What made Baz Luhrmann’s biopic of Elvis Presley so monumental wasn’t what it revealed—if you really want to know about Elvis’s life read Peter Guralnick’s two-part biography—or its dodgy insights into Elvis’s personality, but rather the way it tapped into Elvis’s peculiar attributes as a performer to create a spectacle separate from the man. Elvis eschewed the dramatic arc typical of musical biopics for a shaggier take on the singer as an American original in that there was very little distance between what he was and how he performed. It’s why he was so revolutionary as an artist. While researching the movie, Luhrmann came across unused footage from two of Elvis’s concert movies from his early Vegas days—Elvis: That’s the Way It Is and Elvis on Tour—and has patched it together with already released concert scenes from those movies to create EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, a kind of impressionistic portrait of the artist as a concert animal. Even during the scenes when Elvis is not on stage, he’s performing, and thus walking straight into Luhrmann’s wheelhouse.

Much is made in casual voiceovers and direct comments from the King himself that he is through with Hollywood, which he denigrates as phony and pointless, and wants to get back to the genuineness of live music, but what Luhrmann emphasizes with his selection of numbers and decision to present in IMAX is the bigness of the Elvis production, thus clarifying that the music is only part of the show, a means for which the man can parlay his greatness; and as much of a cornpone as Elvis can be with his capes, karate chops, blue jumpsuits, and carefully cultivated perspiration, there is definitely a greatness in his presence as a performer that could only be appreciated by seeing him in person, and it’s this quality that Luhrmann is so desperate to convey. Wisely, he has chosen to do it with technology: the big screen (the digital restoration is excellent), the big sound (the remastering proves how great his band was), the attention to all the details. He gives us whole songs—the stage mashup of “Little Sister” and the Beatles’ “Get Back” with Elvis sitting down and strumming guitar is worth the price of admission alone—but also bits of rare conversation that don’t so much provide context as explore the thinking behind the spectacle. “It’s very hard to live up to an image,” he says during a press conference, and Luhrmann remains an extra beat on his face after he says it, as if trying to figure out if he really believes his own words.

That’s because the movie is all image. Luhrmann only teases the possibility that we will get to know anything more about Elvis than we already know. This is before he became fat and confused. Luhrmann is only interested in the art, and he shows how Elvis’s whole approach to his craft was more artful than he’s given credit for. This is especially obvious in the sequences that cover rehearsals, where he’s impatient but adamant about what he wants, even if he sometimes has trouble explaining it. EPiC is one of the most entertaining concert movies ever made because it revisits a truism we now take for granted, that Elvis was talented but misguided, and shows us after all these years that we still have the capacity to underestimate him. 

Performance is also the operative word in The Choral, one of those provincial historical comedy-dramas that the British can’t get enough of. The setting is a fictional English town in 1916, when the human toll of World War I was just being felt by the populace. Young men waiting for their own call-ups deliver death notices to households and older establishment types try to drum up patriotic feelings among a citizenry that has no idea what they’re fighting for. Amidst this emotional turmoil, the town is about to put on its annual choral society performance, which usually does a Bach mass, but since Bach is German, they have to think of something else. The main obstacle, however, is that the cream of their male vocal crop is off to the trenches, leaving old-timers, teenage boys, and—gasp!—women as the only substitutes, but the show must go on, and so in the absence of their usual choir master they hire Dr. Henry Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes), an organist whose credentials are suspect since he trained and worked in Germany. 

Guthrie’s loyalties, which he doesn’t necessarily dispute, end up being the least of the society’s worries in getting the performance off the ground. Guthrie acknowledges that Bach is a hard sell in these times, and suggests a little known oratorio by the British composer Edward Elgar, who is mainly known for having written “Pomp and Circumstance.” The great man is quite taken with the idea that this work, which is rarely performed, is being taken up by an amateur choral society until he meets Guthrie and discovers that he has had to alter the score to fit the choir’s much reduced resources. Royal-scale fireworks follow.

Written by playwright Alan Bennett and directed by the reliably stodgy Nicholas Hytner, The Choral is sturdy entertainment that nevertheless feels musty and, despite its musical provenance, tone-deaf. There are lots of offhanded jokes made at the expense of the dead and soon-to-die, and the constant harping on sex—all the boys who are about to go over there are desperate to lose their cherry to the town’s designated middle-aged prostitute—feels like it was imported straight from the late 1960s, when such matters were considered edgy. The music, however, is quite lovely. 

EPiC now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (IMAX, 050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (IMAX, 050-6868-5063), Shibuya Cine Quinto (03-3477-5905), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

The Choral now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001).

EPiC home page in Japanese

The Choral home page in Japanese

EPiC photo (c) 2025 Sony Music Entertainment

The Choral photo (c) Gerontius Productions Limited 2025