Elvis

Austin Butler’s film Elvis received a 12-minute long standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival this week.The film, which is directed by Baz Luhrmann, is a musical based on the life of Elvis Presley and his rise to fame in the Fifties, during which time he maintained a complex relationship with his manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks).The film also stars Olivia DeJonge, and Dacre Montgomery.According to Variety, the film received a 12-minute long-standing ovation as the crowd went wild over Butler’s performance as…

Although Baz Lurhmann ventured into the TV realm several years back to make the short-lived Netflix series The Get Down, he hasn’t delivered a movie since 2013’s The Great Gatsby. That nearly-decade-long hiatus finally ends this summer with the release of Elvis, which stars Austin Butler as the title King of Rock ’n Roll. Elvis began filming in January 2020, and because of delays caused by COVID-19, didn’t finish rolling cameras until March 2021. Once the Lurhmann-helmed movie wrapped though, Butler was hospitalized soon…

Image via Warner Bros. Early reviews for Elvis are proving critics find the film divisive, even if the overall arch is a positive one. The pendulum could swing for better or worse for the Baz Luhrmann-directed musical biopic that releases next month, but for the time being the film is scoring in the high 80s on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, as of press time. However, it’s important to remember that the ranking is only based on 16 reviews thus far, so that number may vary wildly as we get closer to…

Photo by Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue Austin Butler is having one hell of a year. The actor is getting a ton of attention for his potential superstar making turn in Elvis, but now we’re finding out he’s started training for the most anticipated sci-fi movie in recent times: Dune: Part Two. Hollywood is apparently coalescing around the star the same way they did for Timothée Chalamet when he burst on the scene a few years, according to The New York Times. Big-time actors like Tom…

Baz Luhrmann has given us another pointless explosion of super-spangly sparkles in celluloid form – exactly the same sparkles he sprinkled over the Moulin Rouge and Jay Gatsby in previous films. And just as Alan Partridge said his favourite Beatles album was The Best of the Beatles, so Luhrmann has given us a film built around what he imagines is the best of Elvis Presley.It’s not a movie so much as 159-minute trailer for a film called Elvis – a relentless, frantically flashy montage, epic and yet negligible at the same…

Dir: Baz Luhrmann. Starring: Austin Butler, Tom Hanks, Helen Thomson, Richard Roxburgh, Olivia DeJonge, Kelvin Harrison Jr, Shonka Dukureh. 12A, 160 minutes.If we were to pull back the curtain on Elvis Presley, what would we even want to see? A soul stripped of its performance? Something cold and real behind the kitsch? I’m not convinced. America’s pop icons aren’t merely shiny distractions. They’re a culture talking back to itself, constantly interrogating its own ideals and its desires. I don’t think who Elvis was is…

Austin Butler has described how his body “started shutting down” after he finished playing Elvis Presley in the forthcoming biopic.The actor stars opposite Tom Hanks in Elvis, Baz Luhrmann’s film about the rock’n’roll singer’s life and career.In an interview with GQ, Butler described how he wrapped filming in March 2021, only to be diagnosed with a virus that has the same symptoms as appendicitis, leaving him bedridden.“I woke up at four in the morning with excruciating pain, and I was rushed to hospital,” Butler said.“My…

Riley Keough has said she did not want to star in Baz Luhrmann’s biopic about her grandfather, Elvis Presely.Lurhmann’s forthcoming film – titled Elvis – sees Austin Butler (The Carrie Diaries and Zoey 101) portraying the Mississippi-born musical legend.Being Presley’s granddaughter, Keough (previously The Girlfriend Experience, Zola, Mad Max: Fury Road) fielded some questions about the forthcoming film at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.As per Indiewire, the actor said that she had no interest in starring in the biopic,…

Actor and filmmaker Riley Keough has admitted that she couldn’t stop crying while watching Austin Butler’s performance as Elvis Presley in the forthcoming film Elvis. Baz Luhrmann’s movie depicts the music legend’s rise to fame in the 1950s, alongside his complex relationship with his manager. Appearing at the Cannes Film Festival – where her directorial debut film War Pony was screened – Keough, Presley’s granddaughter, praised Butler’s portrayal. “There’s a lot of family trauma and generational trauma that started…

We ain’t nothing but two days away from the premiere of Elvis at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. It’s one of the 11 screenings not competing for any awards, but you wouldn’t know that from watching the latest trailer for the biopic, which carries the swagger and density of a rhetoric that could only ever surround Elvis Presley. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp2BNHwbwvI Given his sexually provocative performances and promotion of the African-American sound in his music, Presley was very much a counterculture…