Way too ambitious for its own good.

| Dec 14, 2019

I liked this film. This is kind of a rare documentary ride along.

| Dec 14, 2019

It's all rather random, but never dull.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 6, 2018

The King: Elvis and the broken American mythology

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 26, 2018

[A] wildly ambitious but not entirely successful documentary.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 26, 2018

You'll be intrigued. You will not be bored. But you probably won't be convinced.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 24, 2018

Just when we thought it was impossible to say something new about Elvis Presley, documentary film-maker Eugene Jarecki pulls it off...

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 23, 2018

An ambitious state-of-the-nation vehicle that sometimes veers off-course.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 23, 2018

The King is exhilarating because it doesn't do "truth". It does Tom Wolfe-style free association and play of ideas, of which surely the best is that the King was King Kong reborn.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 22, 2018

[Director Eugene] Jarecki combines probing and provocative analysis of US culture with a more conventional account of Presley's musical career.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 22, 2018

The insistence may inspire a furrowed brow here, a rolled eye there, and a shaken fist or knowing nod over yonder, but there's enough earnest comment and good music to make the effort worth seeing and chewing over.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jul 27, 2018

Few directors have Jarecki's skill for pulling a massive stack of disparate themes - race, celebrity, power, wealth, drug addiction, poverty, militarism - into one coherent narrative.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 19, 2018

Provocative and at times unwieldy, The King is something of a stoned CNN Special Report on wheels.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 13, 2018

Filmmaker Eugene Jarecki does something rather unusual with The King, which becomes something extraordinary and insightful.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 12, 2018

At its best, "The King" is a fever dream of American glory and American weirdness - between which there can be an even thinner line than the one separating love from hate.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 12, 2018

With an insistence that borders almost comically on obsession, [director Eugene Jarecki] forces the singer's life into a larger theory of national decline-the American dream is dead, and Elvis is the emblem of its passing.

| Jun 28, 2018

...the movie does so in painfully simplistic terms, with encyclopedia-style snippets of history, authentically pained but insubstantial musings on "how we got here," and an odd reliance on the comments of celebrities who lack any Presley connection...

| Jun 26, 2018

So vast it often strains to make connections, but its form-an intricate intersecting montage, a flashcard bombardment of images and clips-keeps the film chugging along, just like Elvis Presley's 1963 Rolls-Royce Phantom V.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 24, 2018

It's hard to pinpoint exactly when Eugene Jarecki's one-of-a-kind doc on the rise and fall of Elvis turns into a metaphor for Trump's America, but when it happens - kapow!

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 24, 2018

What carries us through this mad experiment is a sense of commonality through the oral tradition, a reminder that Elvis's story is one of our shared myths.

| Jun 22, 2018