Once considered a genre headed towards extinction, movie musicals seem to be back to a degree—albeit almost exclusively in the realms of family animations (like the current Moana 2and Mufasa) and presold Broadway adaptations (such as Wicked). Last year, however, saw an unusual number of films that went way out on a limb, grafting songs onto stories and concepts that basically rejected the transplant: Most notably Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez, Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End, and Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie a Deux. The first has its passionate advocates, the second not so much, and the widely-derided last was the most popular cinematic pin-cushion of 2025. But all seemed to use the musical form as ironic commentary on their material, rather than something organic—complete with using some vocal performers who weren’t quite ready for karaoke night, let alone Dolby Surround. You could applaud these elaborate gambles for their sheer chutzpah, but much of the public’s response didn’t get past “Huh?”
Also taking big risks on a big budget is the new Better Man, which at least has every reason on Earth to be a bona fide musical… being about the kind of showbiz personality who seems to be living in his own grandiose mental production number 24/7. That would be Robbie Williams, the English pop star who’s been huge in the UK for decades now, though less so elsewhere. Appropriately for someone whose first solo US album release was called The Ego Has Landed, this is a simultaneously confessional and tongue-in-cheek fictionalized biopic starring the man himself, a cheeky self-indulgence on a lunatic scale that seems to invite failure.
It follows a standard trajectory of rags-to-riches-to-disillusionment-to-hopeful-redemption. But the splashy, hyperreal presentation places quote marks around those cliches, even when they’re intended semi-sincerely. And oh yeah: Williams plays himself… but in post-production was transformed into a talking CGI chimpanzee, a very literal take on the notion that he’s always felt “less evolved than other people.” Yes, this is a 135-minute, purportedly $110 million extravaganza in which a pop idol is depicted as a computer-animated monkey.
And it pretty much works, to a point at least. Wee Robbie is first met precociously announcing a lifetime of pushy insecurity as he tells his gram (Alison Steadman) “I don’t want to be a nobody,” while she’s bathing him in the tub. The obvious source for this anxiety is having a father (Steve Pemberton) who himself is a frustrated entertainer, and whose spotlight chasing leaves very little time for parenting even before he abandons wife (Kate Mulvany) and son. Robbie shoehorns his way into Take That, a boy band assembled by manager Nigel Martin-Smith (Damon Herriman), though he almost immediately chafes at the quintet’s star singer-songwriter slot being granted to Gary Barlow (Jake Simmance).
Their circa-1992 commercial breakthrough is illustrated half an hour in by a humungous production number for “Rock DJ” (actually a later Williams solo single) in which they seem to conquer all of London, and by implication the world. Director-cowriter Michael Gracey, whose background is in commercials, music videos and visual effects work. He made his feature debut with 2017’s The Greatest Showman—a somewhat overbearingly busy fictionalized biopic about P.T. Barnum that was the rare recent live-action original movie musical to become a big hit. An Australian native, it seemed to mark him as the latest in a line of hyperbolic screen talents including fellow countrymen Baz Luhrmann, P.J. Hogan, and Stephen Elliott, for whom no bombast need ever be spared. But here, excess elevates itself as both means and message. This blowout sequence is exhilarating while making a joke of its own over-the-topness, a perfect 10.
Too bad it’s never topped or equaled in the nearly two hours still to come. But Better Man does get pretty far finding an aesthetic and tonal equivalent to Williams’ own persona—snarky, witty, laddish, bitter, bratty, self-inflating and deflating. It’s a whole movie about Imposter Syndrome only exacerbated by actual fame and fortune. Admitting to a “raging cocaine habit and a fullblown alcoholic at 21,” Robbie leaves Take That, finds briefly-stabilizing love with Nicole Appleton (Raechelle Banno) of girl group All Saints, achieves solo-act success, then seesaws through rehab and breakups and estrangements and terminal self-doubt.
Despite the diverting gloss of ironic, even surreal distancing, so much tears-of-a-clown angst does drag the film down in its last 45 minutes or so. We get that he’s a permanently stunted child who can never be loved enough; that message is not one that bears so much repeating.
Mixed bag as it is in the end, Better Man is nonetheless the kind of crazy imaginative leap that doesn’t stint on enjoyment, unlike last year’s other movie-musical odd ducks. If nothing else—and it’s quite a bit else—it is surely the most formidably bizarre UK autobiographical pop star phantasmagoria since Anthony Newley’s 1969 Can Heironymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? The opportunity to reference that notorious obscurity (which also involved Joan Collins, Milton Berle, a Playboy centerfold, and an “X” rating) is reason enough for gratitude. Better Man opens in Bay Area theaters this Fri/10.
Exploring a different realm of glamour and grit, Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl has gotten a certain amount of hype (like The Substance) for its supposed daring in letting an aging female sex symbol look old and insecure. Here, it’s erstwhile Baywatch babe Pamela Anderson as Shelly, a dancer in the last of the old-school Vegas revues centered around topless women in sequins and high heels. Being a beautiful object under klieg lights is seemingly all she’s ever wanted. But after 30 years, “The Razzle Dazzle” is closing—its market share usurped by hipper, more graphically erotic shows. This triggers an existential crisis for Shelly, who at 57 is already pushing it as a chorine.
That premise could provide the gist of a good, small character study. But Kate Gersten’s script is painfully on-the-nose, trite and crude, while Coppola (who made a promising-enough feature debut with Palo Alto) lacks the style to pull off such thin material. While we’re meant to sympathize with Shelly, she seems like a hapless, irresponsible airhead—no wonder her daughter (Billie Lourd) wants nothing to do with her.
There are equally one-dimensional support characters played by Dave Bautista, Jamie Lee Curtis (in a bronzer fit to make Trump’s look restrained), and others, doing their variable best. Yet despite some sequences of pure actor-improv indulgence, no one gets much of real substance to play. Anderson can be said to give a good performance only if you find scrubbing the makeup off a famous beauty and letting her look sad to be revelatory in itself. Though under 90 minutes, The Last Showgirl is so slight, it ultimately feels pointless and interminable. It also opens in Bay Area theaters this Fri/10.
Other new arrivals:
Sandi DuBowski’s Sabbath Queen, from a filmmaker whose prior Trembling Before G*d explored LGBTQ+ lives struggling within and against Orthodox Jewish cultures. His latest is about Amichai Lau-Lavie, who’s rebelled against his rather illustrious Israeli family’s traditions—purportedly passed down through “an unbroken line of 38 rabbis stretching back a thousand years”—to agitate for interfaith marriage and other progressive concepts many consider heretical. Shot over 21 years’ course, the film follows him from an immigrant newbie in NYC gay society to an improbable enrollee in its Jewish Theological Seminary, as he seeks to generate “change from within.”It plays Berkeley’s Elmwood Fri/10-Sun/13, SF’s Roxie Fri/10-Sat/11, and the Smith Rafael Film Center and Rialto Sebastopol on Sun/12 only.
Playing the Roxie just Sat/11 at 12:45 pm is Taghi Amirani’s 2019 Coup 53, narrated by current high-profile awards contender (for Conclave) Ralph Fiennes. It’s a nonfiction “conspiracy thriller” that charts the 1953 Anglo-American orchestrated overthrow of democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh—one of the first indicators that WW2 “good guy” the US would pursue postwar imperialist policies around the globe, via a CIA plot that played a large part in creating the political minefield of today’s Middle East. This one-shot revival will be a special occasion, with the director and his editor, Bay Area film legend Walter Murch, present for a post-screening discussion.
Arriving on major VOD platforms Tues/14 from Grasshopper Film is Stephen Gerard Kelly and Garry Keane’s In the Shadow of Beirut, a 2023 feature that until now has bypassed US release. It’s a personal, up-close look at life in a longtime slum district on that city’s outskirts that has long been a magnet for multinational refugees—and is now further burdened by a huge influx of Palestinians. Unusually artful yet intimate, this sketches a portrait of a community largely comprised of people who didn’t ask or intend to be here…but who maintain their dignity despite an atmosphere variably shaped by crime, corruption, COVID, and political crises.
Gatecrashers At the Toxic Masculinity Fest: ‘Birdeater,’ ‘Hunting Daze’
Two adventuresome new narrative-feature imports utilize the familiar thriller premise of potentially vulnerable heroines stranded at all-dude bacchanalias in the country—never a good thing. In both cases, however, things work out somewhat differently from the testosterone-raging, misogynist abuse-a-thon you might expect.
In Jack Clark and Jim Weir’s Australian Birdeater, the separation anxiety suffered by Irene (Shabana Azeez) gets her invited to what had been intended as a boys-only “bucks party” weekend celebrating fiancee Louie’s (Mackenzie Fearnley) imminent wedlock. Mercifully, she’s not the sole female, either—there’s also Grace (Clementine Anderson), girlfriend to Charlie (Jack Bannister). Still, that’s two women “versus” five men, the latter camp including the childishly aggro Dylan (Ben Hunter), who seems resentfully determined to drive any and all couples apart. Things get cringey, then ugly.
The specter of such pioneering New Australian Cinema films as Wake In Fright aka Outback (whose poster is glimpsed early on) and Don’s Party immediately haunt this debut feature. Once again, we’ve got barely-veiled hostility masquerading as matey-ness amongst manboys who require very little recreational substance use before they’re taking their personal issues out on the opposite sex. There are some interesting interpersonal dynamics here. But most go underdeveloped, and the material isn’t strong enough to sustain nearly two hours—or withstand the directors’ gratuitously flashy treatment, with editing and visuals over-thought while plot and characters seem thin.
More successful at uniting high style and ambiguous storytelling is the Canadian Hunting Daze, writer-director Annick Blanc’s own first feature. Edgy, assertive Nina (Nahema Ricci) has apparently already been part of a night’s “entertainment” at a rural men’s party weekend when she has winds up arguing with her driver/minder/possible pimp on the way back to civilization. Storming out of that car, she winds up back at the proverbial cabin in the woods, with no public transport passing by for several days. She, too, has five men to deal with, and for a while we fear the worst will befall her.
But Nina is tough—having landed in a rowdy boys’ club, where she’s immediately called upon to pass an “initiation,” she proves able to keep up with this lot and then some. Nonetheless, tensions continue to fester, ones not just of gender and class but eventually race (as the company gets joined by Noubi Ndiaye as a stray African guest worker).
The French-language Daze may strike those looking for more bluntly rewarding horror-adjacent fun as a pretentious tease, its portents of supernatural, sexual and/or violent peril often leading nowhere in particular. Yet Blanc builds an unsettling atmosphere like nobody’s business, and the film is exceptionally refined in all its aesthetic elements, with an almost hallucinatory intensity to both optical and sonic contributions. Her movie is far from perfect, but it’s the kind of bow that makes a filmmaker’s future work a very exciting prospect. Both Birdeater and Hunting Daze are releasing to U.S. On Demand platforms, the first this Fri/10, the second Tues/14.
