Elvis
Warner Bros. Pictures | Release Date: June 24, 2022 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
64
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 60 Critic Reviews
Positive:
36
Mixed:
19
Negative:
5
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
60
Paste MagazineSaffron MaeveJun 27, 2022
It’s clear that Luhrmann has a genuine affection for his eponymous star—having ensured that the film’s contents were above-board with Elvis’ relatives—but even with all of his auteurist trimmings, Elvis shares a narrative flatness with this new wave of musical biopics. Read full review
60
The New YorkerAnthony LaneJun 27, 2022
Presleyologists will learn nothing here, and purists will find plenty against which to rail. Less knowing viewers, however, may well be sucked in by Luhrmann’s lively telling of the tale. This is not a movie for suspicious minds. Read full review
60
Screen RantMae AbdulbakiJun 24, 2022
Elvis seems perfectly content being a glitzy, bejeweled extravaganza, even when the film’s nearly three-hour runtime leaves its energy — which never fully recovers after the first half — waning by the end. Read full review
60
The Irish TimesDonald ClarkeJun 23, 2022
The viewer may struggle with the continuing inconsistency — the film is more comfortable with the supposedly compromised Elvis than the barely seen roots artist — but the audience is, at least, propelled back into the street in something like an elevated mood. Read full review
60
EmpireOlly RichardsJun 22, 2022
This is everything you might expect of a Baz Luhrmann biopic. It’s brash, loud, maximalist, and certainly never boring, but also keeps its subject at a distance, enthralled by his glamour not his soul. Read full review
60
VarietyOwen GleibermanMay 25, 2022
Luhrmann has made a woefully imperfect but at times arresting drama that builds to something moving and true. By the end, the film’s melody has been unchained. Read full review
60
Screen DailyTim GriersonMay 25, 2022
If Elvis suffers from a familiar Luhrmann weakness — style outpacing substance — the concert sequences effortlessly illuminate why Presley remains a revered musical figure, Luhrmann and Butler delivering one euphoric set piece after another. Read full review
60
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangMay 25, 2022
To complain that “Elvis” is basically a compilation of musical-biopic conventions is a bit like complaining about a greatest-hits album; it also misses one of Luhrmann’s strengths as a filmmaker, which is his ability to suffuse clichés with sincerity, energy and feeling. Read full review
58
The Film StageLuke HicksMay 28, 2022
It’s tough to watch a movie like Elvis and totally dismiss it, no matter how much of a trainwreck it might seem. Name a department that isn’t the Tom Hanks department and there’s plenty of creative work worth praising. It’s just utterly incoherent with the material—that’s even tougher to get past. Read full review
50
ObserverRex ReedJun 24, 2022
Elvis Presley never dies, but an unequivocally gripping, emotionally effective and quintessential movie about him still begs to be made. Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is not the one. Read full review
50
The New York TimesA.O. ScottJun 23, 2022
In the end, this isn’t a biopic or a horror movie or a cautionary parable: It’s a musical, and the music is great. Remixed, yes, and full of sounds that purists might find anachronistic. But there was never anything pure about Elvis Presley, except maybe his voice, and hearing it in all its aching, swaggering glory, you understand how it set off an earthquake. Read full review
50
ColliderRoss BonaimeJun 17, 2022
While Luhrmann can do his best to recreate the glitzy, nonstop nature of Presley’s life, in those final moments, it’s easy to see that Elvis lacked the weight that this real footage captures. It’s that little bit of substance that reminds how hollow the previous hours of style have been. Read full review
50
Slant MagazineJake ColeJun 16, 2022
The protracted rubbernecking at Elvis’s inexorable decline epitomizes a film that regularly backs away from its keenest observations about the icon to merely, and superficially, bask in his star power. Read full review
50
The PlaylistCharles BramescoMay 26, 2022
Luhrmann sees the chief utility of Elvis (or “Booby,” as his loved ones called him) as a pedestal for his everything-all-the-time maximalism, the King of Rock and Roll’s taste for excess in harmony with the Aussie auteur’s desire to shove shock-and-awe cinematic effect down his viewers’ throats until we choke to death on whip zooms. Read full review
42
The A.V. ClubTodd GilchristJun 22, 2022
Unfortunately, what audiences get from Luhrmann is simply excessive: his fast-cutting super-montage style overpowers the subject matter, and the result is an impressionistic, jumbled highlight reel of Presley’s many accomplishments, despite vivid recreations by actor Austin Butler as The King. Read full review
40
The New YorkerRichard BrodyJun 28, 2022
Elvis is a gaudily decorated Wikipedia article that owes little to its sense of style; it’s a film of substance, but of bare substance, a mere photographic replica of a script that both conveys and squanders the power of Presley’s authentic tragedy. Read full review
40
Wall Street JournalKyle SmithJun 24, 2022
The editing is like a kaleidoscope fed through a food processor, the camera has less ability to sit still than a 4-year-old stuffed with birthday cake, and both lead actors veer into camp. Read full review
40
CNNBrian LowryJun 23, 2022
"Elvis” has entered the theaters, but in a package that often recalls the excesses associated with his Vegas-residency years: Looking bloated, gaudy and at times bordering on self-parody. Those missteps, courtesy of director Baz Luhrmann and an ill-used Tom Hanks, squander Austin Butler’s brilliant moments in the title role, which deserve a much better movie. Read full review
40
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 25, 2022
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 time, with no variation of pace. Read full review
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