphasized without the burden of narrative sprawl.

Following her justly acclaimed documentaries (The Mole Agent, The Eternal Memory) that play like dramas and a scripted feature inspired by actual events (In Her Place), Chilean director Maite Alberdi continues to blur, smudge and gleefully mess with the lines between fiction and fact in her latest, the by-turns highly comical and then suddenly moving A Child of My Own (Un hijo propio).

Revolving around a news story from the early 2000s that brings Alberdi north of the equator for her first Mexican-set feature, Child layers interviews with the actual participants in this strange tale with a scripted and performed re-enactment of the events. But don’t worry, this is nothing like the tacky reconstructions one often sees in made-for-TV docs to break up the monotony of talking heads telling the story, thanks in part to Alberdi’s deft narrative footwork. It helps that the cast is led by the immensely engaging Ana Celeste Montalvo Peña, who stars as Alejandra, a young hospital administrator who fakes a pregnancy and takes drastic measures to assuage her intense maternal longings. And also shut up all the pesky relatives who keep asking her about when she and husband Arturo (Armando Espitia) are going to start a family of their own.

Recalling Kitty Green’s darker but similarly genre-tweaking doc Casting JonBenet, this starts with a flurry of edits showing different actors trying out for the role of Alejandra, nicknamed Ale, our complicated protagonist. Montalvo Peña’s audition gets across in just a few minutes Ale’s distinctive blend of perk, pluck and pastel-pink girlishness spiked with a generous dollop of disassociated delusionality. From there, the film goes into a mostly straightforwardly chronological account of how Ale and later Arturo get into the desperate situation they eventually find themselves in.

As (staged) footage unfurls of Ale and Arturo dancing at their wedding to “Unchained Melody” (we get to see the real thing later on), Ale explains how even at this, what should have been the happiest moment of her life, she sensed that Arturo’s mother didn’t think Ale was good enough for her son. A sly freeze frame reveals a scowling mother-in-law (Ángeles Cruz), looking very grumpy indeed. The confetti has barely settled before the extended family of aunties and cousins start asking when they’re going to produce a child. Unfortunately, poor Ale has two miscarriages in short succession, and eventually an OB-GYN at the hospital where Ale works warns her that she may never carry a child to full term.  

Just after a third pregnancy also miscarries, Ale meets a young woman named Mayra in a hospital waiting room and the two get talking. A single mother of one child already and due around the time that Ale would have had her baby, Mayra is unhappily pregnant. She’s come to the hospital seeking an abortion, although she’d prefer to “give [the baby] away rather than throw it away.” Ale suggests that Mayra passes over her baby to her when the time comes, and Mayra implausibly agrees.

To keep the deception going, Ale starts eating for two, piling on the pounds, fortunately carrying a lot of her new extra weight in her midsection. Concerned that Arturo might figure out she’s not knocked up, she puts him off when he tries to get conjugal in bed (it could be bad for the baby, she says) and insists he doesn’t have to come to any of her pre-natal check-ups at the hospital. Armed with marabou-feather festooned pens, an in-depth knowledge of the hospital’s procedures and familiarity with staff on many wards, she manages to fake a hospital record for herself, obtain a fake ultrasound picture and generally keep the whole deception going until it all falls apart in a matter of days.

To reveal what happens exactly would spoil the film’s several canny surprises, but it’s worth noting that we get to spend considerable time in the last half hour with the real Ale and Arturo — at least enough time to appreciate how well the actors inhabited the characters. And yet there remains an ineffable quality, especially in Ale — a placid dreamy blankness, inimitable, touching in its naiveté, and a tragic flaw all at once.

DP Sergio Armstrong and his team ensure that the candy-colored palette pops just enough to suggest we’re not quite in the realm of reality at times, while frequent overhead shots and odd angles enhance the sense of discombobulation. Nevertheless, the documentary footage also has a polished sheen to it, minimizing the separation between fact and fiction in a way that feels respectful of the subjects, putting them on the same level as the dramatis personae.