EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (2025)

Made me cry more than once. Like, goddamn, what an astonishing performer/bandleader Elvis was, and the footage of him building his touring show from concept to showtime was thrilling.

If that’s all this movie was, it would have been perfect, but it’s a Baz movie, a companion piece to his own towering spectacle of a biopic, and as such it’s discursions away from the stage are decidedly living in the shadow of that production and suffer from the same issue: Baz has no idea who Elvis was as a person but is obsessed with trying to define him as such. In Elvis (2022) he nails Elvis: The Product, and in EPiC he shows him as a musician and artist, but because he can’t figure out Elvis: The Human, even with Elvis “telling his side of the story,” he finds himself bending back to the question of “What Elvis means,” which ultimately isn’t something you can answer with a poem by Bono. Baz is eternally a big ol’ dork, but Elvis is so undeniable that it doesn’t fuckin matter.