movie review king richard

King Richard

“King Richard” is half sports movie, half biopic. As such, it hits the sweet spots and sour notes of both genres. Depending on your perspective, this is either an invitation or a warning. Fans of the preternaturally talented tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams will flock to this origin story when it makes its simultaneous debut in theaters and on HBO Max. But the film’s title, and the Williams’ executive producer credits, should clue you in on exactly how complicated the characterization of its subject will be, and just how far the needle will be sent up the likability gauge. It seems that only directors Bob Fosse and Richard Pryor were willing to risk making their semi-autobiographical, cinematic alter egos potentially irredeemable at the expense of viewers’ comfort. Richard Williams does some infuriating things here, but the movie never once indicates he was ever wrong. This sands the edges off a film that occasionally comes at you from unexpectedly askew angles.

When Mario van Peebles decided to play his father, Melvin, in “Baadasssss,” the elder van Peebles told him “don’t make me too nice.” Will Smith adheres to this philosophy, though “King Richard” keeps pulling him back from the brink. The day before my screening, I saw Smith live on his book tour at the Kings Theater in Brooklyn. He read from his book, performed songs and chatted with Spike Lee . Smith talked about how he uses humor as a defense mechanism, an action to hide his fears. His words came back to me as I watched his performance; Richard Williams is always on, tossing off asides and comments that are often hilarious and mean enough for a Madea movie. He is larger than life, and we need a larger-than-life personality to play him, someone who can successfully overpower your defenses with charm.

Though Smith’s characterization is oversized, his best moments occur when he’s cornered into dropping his façade. He’s playing a man who refuses to acknowledge anything besides his own opinion, yet he is hauntingly effective when forced into silence. Despite two Oscar nominations, Smith is rarely given credit for his dramatic acting chops. The scenes where he shows Williams’ vulnerability have a wounded quality that lingers long after the moment has passed. Whether surveying his wounds after his umpteenth violent run-in with neighborhood riff-raff (“Daddy got beat up again!” one of his kids announces), or realizing there’s no way he can help his daughter get out of her own head on the court, Smith excels at showing the wounded man under all the bravado. It’s the screenplay by Zach Baylin that keeps threatening to undermine his performance. There’s a dramatic skittishness here that can’t be ignored. The actor is willing to be truly unlikable in appropriate moments, but the film keeps making him unimpeachable.

If you know this story, you know that Richard Williams, Compton resident and big idea man, drafted a “plan” for his daughters Venus and Serena before they were born. The plan indicated that the duo would become enormous tennis superstars. There will be no deviations, so Williams puts the elder Venus ( Saniyya Sidney ) and her younger sibling/best friend Serena ( Demi Singleton ) through their practices even when it’s pouring rain outside. “I got two Michael Jordans,” he says, and it’s fun to watch him rub a former detractor’s face in Venus’ success once she starts winning. You’d probably agree with these early naysayers if a man presented you with a brochure for his kids’ future and demanded you accepted it without question. But this movie is guilty of that same sin. We don’t even hear what the entire plan is, and if you didn’t know any better, you’d think Venus and Serena were the first two Black women to play the game. No mention of the legacy of Althea Gibson can be found. I wondered if her career had any bearing on Richard’s decision to consider tennis.

Since Richard can’t reproduce by osmosis, “King Richard” reminds us the Williams sisters had a mother, Brandy, played by the always welcome Aunjanue Ellis . Ellis is somewhat trapped in the “supportive spouse who puts up with a bunch of crap yet has her own dreams” role, but she has two knockout scenes that reinforce why she’s one of my favorite currently working actors. The larger, and more impressive of the two, occurs when she finally has had enough of her husband’s self-martyrdom. Brandy reads her husband for filth, and the electricity between the fiery Ellis and the backpedaling yet still prideful Smith makes for one of the year’s best scenes. It’s a smaller version of Viola Davis ’ masterful scene opposite Denzel Washington in “ Fences ”—Brandy and Rose are saying the same thing, combatting and besting the same type of foe—but it’s equally memorable.

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green is much better at directing the dramatic scenes than he is at the tennis sequences. They have a flat, repetitive quality that doesn’t reflect just how exciting they were in real life. Since this has to end, as all sports movies do, with the big game, this could have been a major deficit. But “King Richard” is smart enough to know its strength is in its acting, so it wisely cuts between the play action and Richard and Brandy’s reactions and monologues. Green is also far better at conveying the intensity of the threats in Compton (a scene of shocking violence is superbly handled by the director and Smith) than he is at depicting the inherent racism prevalent at the lily-White clubs where Venus and Serena compete. They seem too gentle and jokey, though Jon Bernthal gives a good, frustration-filled turn as coach Rick Macci.

Much will be made of Smith’s performance, which is excellent, and I’m hoping Ellis gets all the praise she deserves. But Sidney and Singleton should also be commended for their excellent work as Venus and Serena. Both have difficult roles to play, that of the rising star and the budding one temporarily trapped in her shadow, respectively. Plus, unlike Will Smith, they have to mimic two of the greatest athletes to ever play any sport. They should be kept in the conversation, because it’s the acting across the board that ultimately saves “King Richard.” It earns the extra half-star that makes this a “thumbs up” review. At 140 minutes, the film is about half an hour too long, but everyone onscreen made the extra time far more tolerable than it could have been.

“King Richard” will be available in theaters and on HBO Max on November 19th.

Odie Henderson

Odie “Odienator” Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire  here .

• Will Smith as Richard Williams
• Demi Singleton as Serena Williams
• Saniyya Sidney as Venus Williams
• Aunjanue Ellis as Oracene 'Brandi' Williams
• Jon Bernthal as Rick Macci
• Tony Goldwyn as Paul Cohen
• Susie Abromeit as Robin Finn
• Kris Bowers
• Pamela Martin
• Reinaldo Marcus Green

Cinematographer

• Robert Elswit
• Zach Baylin

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‘King Richard’ Review: Father Holds Court

Will Smith and Aunjanue Ellis play the parents of Venus and Serena Williams in a warm, exuberant, old-fashioned sports drama.

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By A.O. Scott

The climactic scenes in “King Richard” take place in 1994, as Venus Williams, 14 years old and in her second professional tennis match, faces Arantxa Sánchez-Vicario , at the time the top-ranked player in the world. If you don’t know the outcome, you might want to refrain from Googling. And even if you remember the match perfectly, you might find yourself holding your breath and full of conflicting emotion as you watch the director Reinaldo Marcus Green’s skillful and suspenseful restaging.

You most likely know what happened next. Venus and her younger sister Serena went on to dominate and transform women’s tennis, winning 30 Grand Slam singles titles between them (plus 14 doubles titles as a team) and opening up the sport to aspiring champions of every background. (They are credited as executive producers of this film.) You might also know that those achievements fulfilled an ambition that their father, Richard Williams, had conceived before Venus and Serena were born.

In the years of their ascent, he was a well-known figure, often described with words like “controversial,” “outspoken” and “provocative.” “King Richard” aims in part to rescue Williams from the condescension of those adjectives, to paint a persuasive and detailed picture of a family — an official portrait, you might say — on its way to fame and fortune.

In modern Hollywood terms, the movie might be described as a two-for-one superhero origin story, in which Venus (Saniyya Sidney) takes command of her powers while Serena (Demi Singleton) begins to understand her own extraordinary potential, each one aided by a wise and wily mentor. But this is a fundamentally — and I would say marvelously — old-fashioned entertainment, a sports drama that is also an appealing, socially alert story of perseverance and the up-by-the-bootstraps pursuit of excellence.

It’s also a marriage story. When we first meet them, in the early 1990s, Richard (Will Smith) and his wife, Oracene (Aunjanue Ellis), are living with five daughters in a modest bungalow-style house in Compton, Calif. He works nights as a security guard, and she’s a nurse. Their shared vocation, though — the enterprise that is the basis of their sometimes fractious partnership — is their children.

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Will Smith Makes a Racket as Venus and Serena’s Dad in ‘King Richard’

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

In his 2014 memoir Black and White: The Way I See It , Richard Williams — father of tennis legends Venus and Serena and a noted celebri-dad in his own right — tells the story of the lynching of his childhood best friend, a boy his age named Lil Man. 

This was in Shreveport, Louisiana, in the 1950s. His was an impoverished but eventful life, as Williams describes it, marred by his father’s emotional abandonment and by the racism of the era, but brightened by Williams’ sense of duty to his mother and sisters. He spent his adolescence tending to a produce garden in his family’s backyard, going so far to hire employees — loiterers he paid to stalk street corners and drive business his way. Whatever produce they didn’t have to sell, Williams stole from white vendors, passing it off as his own stock. Reckless? Heroic? He was a young Black man whose father, in the memoir’s telling, “put me way behind the starting line in the race of life.” The race of life : a phrase tragically summarized in Lil Man’s lynching. The act was a warning to young men like Williams not to get ahead of themselves, never mind their barely keeping pace to begin with. This is not a story that the Richard Williams of King Richard , played by Will Smith , tells in explicit detail onscreen, despite being a man full of stories — and potentially, to the primarily white world of tennis in the 1990s, full of shit. Nor does the movie give us the lowdown on another tale Williams spins in his memoir, one that’s just as memorable and revealing: of dressing up in a Klan uniform as a teenager and, feeling duly empowered, knocking a white guy upside his head with a stick. 

Here’s what the movie does give us: a Richard Williams who somehow makes those stories — their brash, tireless, fearless near-foolishness — plausible. A Williams for whom abandonment by one’s father is a mistake not to be repeated. 

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King Richard is, in the broad sense, a movie about the making of Venus and Serena. It gets there through a portrait of their father that is in many ways consistent with the man we meet in that memoir — consistent, that is, with the stories he’s told about himself, as distinct from the stories told about him in the media during his heyday as a thorn in the tennis world’s side. It’s a portrait keen on making us aware of the vast gulf between these portrayals, and on trying to get us to see this man from both sides. 

So we are treated to an equal-parts moving and humorous depiction of Williams the hard-working family man, on the one hand, and of Williams the dadager on the other. The latter Williams was infamous for shirking the so-called rules of the game and troubling, in his private life, for his willingness to steamroll the desires of even those people closest to him, the women in his life that he was ostensibly working so hard to support. We get Williams the persistent pain in the ass who knows that the only way to bring two Black girls from Compton to the attention of the best tennis coaches in the country is, frankly, to be a pain in the ass; and the Williams so dead-set on his vision for the family’s future that he forgets to talk things over with his wife, Brandy (played by the great Aunjanue Ellis), who’s just as much their coach as he is. The Williams who embodies stubbornness while chastising his daughters for it; and who can’t even let a family rewatch of Cinderella go by without turning it into a pop quiz on morality. 

Williams, as charismatically portrayed by Smith, is overwhelming. Obstinate. Bold. Savvy. Pugnacious. Selfless in that special way that somehow veers right back around to selfishness. On the subject of Venus and Serena, who he believes will be the future of tennis, he is also absolutely correct. Which leads to another of his standout qualities: He knows it. King Richard sayeth that these women will rule the world of sports. And they do. Williams’ fearsome need to do for his five daughters what his own father denied him is King Richard ’s salient dramatic spark. It’s the scaffolding of the character and, accordingly, the movie. It’s the essence of who the movie says the man is.

Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green and written by first-time screenwriter Zach Baylin, King Richard is set in the early Nineties, when Venus and Serena (played, respectively, by Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton, lovely young stars who are easy to root for) and their three sisters are still teens or younger. It’s a time when the streets of Compton are vulnerable to drive-bys and the cops are a hovering threat. The Rodney King beating is being played and replayed on TV. A nosey neighbor calls the cops on the Williams family with fake concern for the ways that Richard and Brandy are overworking their daughters. Much of this is cinematic territory already covered in films from the period in which King Richard is set, like John Singleton’s Boyz N the Hood , down to even the hard-won lessons bestowed by strict, caring, fearless Black parents. The familiarity of the dynamic isn’t a reference to that earlier film , but an effort at continuing its counternarrative. To the misjudgments of the Moynihan Report and its view on Black families, here are movies about Black parents — the plural matters — being courageous, vital forces in their children’s’ lives, contra a broader public belief that Black households such as this did not exist. 

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Only, as a film about raising young Black women, and as a film about sports, there are lessons in King Richard  that we won’t find in films like Boyz . In the midst of everything else being thrown the Williams daughters’ way (including tennis balls), the film nods to the distinct dangers facing young women, the street education they’re getting in the realities of catcalling and predatory men. And tennis? Its overbearing whiteness tends to speak for itself.

These are the overwhelming external odds confronting this family. Despite hard-working parents (he’s a night guard; she’s a nurse; both are skilled tennis coaches) and sky-high dreams, those odds seem not to be in its favor. We all know how this story ends, and the movie knows that we know, but so far as this Williams family is concerned, nothing is guaranteed — even as Richard’s belief that his daughters will succeed has all the power and might of a sure thing. The movie’s portrait of Compton isn’t entirely played for sociological seriousness. It becomes something of a joke to see white men, specifically the likes of Paul Cohen (Tony Goldwyn) and Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal) — coaches who take a chance on these young women, thanks to Richard’s persistence — riding into town, getting a taste of how the other half lives, looking as pale and out of place as ponies at a horse race. As the necessary counterpoint to the whiteness of the tennis world, this version of Compton almost feels too simple, as if the movie’s prying our mouths open — and those of the white coaches —  to ask, “They came from this ?” When drive-by shootings become a trope on the way to other peoples’ Horatio Alger-esque success stories, something is possibly amiss. 

But there’s a strong, straightforward drama coursing through the heart of the movie, the predictable but satisfying undulation of the underdog story arc — in sum, the stuff that makes sports movies such reliable vehicles for tear-jerking, riveting storytelling. The world of tennis, and the prejudices that come with it, proves a key ingredient. Here, it is a world beset with stereotypes that have a twinge of satire, as during a succession of scenes in which every one of Venus’ white competitors storms off after losing, like an entitled brat. The country clubs with their pools and high-end burgers, the Rick Macci tennis camp, the home the Williams are given to live in while they train: all of it stands in, not inaccurately, for the whiteness of the entire sport, the ease with which money is both a barrier and an expectation. 

It’s into these spaces that we get King Richard asserting himself as, well, himself, armed with brochures about his daughters, finessing his way into meetings with the best coaches in the country, all the while holding the reins of his daughters’ images and careers. Despite its well-worn triumphant narrative, King Richard proves convincing at giving credence to the idea of Williams as a fact already stranger than fiction — the kind of man you can’t help but feel is a real character , in the everyday-life sense of that phrase: a one-of-a-kind guy, hard to reproduce. Green and Smith make good on the fact that Williams is dedicated to his daughters to the point of being just this side of nutty. The character grows into someone whose choices you cannot always trust, even if history would prove him right eventually — and in proving him right, make a case for the value Richard sees in his daughters, which is to say, in Black women. 

That the real story at stake here is that of the rise of Venus and Serena isn’t lost on the movie. Its climactic scenes are the same as any classically satisfying sports movie’s: athletes (in this case, young Venus) making decisions about themselves, their worth, their futures, and bringing those notions to bear in a knock-down, drag-out match. This stage of King Richard is especially satisfying, the filmmaking rhythmic, the tensions nearly tactile. The movie’s emphasis on Richard, to this point, gives the action an added kick, on all fronts. When big-name sports brands try to lure Venus toward instant riches before she’s even played the match that would seal her reputation as a force to be reckoned with, King Richard transforms the scene into a shift in the balance of power: from father to daughter, from manager to star. When the actual match comes, it testifies to this shift. Richard recedes, watching from a distance. He strips himself down to one role: the supportive father. 

The movie-humble quirks of Smith’s performance are very much in line with the relatable Will we met in films like The Pursuit of Happyness , serving to heighten the seeming implausibility of the Williams sisters’ successes by occasionally verging on becoming a liability. As Williams is told time and again, the man’s professional aspirations for his virtuoso daughters, who were relatively untested when they emerged on the scene, are ambitious to the point of being stubborn. You don’t have to be from Compton for the dream of winning Wimbledon to feel like a long shot. But if you are from Compton… 

Richard’s reasoning? He wants his daughters to have childhoods. Yes, he works them hard. But when it’s time for a match, his words of encouragement are simple: Have fun . Compare this to the other tennis parents in the sport’s many country clubs, living competitively through their children. King Richard isn’t saying that Richard is less of a helicoptering control freak. It’s just that his reasons seem to be drawn from an opposite well — that well of traumatic experiences the real Richard writes about in his memoir, which get whittled down into only a few glimmering details in the movie. 

That writing choice is almost too bad, because it’s that background material, more than most of what the movie provides, that bores a hole straight into the inner life of the man, helps us make sense of a drive that seems outsized for even the most driven parents. Williams proves quite the personality, running his life like a one-man PR firm and management team (despite his wife playing just as vital a role), exercising a degree of care and control over his daughters’ lives that stood in stark contrast to the gotta-win white parents on every side. The media, seeing him from the outside, had a way of making him into a circus freak, what with his off-color — some would say candid — remarks about race and money and the game and all his talk of that 78-page plan he’d written to map out the young prodigies’ sterling futures. To the people who doubted him, Williams was a huckster. King Richard , by contrast, has faith in the man’s faith. So much so that he’s almost rendered into a saint, however human. The movie, which is admirably sincere but for a few too-drippy scenes, is sometimes at its weakest in allowing Smith to play him up like that saint, even as the screenplay makes sure to bring him down to size when it counts, as solid adult dramas tend to do. Better is Smith’s turn as Richard the Unpredictable, Richard the Overbearing, Richard the Goofy. The Richard quizzing the family on life lessons via Disney; the Richard who preaches humility yet fails to practice it. 

Zach Baylin — once a prop and set dresser for shows like Girls and Damages ; now a big-ticket Hollywood writer who’s already been tapped to pen the script for Creed III — has written an utterly consumable version of this story, shaving off the complexities of Richard’s past and even present to portray him as a man whose eye is firmly on the future. There’s a nod to the fact that Williams has children outside of his marriage to Brandy, from whom he is currently divorced. The side of Richard responsible for that indiscretion is largely left out of the movie — but of course Brandy cannot leave it unmentioned. And Ellis is too good of an actor not to give her a major scene of confrontation. She makes good on the chance, forcing us to reconcile the childhood survivalist Richard, the cheating Richard, the Richard who undermines her by excluding her, with the Richard doing good by his daughters. 

Richard Williams’ life avails us of a movie hero too robust for the usual three-act, feel-good, I-laughed-I-cried kind of movie. If that’s ultimately what King Richard is, it’s good at being what it is, generous with its character complexities and dramatic pleasures in ways that strong actors in pursuit of solid roles, to say nothing of the Oscar voters eager to reward their work, cannot resist. The basic sports-movie template of the competitive underdog who proves everyone wrong is equally irresistible — even when you already know that the story ends with the underdogs becoming two of the most heralded athletes in the history of sports. The movie’s brightest-burning idea, and it is sincerely moving, is that Richard, for his flaws, does what he does on behalf of the young Black women he’s raising. This rings true in real life and in fiction. He doesn’t need to be selfless, or even likable, for it to be true; if Smith’s performance sells us on one thing, it’s this.

Why King Richard , then, when the story of interest to most people is probably that of his daughters, tennis’s reigning queens? This is the kind of movie to question the difference. Yes, it says, these women are once-in-a-lifetime athletes. But what are we, the movie asks, if not products of the sacrifices, flaws, and sky-high aspirations of our parents?

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Will Smith’s real-life sports drama King Richard is so much more fun than it should be

Its flaws are troubling, but movie-star charisma and an unbeatable real-life underdog story win out

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by Robert Daniels

In Reinaldo Marcus Green’s charming, well-acted inspirational sports film King Richard , Richard Williams (Will Smith) shows Walt Disney’s Cinderella to his tennis-prodigy daughters, Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena (Demi Singleton). Venus has just finished wiping the floor with a rival en route to winning another junior tennis competition. Williams doesn’t take kindly to what he perceives as Venus bragging about beating a white girl. He shows his daughters Cinderella because the film, in his mind, teaches humbleness and dignity. To Williams, a Black man who grew up in Louisiana, humility and docility is how Black folks survived in the white-dominated South.

Zach Baylin’s script, unfortunately, doesn’t fully explicate the complicated, internal politics working within Williams. This film, without explicitly saying so, is a version of events approved by the real-life Williams family. That leads to friction between the glossy, wholesome triumphs common to most sports biopics, and the uneasy interrogation needed for a character like Williams, a vain leader who’s guiding his daughters toward tremendous triumphs , while feeding them uncomfortable and even disturbing messages. That push and pull between frankness and a spin that flatters Williams keeps Green’s King Richard from being a truly great film. But it doesn’t inhibit it from being enjoyable. It’s tonally conflicted, but it’s an oddly compelling piece about an unlikely Black family succeeding in a white-dominated space.

King Richard begins in Compton, California. Richard, Oracene (a captivating Aunjanue Ellis), and their five daughters live in a modest, crime-riddled neighborhood. Oracene works double shifts as a nurse, while Richard trains Venus and Serena during the day, and works as a security guard at night. Richard knows his daughters are talented — he believes he’s training up the next two Michael Jordans. But Compton’s downtrodden surroundings provide few facilities, and lack the institutional or community support required to mold champions. So Richard spends many of his days promoting his two prodigies: He makes a corny, low-budget promotional video, makes up a booklet about their potential, and stalks the upper-crust country clubs, searching for an investor.

Green’s film follows several familiar inspirational sports motifs, especially some seen in Randall Wallace’s Secretariat . In both films, the protagonist ignores conventional wisdom in lieu of their own instincts, believing success lurks just around the corner if they keep with their plan. The villainous obstacles in this narrative are the nonbelievers. Richard and Oracene’s busybody neighbor routinely chastises them for how hard they work their daughters. The local gang members catcall Williams’ eldest daughter, Tunde (Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew). In one odd scene, Williams comes close to killing one of the gangbangers, but a brutal twist of fate intercedes on his behalf. How the audience is supposed to emotionally read a Black teen suffering due to cyclical violence isn’t altogether clear.

The film doesn’t shy away from Williams as both a control freak and a huckster. When Paul Cohen (Tony Goldwyn) becomes the girls’ trainer, he grates against Williams’ insistence that Venus and Serena use an open stance, especially since Williams’ scant tennis knowledge comes from the multiple nights he stays up reading tennis magazines or listening to instructional audiotapes. They butt heads even more when Williams decides to pull the girls off the junior tournament circuit. Most of the time, Williams is acting from a place of love: He doesn’t want his daughters burning out under the weight of competition. King Richard somewhat critiques the pressures piled onto sports children, especially by their parents, by showing a montage of tennis kids berating themselves for not succeeding.

Even so, the first hour of King Richard is shaky, mostly because it relies too heavily on Williams’ perspective without actually inspecting him. His outlook on Black folks entering white spaces seems fascinating: He openly believes his daughters shouldn’t make waves, and shouldn’t trust the private, luxurious country clubs where they end up. But Green leaves that tension on the surface. The same goes for any consideration of whether Williams is abusing his kids by pushing them so relentlessly. He talks about wanting Venus and Serena to just be kids, but when are they ever just kids? The most relevant and potentially emotional scenes aren’t seen, merely talked about.

King Richard doesn’t lock in until its second half, when the film becomes more an ensemble than Williams’ story. Sidney and Singleton are given meatier scenes for their affableness to shine through. Jon Bernthal as the girls’ second trainer, Rick Macci, is a fireball of energy fueled by short-shorts, thunder thighs, and a lightning mustache. Ellis has a couple of show-stopping scenes where she takes Williams to task for his selfishness.

The intensity swimming in Ellis’ eyes, her naturalism, approaching the character not as a caricature but a real person, contrasts greatly with Will Smith, who balances his charming movie-star persona with broader character beats. Smith’s decisions don’t always work: His accent often slips, and the hunched shape he gives his body too often allows the seams of his performance to show. The best portions for Smith always occur when he’s relying on his easy wit. The worst portions occur when he tries to bring across Richard Williams’ contradictory racial politics. He plays both Williams’ subservience and his rebellion at a surface level.

Cinematographer Robert Elswit shoots the tennis matches in a claustrophobic fashion, positioning the camera exclusively behind the serving player. That decision takes the excitement out of the tennis. Richard Loncraine’s rom-com Wimbledon took a different tack, using full and establishing shots to contextualize the action. Viewers could see the ball travel, the players’ movement, and the gamesmanship of the shots. Such pleasures elude King Richard .

Multiple competing interests are pulling on this film: The need to sanitize Williams’ image, the desire to make an already inspirational story more mainstream. King Richard never delves into the grittier side of racial dynamics, instead remaining at arm’s length while quickly moving past references to Rodney King or the Jim Crow South. The more interesting movie would probably be told from Venus and Serena’s perspective.

But in spite of those shortcomings, the beguiling draw of this rags-to-riches story can’t be denied. Smith’s immense movie-star presence can’t be ignored. And the other crowd-pleasing performances, are delightful, complete with a bevy of open-hearted one-liners. Green’s King Richard isn’t a great movie, but it doesn’t need to be when the characters are this warm, and its message is so earnest.

King Richard debuts in theaters and on HBO Max on Nov. 19. It will stream exclusively on HBO Max through Dec. 19.

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• Will Smith and a Dazzling Cast Tell the Story of Venus and Serena Williams in <i>King Richard</i>

Will Smith and a Dazzling Cast Tell the Story of Venus and Serena Williams in King Richard

I t hardly mattered whether you cared about tennis or not: In the mid-to-late 1990s, when Venus and Serena Williams blazed onto the scene, nearly everyone loved them—and those who didn’t were people you didn’t want to know. These young women were distinctive on the tiresomely chalk-white tennis scene because they were Black, and they’d come from Compton. But they were also unstoppable as athletes and exuberantly charming as individuals. Often young athletes seem to have been more groomed than raised. But something about these two suggested that, in addition to having been coached in their sport from a tender age by their parents, Richard Williams and Oracene “Brandy” Price, they’d also been brought up right. They were superstars you might actually like to know.

The man who, along with his wife, made that possible now has his own movie, King Richard , in which he’s played by Will Smith . As with all movies based on real people, you can assume director Reinaldo Marcus Green (Monsters and Men) and writer Zach Baylin took some liberties with the facts; it’s always necessary to elide and condense for drama’s sake. But as a story of how two little girls worked hard for their success, supported and encouraged by parents who believed in them, it’s wholly satisfying; the picture skims along on its own ambitious energy, and on the strength of just about every one of its performances. It’s one of those crowd-pleasing movies that doesn’t make you feel embarrassed to be part of the crowd—you feel buoyed rather than talked down to.

King Richard opens with some old-fashioned shoe-leather enterprise. Smith’s Richard Williams—who, we learn, grew up in Louisiana before ending up in Compton, neither place particularly hospitable to a Black tennis fan—had a plan for his two daughters, Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena (Demi Singleton) before they were even born: To turn them into champion athletes. To that end, he allows—or maybe urges—them to practice often, even during the rain, which raises an eyebrow or two in the neighborhood. Does this constitute a kind of child abuse? But the girls clearly love it, and the whole family joins in the act of spectatorship: Richard regularly packs the whole clan—all girls, five in total—into his van and heads off to the local, decidedly un-luxurious, tennis courts. Mother Brandy (Aunjanue Ellis, in a terrific performance that brings the movie to Earth when it teeters toward hagiography) seems to be the chief breadwinner, though she steps in as coach at a crucial moment. Both are aligned with a single goal in sight, and Richard treks doggedly to one fancy white tennis club after another, seeking a good coach for his two budding stars, even though he’s unable to pay. You can imagine how many of them say no, or even laugh at him outright.

One coach, Tony Goldwyn’s Paul Cohen, finally takes notice of the girls’ gifts, though he’ll accept only one of them, and he chooses Venus. It’s her story that largely unfolds throughout King Richard, though the picture is so skillful that Serena rarely disappears from it: The film addresses her early disappointment without ever losing sight of the player, and the woman, she’ll eventually become. Sidney and Singleton are wonderful in these roles. They give us Venus and Serena as kids at play, ambitious and hardworking but also joyful in the mission their parents have given them, one that they clearly want for themselves as well. There’s a lightness to these performances that you might not expect in a movie about two young people who will eventually become the very best at what they do; they’re humans, always, and never sports robots.

Mostly, though, this is Richard’s saga. Smith is one of those actors who’s so perpetually likable that many critics I know practically will themselves not to like him. But no matter where you stand on the types of movies he favors (often inspirational, for better or worse), or on his gifts overall as a performer, what he does in King Richard is remarkable. The movie gets us on his side early. His efforts are the grass-roots type. He makes amateurish videos about the girls; he Xeroxes little pamphlets extolling their talents. With the two of them at his side, he strides into club after tony white club, undaunted by rejection. But when one prospective coach laughs at the video he’s made, something clicks on in him—a complicated blend of embarrassment and despair—and his eyes go suddenly, unbearably blank.

Read more reviews by Stephanie Zacharek

The mood doesn’t last long. Yet the movie needs this complexity. It also needs to show us how overbearing Richard can be, and how he’s sometimes so goal-oriented that he doesn’t recognize certain things his girls—or, for that matter, his wife—need in the moment. Smith plays Richard’s proud-papa peacock act to the hilt—but without vanity, he also shows us this man’s stubborn, self-centered side. In the end, Richard Williams’ plan worked out—his girls became world champions. But he pulled off something else too: they became people we never want to lose sight of, people we care about whether they’re on the court or off. He’s a king who put queens before us, knowing how wonderful they were and certain that we’d see it too. He didn’t create them, but he created a space for us to believe in them. King Richard shows us how he fought for that space, inch by inch and match by match.

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Will Smith’s Performance Makes King Richard Worth Seeing

Some will look at King Richard and wonder why anyone would want to make a movie about Richard Williams, father to tennis gods Venus and Serena, when his superstar daughters’ stories are right there and more momentous. But oblique approaches to well-known tales can have their own value, and it makes some sense here — as the film is less about the father and more about a fraught but loving family relationship at a pivotal time in all their lives. Richard was born and raised in the segregated South, and his journey was a dramatic one. “Where I grew up, Louisiana, Cedar Grove, tennis was not a game peoples played,” he tells us in the film’s opening narration. “We was too busy running from the Klan.” We don’t actually see his past — the film isn’t really a biopic — but we feel it, in the hunched posture, gravelly determination, and oddly deferential hard-headedness with which Will Smith plays him. It’s as if he’s absorbed a lifetime of hurt and hate so that his kids wouldn’t have to.

When we first meet Richard, he’s already well aware that Venus and Serena (Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton) are enormous talents. Indeed, it’s all part of his so-called plan, an elaborate, preordained trajectory of how Venus and Serena’s lives and careers will develop. “When I’m interested in a thing, I learn it,” Richard tells us. “How it works, how the best peoples in the world do it. And that’s what I did with tennis, with the girls.” That goes beyond just teaching them skills, however; it also involves breaking into the circuit of big-time trainers and clubs, a world in which a Black family from Compton is a rather rare sight. Wandering into the middle of a practice match between Pete Sampras and John McEnroe, overseen by legendary coach Paul Cohen (Tony Goldwyn), Richard insists that the bewildered Cohen watch his daughters play. Sure enough, within a few minutes, Cohen has taken on Venus as a student for free. (He can’t teach both kids, however, so Serena — who would, perhaps ironically, go on to become an even bigger tennis champion — has to stay home and continue lessons with her mom, Oracene, played by Aunjanue Ellis.)

Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, King Richard bounces along briskly through its somewhat predictable plot points. Cohen tells Richard that to get noticed, Venus needs to participate in junior tournaments. Soon, she’s destroying any and all opponents, leaving her young rivals and their parents angry, humiliated, and questioning their decision to play this sport in the first place. Richard loves to talk about his aforementioned plan as an iron-clad thing, but there seems to be more improvisation and backpedaling than he lets on. Despite Venus’s astounding success in juniors, Richard becomes convinced that the relentless grind of the circuit will psychologically ruin his daughter. So he changes coaches — to Florida-based Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal, doing a perfect impression of just about every other adult I met in the 1980s), whom he hopes will train Venus without the immediate promise of competitive glory.

Of course, Richard’s decisions about doing what’s best for his daughters never actually seem to involve his daughters, or Oracene, despite the fact that she appears to have been just as instrumental in helping the girls develop their skills. That’s not the only fundamental, or obvious, inconsistency in his approach. He wants the girls to enjoy their childhoods, and to not become victims to expectations and pressure — and yet he’s harder on them than just about anyone else. We find a perfect example of this in a scene when Richard makes the whole family sit down and watch a VHS of Disney’s Cinderella ; when he feels that the kids haven’t gleaned the right lessons from the movie, he makes them watch it again. The film wants us to feel love for this man, sure — but maybe a little terror, too. (Venus and Serena are producers of the film. Richard himself was reportedly uninvolved, and even reluctant.) We understand that, for all his wisdom and his dedication to the girls, there’s a slightly tyrannical streak to this man, a refusal to entertain opposing views. He wants his daughters to be kids, but he himself, it seems, has forgotten to be a grown-up.

There’s pathos here, too. And that’s where having Will Smith pays the most dividends. Because he is also such a huge movie star, we often overlook the actor’s transformative capabilities — as evidenced in previous films like the sublime Ali and the not-so-sublime Concussion . His performance here is not a full-on impersonation, as far as I can tell. Instead, he seems to have brought his own poetic physicality to the part. He plays Richard as a rough, gruff man, his bearing nearly collapsing under all the responsibilities he’s put on himself. It’s a touching turn, but not a particularly surprising one, thanks to a pro forma script that telegraphs all its big moments and rarely tries for the unexpected, keeping all its key emotional beats to the level of incident and dialogue — which feels like a bit of a waste when you have as dynamic and versatile a presence as Smith.

Still, when King Richard works, it sings. During one teary, late-night confessional, Richard tells Venus of a time when, as a child in Shreveport, he was beaten in front of his father by a group of white men for accidentally touching one of them. He recalls that his dad just ran away from the scene, ashamed and unwilling to help. So Richard has made a promise to himself. “I never want you to look up, and see your dad running away,” he tells Venus as he chokes back tears. When the girls are competing, however, we do see him turn away, keeping his head down or off to the side — as if, for all his outward confidence, he can’t bear to watch what happens. During a climactic match between Venus and Arantxa Sánchez Vicario, he’s out by the locker rooms, wandering the corridors, watching on TV, anywhere but in the stands. Earlier, we’d seen him bemusedly watching the aggressive parents of Venus’s (usually white) rivals petulantly yanking their kids away after their losses, as they loudly complained and dismissed their second- and third-place trophies. Richard may not be one of those outwardly hypercompetitive adults, but he’s not entirely free of his own fears and weaknesses either; he’s merely internalized it all. So that when he does take his seat in the stands — as he must — we understand that his daughters’ accomplishments will liberate and lift him as well.

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'King Richard' review: Will Smith gives the performance of his life

The movie focuses on the rise of Venus, leaving Serena in the shadows.

Former Fresh Prince Will Smith gives the performance of his life in “King Richard,” in theaters and on HBO Max. Destined for awards glory, Smith sends the story of Richard Williams — the hard-driving father/coach of tennis champs Venus and Serena Williams — to the winner’s circle.

From the first sight of Richard wrangling his girls to Beyoncé power-ballading “Be Alive” over the end credits (“Couldn’t wipe this black off if I tried/That’s why I lift my head with pride”), “King Richard” easily reigns as the feel-good movie of the year. And if it sandpapers off Richard’s rougher edges, that’s what happens when a biopic comes with family approval.

Luckily, screenwriter Zach Baylin dodges the worst underdog clichés. And indie director Reinaldo Marcus Green (“Monsters and Men” “Joe Bell”) deserves high praise for keeping it real by deepening the uplift with human complications and bringing out the best in a dynamite cast.

“King Richard” is Smith’s show — Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena (Demi Singleton) are still teens dreaming of Wimbledon when the film wraps — but Aunjanue Ellis as Brandy, Richard’s wife and the mother of five daughters, is an unshakeable source of love and balance in a magnificent portrayal that deserves a shower of raves.

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Since we already know that Venus and Serena will hit it big, “King Richard” tells us what we don’t know, which is how they got there, taking life lessons from an overbearing father whose persecution by the KKK in his native Louisiana magnified his determination to call the shots, even if it means breaking wind at bigots who don’t think his Black life matters.

Set in South Central Los Angeles in the 1990s era of Rodney King and drive-by shootings, the film spins around Richard’s 78-page manifesto to make Grand Slammers out of Venus and Serena, his only biological children with Brandy. But first Richard needs to get his family out of Compton with its ragged public tennis courts and into the restrictively white game of tennis.

At one point, Richard grabs a gun he uses as a security guard to retaliate against local thugs who beat him and come on to his daughters. But he’s held back by the need to create role models for a new generation of Black girls he calls “ghetto Cinderellas.”

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Though Smith adds pounds and a grizzled beard to play Richard, his ingratiating humor still shines through as he pressures two famous coaches — Paul Cohen (Tony Goldwyn) and Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal) — to train his girls. It’s hard not to laugh watching him do the hustle.

Sure his methods are unorthodox when he pulls Venus off the junior circuit, where stars are made, to enjoy school before she turns pro. This infuriates the tennis establishment and Venus who is eager to compete. “I have the game,” she tells a TV reporter, “now I need to play it.”

The movie focuses on the rise of Venus, leaving Serena in the shadows to await her own legendary turn. Sidney and Singleton play these roles with a disarming naturalness that shows they learned as much from their fiercely private mother as their spotlight-hogging father.

Did Richard push against the barriers of race, class and poverty for his girls or for himself? Though the movie lists Richard’s faults it rarely dramatizes them. But there’s no faulting the Smith tour de force. Having been nominated for “Ali” and “The Pursuit of Happyness” (he was robbed for “Concussion”), the third time looks like the charm to make Smith Oscar royalty.

MORE: Review: 'Judas and the Black Messiah' is a new movie classic

The tennis action is thrilling, but the drama cuts deepest in the family scenes that show the sweetness and the steel required to grow up a Williams. “King Richard” is a crowd-pleaser in the best sense of the word. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll tell your friends, and you just might want to stand up and cheer.

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King Richard Review

19 Nov 2021

King Richard

There’s a particular heartbreak in watching a man being beaten up in front of his little kids. We see it happen early on here, after Richard Williams ( Will Smith ) confronts a local hood for flirting with his young daughter Venus (Saniyya Sidney). It’s not, we learn, the first time it’s happened to the oft patronised, oft dismissed, oft humiliated father.

King Richard , exec-produced by Venus and Serena, is a love letter to his dogged ambition, without which, they’ve said, they would never have become who they are. A biopic that doesn’t feel like a biopic, a sports film that doesn’t feel like a sports film, it’s a freewheeling but intense family drama, a tribute to the love that bound them — even if their father’s bullishness repeatedly threatened to break it all up.

Smith’s version of Richard Williams doesn’t care what anyone thinks, with an often unbearable bullheadedness: he’s the Terminator of tennis parents, dismissing those who displease him, unafraid of insulting those with power, at one point ending a meeting he doesn’t like by farting. He’s a cocktail of confidence and insecurity, walking with a hunch that betrays how he really sees himself. Smith immerses himself in Williams, wielding only minor make-up (mostly eyebrows) to look more like, well, the rest of us — so hardly Charlize Theron/Aileen Wuornos levels of disguise, but enough to make it not seem like The Will Smith Show. It’s his best work in years.

There are no big cheesy moments. No montages. No melodrama.

Yet, despite the title character taking centre stage, Venus and Serena share the spotlight. The young Sidney and Demi Singleton give a pair of vibrant performances that convey Venus and Serena’s undeniable star quality, performed with a naturalism that makes the actors feel like real sisters. The whole family seems tight, including Aunjanue Ellis as Richard’s long-suffering wife Brandi, who exudes a quiet power, which ends up being not so quiet when she’s pushed.

Director Reinaldo Marcus Green broke out with 2018’s taut drama Monsters And Men , which explored race through the eyes of conflicted characters. And race is a heartbeat here too, bubbling in the background as Richard breaks down the doors of a gleaming white industry. Zach Baylin’s screenplay positions Richard as a man refusing to be hemmed in, refusing to know his place, refusing to fall into the hands of those that might want him and his family to fail. He is determined to climb out of Compton.

King Richard doesn’t reinvent the wheel, doesn’t take any wild swings, happy to deliver a solid crowdpleaser. But what’s great is what doesn’t happen. There are no big cheesy moments. No montages. No melodrama. It hits the beats you’d want but without falling into cliché, with warmth baked in so much that you’re swept along throughout, rooting for every Williams on screen. And it looks so pretty, Robert Elswit’s cinematography basking it all in a golden glow — and in love.

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King Richard

A look at how tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams became who they are after the coaching from their father Richard. A look at how tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams became who they are after the coaching from their father Richard. A look at how tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams became who they are after the coaching from their father Richard.

• Reinaldo Marcus Green
• Zach Baylin
• Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor
• Jon Bernthal
• 612 User reviews
• 278 Critic reviews
• 76 Metascore
• 50 wins & 137 nominations total

Top cast 99+

• Richard Williams

• Oracene 'Brandy' Williams
• (as Aunjanue Ellis)

• Venus Williams

• Serena Williams

• Tunde Price
• (as Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew)

• Lyndrea Price

• Ms. Strickland

• PV CC Tennis Pro

• (as Vaughn Hebron)

• Bud Collins
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• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia As a thank you to the cast, Will Smith divided his $40 million earnings from the movie amongst the other actors as bonuses for them.
• Goofs Arantxa Sánchez Vicario is regularly announced and shown as Vicario on the scoreboard, which wouldn't have happened. She was first known as Arantxa Sánchez, then she added Vicario to honor her mother. Following Spanish usage, Sánchez, her father's name, was always the prime part of her last name and she was known as Sánchez Vicario.

Richard Williams : The most strongest, the most powerful, the most dangerous creature on this whole earth is a woman who knows how to think. Ain't nothing she can't do.

• Crazy credits During the credits, real documented footage was shown of Richard Williams and his daughters Venus and Serena. From camcorder footage to TV broadcasts, it showed a summary of the accomplishments that the Williams had achieved.
• Connections Featured in WatchMojo: Top 10 Best Movies of 2021 (2021)
• Soundtracks Get Me Back on Time, Engine Number 9 (Pt. 1 & 2) Written by Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff Performed by Wilson Pickett Courtesy of Atlantic Recording Corp. By arrangement with Warner Music Group Film & TV Licensing

User reviews 612

• Nov 20, 2021
• How long is King Richard? Powered by Alexa
• November 19, 2021 (United States)
• United States
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• King Richard: Huyền Thoại Nhà Williams
• Claremont Club, Claremont, California, USA (1777 Monte Vista Ave, Claremont, CA)
• Warner Bros.
• Star Thrower Entertainment
• Westbrook Studios
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $50,000,000 (estimated)
• $15,129,285
• Nov 21, 2021
• $39,429,285

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• Runtime 2 hours 24 minutes

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Review: Will Smith rules in ‘King Richard,’ a Venus-and-Serena drama with a sharp spin

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The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local health officials .

“Keep your stance open.” These words, or some variation on them, form a steady refrain in “King Richard,” Reinaldo Marcus Green’s shrewd, slick and enormously satisfying drama about the forging of a pair of tennis superstars. To anyone who will listen (and some who won’t), Richard Williams demands that his young daughters Venus and Serena use an open-stance technique, not the closed stance favored by most others. It’s a nifty running gag, rooted in the truth: Richard and his then-wife, Oracene, really did teach their daughters this method, which would become more widely adopted in the wake of their fame and influence. And because sports dramas and biopics are all about tidy metaphors, it’s also a lesson: Stay loose. Stay flexible. Keep an open mind.

This is admittedly rich advice coming from Richard, who is easily the most stubborn, closed-minded person in the movie and possibly the greater Los Angeles area. As played by an outstanding, wholly committed, sometimes fearlessly insufferable Will Smith, Richard is a combination of helicopter parent, personal publicist, battle strategist and drill sergeant, with a disarmingly friendly, quippy manner that doubles as an instrument of persuasion. Running around town in his tennis-coach regalia of short shorts and knee-high socks, Richard cajoles, insists, argues and refuses to take no for an answer. But for all his initially boundless energy, he sometimes betrays a haggard, heavy-eyed exhaustion, as if even he were getting a little tired of his company.

The details of the outsize role that Richard Williams played in Venus and Serena’s success are by now well known: the exhaustive 70-plus-page plan he wrote for them; the rain-or-shine practices he led on Compton’s cracked-concrete tennis courts; his headline-generating decision to keep his daughters from playing in junior tournaments; his unapologetically self-promotional media interviews; his my-way-or-the-highway attitude in every situation. His plan worked, the closing titles reassure us, which doesn’t entirely neutralize the exasperation of his company. And the paternalistic perspective of “King Richard” — which, like its title, both critiques and lionizes its subject — might provoke a similar irritation. Don’t Venus and Serena Williams deserve biopics of their own? Why does a movie about two game-changing athletes focus on their dad?

For ‘King Richard,’ Will Smith and Aunjanue Ellis serve a nuanced look at Black life and love

‘King Richard’ stars Will Smith and Aunjanue Ellis on the pressures and joy of portraying living icons and finding the emotional truth of Richard and Oracene Williams’ relationship.

Nov. 14, 2021

To tackle the first question: Sure, if deserve is the word. With few exceptions, the celebrity biopic has long been the clunky white elephant of Hollywood moviemaking, a vehicle for reductive insights, canned uplift, middling impersonations and unexamined idol worship. The best ones tend to come at their real-life subjects from a more oblique angle, putting what this movie’s milieu compels me to call an interesting spin on the material. And even when it falls back on familiar beats or airbrushes away unflattering details (it’s worth noting that Venus, Serena and their sister Isha Price are among the executive producers), “King Richard,” assuredly directed by Green from a thoughtful, angular script by Zach Baylin, is never uninteresting.

The reason for this is, in some ways, an answer to the second question: No halfway honest movie could focus on the teenage Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena (Demi Singleton) without also focusing on Richard. For better or worse, he was always there. So, for that matter, were their mother, Oracene (a superb Aunjanue Ellis), and their half sisters Yetunde, Isha and Lyndrea Price (played, respectively, by Mikayla LaShae Bartholomew, Daniele Lawson and Layla Crawford), with whom they formed an inseparably tight unit. The movie’s signature image is of Richard driving a rickety Volkswagen bus around Los Angeles with all five girls crammed into the back, an image of family solidarity as touching as it is gently amusing.

But their journey is anything but smooth, their path anything but certain, despite Richard’s protests to the contrary. Veering from Compton to West Palm Beach, Fla., to Oakland, “King Richard” lovingly re-creates the look, feel and competitive ambience of the mid-’90s tennis world. Green shoots the tennis matches with crisp, invigorating panache (and with energizing contributions from cinematographer Robert Elswit, editor Pamela Martin and composer Kris Bowers). Names like Jennifer Capriati, Arantxa Sanchez Vicario, John McEnroe and Pete Sampras float through the ether, and some of them pop up in spot-on cameos.

Unable to afford a coach who could push his daughters to that next level, Richard shops around for someone who will be sufficiently impressed to do it for free. And the sisters are beyond impressive. Venus, the older of the two by a year, gets most of the attention early on, and the winning Sidney plays her with a quiet, unassuming confidence that doesn’t preclude a teenager’s natural anxiety and excitement. Before long, she’s being coached by the famous likes of Paul Cohen (Tony Goldwyn) and Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal), both of whom Richard infuriates early and often with his father-knows-best attitude. You can’t help but feel for both coaches, especially Rick, whom Bernthal makes so lovable in his help-me-help-you frustration.

But you also can’t help but see Richard’s perspective and appreciate the larger points he’s making. He knows that the paths to the American Dream are fewer, and the stakes of every decision higher, for two Black girls competing in a predominantly rich, white country-club sport. (He also knows that therein lies both an obstacle and an opportunity.) And his rejection of the coaches’ one-size-fits-all advice — he insists that his daughters’ education, not their tennis, comes first — is born of a protective instinct that few of his fellow tennis parents have had to shoulder.

In ways that echo his excellent, underseen debut feature, “Monsters and Men,” Green subtly tracks the social and psychological ripple effects of crime in a vulnerable community. In Smith’s jaded gaze and wary posture you see years of exposure to casual violence, from the attacks by racist white men he endured as a kid to the gang harassment that disrupts Venus and Serena’s Compton practices. (The fatal 2003 shooting of Yetunde Price isn’t foreshadowed during the movie or mentioned at the end, but there’s something about the loving attention the camera gives her, and her parents’ beaming pride at her academic stardom, that feels like a tribute to her memory.)

And so, like a good tennis player himself, Richard keeps everyone off-balance, the audience included. Nearly every step forward, every milestone, occasions a sudden reversal of strategy that he claims was part of his plan all along. Competitive as hell, he nonetheless urges his daughters toward unwavering humility, even in private, which is a challenge once they start winning left and right. He’s tough on his kids, but he knows toughness isn’t the same as meanness; their parent-child interactions are a model of functionality and understanding, in contrast to the rage verging on abuse we see other tennis parents meting out to their kids.

Which is not to say that the family is always in one accord. Venus and Serena don’t often say much, at least not with words — their fierce athleticism on the court communicates plenty — but Serena’s second-run treatment is duly acknowledged, as is their one-of-a-kind mix of sisterly camaraderie and future Grand Slam competitiveness. And Richard’s most formidable opponent, not surprisingly, is Oracene, played by Ellis with a down-to-earth emotional forthrightness that keeps you on her side from start to finish. She pushes back against Richard’s arrogance and his more extreme proclamations, asserting her own strong, steady hand in her daughters’ upbringing, including the honing of their tennis skills. And Ellis herself comes powerfully close to transcending the parameters of the supportive wife role she’s been given, a cliché that the movie rejuvenates without entirely sidestepping.

Oracene’s most forceful monologue makes a few glancing, perfunctory references to Richard’s past infidelities and other children, foreshadowing their divorce and briefly suggesting the more emotionally honest and complicated portrait of marital discord that “King Richard” might have been. Still, what we see on-screen is both rewardingly jagged and uncommonly thoughtful, an engrossing family drama that doubles as a sharp rethink of how a family operates within the overlapping, often overbearing spheres of race, class, sports and celebrity. It climaxes, as it must, with a hell of a match, but the movie’s most furious volleys are rhetorical, psychological and, finally, emotional. Venus and Serena Williams’ story is as spoiler-proof as they come, which doesn’t mean it won’t break you open.

‘King Richard’

Rating: PG-13, for some violence, strong language, a sexual reference and brief drug references Running time: 2 hours, 18 minutes Playing: Starts Nov. 19 in general release; also streaming on HBO Max

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King Richard (United States, 2021)

Across-the-board strong performances represent the upside of King Richard , director Reinaldo Marcus Green’s part bio-pic/part hagiography of Richard Williams (Will Smith), the (in)famous father of all-time tennis greats Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena (Demi Singleton) Williams. With the two stars functioning as Executive Producers, it’s no surprise that the screenplay smooths many of their father’s rough edges and there are times when Richard comes across as more than a little too saintly. The most honest scene in the movie is one in which his wife, Brandy (Aunjanue Ellis), dresses him down for his narcissism.

King Richard is less a recreation of Richard’s life than a love story between one man and his daughters. Although it’s evident that Richard adores his children, the skeptical viewer might wonder where the line exists between “overbearing despot” and “involved parent.” Some of Richard’s tactics – such as intending to abandon his children three miles from home – border on abusive. There’s also a question about to what extent Venus’ success is (at least for him) about validating his planning and methods. The movie skates around criticisms of Richard’s exploitative nature and barely mentions his history of abandoning children from previous relationships. Venus and Serena’s titanic accomplishments are real and undeniable. The story of their upbringing as related in King Richard is idealized.

As would be expected from a movie about the rise of two young tennis stars (although the focus, given the time period, is much more on the older Venus), there’s plenty of court action. King Richard makes the mistake of becoming a hybrid sports movie during a climactic match. There’s too much fixation on individual points when the important thing is what happens after the bout. There’s no tension because, win or lose, we know who Venus will become. The movie as a whole isn’t about moments but a synthesis of all the factors that enriched the girls’ tennis DNA. Regardless of how much is true, how much has been softened and reshaped to suit the movie’s perspective, and how much is fabricated, the end result is compelling drama with top-notch performances and a feel-good denouement.

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King richard.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 8 Reviews
• Kids Say 20 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Winning biopic of tennis stars' dad has language, violence.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that King Richard is a moving, entertaining sports biopic about Richard Williams (Will Smith), the father of tennis legends Venus and Serena Williams. Dialogue includes swearing ("s--t," "hell," and "ass"), as well as slurs like "nigga." There are also scenes of gang violence and racial…

Why Age 13+?

Punching, pistol-whipping, gun violence (including minor character getting shot

Language includes "f--k," "ass," "crap," "damn," "screw you," "bulls--t," and "h

Mentions of Nike, Reebok, Puma, and Fila as those companies try to get Venus Wil

A background character is seen drinking from a brown paper bag, implying the con

Any Positive Content?

Making history means being brave and bold, using tons of perseverance. It takes

The Williams family -- particularly Richard, Venus, and Serena -- show courage i

Cast is largely Black, and comes together to successfully offer a positive repre

Violence & Scariness

Punching, pistol-whipping, gun violence (including minor character getting shot and killed on-screen), mention of sexual abuse (threat of Tunde being raped), police brutality (including footage of police beating Rodney King), descriptions of racism and racist violence (including mentions of Ku Klux Klan and people being punched and tortured during Jim Crow).

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Language includes "f--k," "ass," "crap," "damn," "screw you," "bulls--t," and "hell." Also slurs like "nigga," "bitch nigga," and "cracker," plus words that could be considered ableist, such as "stupid" and "nuts." One use each of "G-damn" and "oh God."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Mentions of Nike, Reebok, Puma, and Fila as those companies try to get Venus Williams to sign lucrative deals with them.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

A background character is seen drinking from a brown paper bag, implying the contents of the bag is alcohol. It's mentioned that another rising tennis star is arrested after being found with pot in her hotel room. Richard tells Venus he does not want her to follow a similar path.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Positive Messages

Making history means being brave and bold, using tons of perseverance. It takes talent and skill to win at something, but a true winner is also humble and grateful for success.

Positive Role Models

The Williams family -- particularly Richard, Venus, and Serena -- show courage in changing the White, affluent world of tennis. Richard demonstrates perseverance and courage in envisioning and pursuing better lives for his children. Even though Richard initially tries to teach his children gratitude and humility in an insensitive way, he does make sure they know the importance of showing those character strengths as they succeed in life.

Diverse Representations

Cast is largely Black, and comes together to successfully offer a positive representation of a Black family. There have been some colorism-related critiques of producer/star Will Smith casting himself as Richard despite being much lighter-skinned than the real man. (Though he does do a great job portraying Richard's bombastic nature.) Features many strong female characters, especially the Williams daughters and Richard's wife, Oracene. But aside from Venus, Serena, and occasionally Tunde, the other Williams girls don't have many, if any, lines.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Parents need to know that King Richard is a moving, entertaining sports biopic about Richard Williams ( Will Smith ), the father of tennis legends Venus and Serena Williams. Dialogue includes swearing ("s--t," "hell," and "ass"), as well as slurs like "nigga." There are also scenes of gang violence and racial violence, and a minor character is shot and killed on-screen. Brands such as Nike, Puma, Reebok, and Fila are mentioned. With themes of perseverance, courage, gratitude, and humility, the film successfully offers a positive representation of a Black family and focuses on Richard's attempts to be a better father than the one he had growing up. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say (8)
• Kids say (20)

Based on 8 parent reviews

Positive true story, a little bit of violence scared my almost 10yo

Amazing movie * spoiler alert*, what's the story.

KING RICHARD tells the true story of Richard Williams ( Will Smith ), the father of tennis stars Venus ( Saniyya Sidney ) and Serena Williams (Demi Singleton), and how he prepared them for superstardom. The film focuses largely on Richard's past as a boy growing up in Jim Crow-era Louisiana and shows how his past shaped the way he parented his children toward greatness.

Is It Any Good?

This moving, entertaining drama might be Smith's best acting yet; he mostly loses himself in the role of Richard Williams. While it doesn't make complete sense for Smith -- who looks nothing like Richard and doesn't even have the same skin tone -- to play Venus and Serena Williams' father, he captures Richard's essence as a strong-willed man who's ready to move heaven and earth to make his daughters' lives better than his. It's one of the rare moments in Smith's career in which viewers are more likely to see Smith's character and performance before they see Smith the actor. Yes, there are a few times in King Richard when Smith slips in his portrayal of Richard's Louisiana accent, but they're brief and early enough in the film to forgive. Smith's commitment to the role shines through, and his earnestness to give Richard his flowers as a father and visionary happily color the performance.

Equally as powerful -- if not more so -- is Aunjanue Ellis as Richard's wife, Oracene. She commands the screen with her nuanced, realistic performance of a long-suffering Black wife and mother who shared her husband's dream despite her issues with his process. She also brilliantly conveys how those misgivings sowed the seeds for the Williamses' eventual divorce. Even through her irritation and frustration, Oracene shows the love she has for Richard. Sidney and Singleton are also commendable as young Venus and Serena. Both actresses had to learn to play tennis at a level convincing enough to be believable, and their commitment comes through as they score aces that look exactly like the real thing. They also portray the balance between childlike excitement and exuberant confidence that the real-life Williams sisters have for the game, as well as their close bond. Overall, King Richard is a fantastic film for sports fans, tennis lovers, and fans of the Williams family.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Richard Williams. How did he prepare his children for life? What were some of the good things he did? Where did he fall short? How did his teachings help Venus and Serena succeed in tennis? How would you describe his legacy?

How accurate do you think King Richard is to the story it's based on? Why might filmmakers choose to tweak the facts of a biopic?

How did Venus and Serena inspire Black girls and children of all backgrounds?

How do the characters demonstrate perseverance and courage ? Why are those important character strengths ?

How would you describe the relationship between Richard and Oracene? How do they work as a team? Where do they differ?

Movie Details

• In theaters : November 19, 2021
• On DVD or streaming : February 8, 2022
• Cast : Will Smith , Aunjanue Ellis , Jon Bernthal , Tony Goldwyn , Saniyya Sidney , Demi Singleton
• Director : Reinaldo Marcus Green
• Inclusion Information : Black directors, Latino directors, Black actors, Female actors, Bisexual actors
• Studio : Warner Bros.
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Sports and Martial Arts , Great Girl Role Models
• Character Strengths : Courage , Gratitude , Humility , Perseverance
• Run time : 138 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : some violence, strong language, a sexual reference and brief drug references
• Awards : Common Sense Selection , Golden Globe - Golden Globe Award Winner , NAACP Image Award - NAACP Image Award Nominee
• Last updated : August 21, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

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One Return Of The Jedi Scene Confirmed The Jedi Never Learned From Their Mistakes

“that’s a classic shot”: friends actor’s infamous movie reboot of classic sci-fi show gets glowing review from vfx artists 26 years later, 12 jedi who were padawans during the clone wars & order 66 (& what happened to them).

Biopic   King Richard  has generated primarily positive reviews from critics, largely praising the performance of Will Smith, and here's why. The movie paints a portrait of the divisive figure Richard Williams (Smith), father to professional tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams (Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton). The November 2021 movie 's true story documents the early years of Serena and Venus, showing how their father strategically and unconventionally raised two incredibly talented athletes that would profoundly impact the world of tennis and sports culture.

At the time of writing, King Richard holds a fresh score of 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, aggregated from 95 reviews. Sports biopics hold a special place in film, combining two equally poignant genres that, if executed correctly, can profoundly tug at the heartstrings of viewers and inspire generations to come. At 92 percent, King Richard  has surpassed popular sports biopics like I, Tonya (90%) and 42 (81%), while falling along the lines with Ford v Ferrari (92%) and Billy Beane's story,  Moneyball (94%).

Related:  HBO Max: Every Movie & TV Show Coming In November 2021

Biopics are inevitably subject to intense scrutiny by virtue of being centered on real-life figures, not to mention figures who still hold celebrity statuses today. The story of Serena and Venus Williams isn't new to many viewers, nor is the presence of their coach/father, Richard. What sets  King Richard  apart in terms of its positive reviews is how warm and emotionally poignant the sports biopic is, as driven by its incredible lead performances. Here's what the positive reviews have been saying.

New York Times :

" There is nothing haphazard or sloppy about “King Richard,” and it succeeds because it has a clear idea about what it wants to accomplish. The script, by Zach Baylin, is sometimes unapologetically corny... but the warmth and verve of the cast make the sentimentality feel earned ."

Rotten Tomatoes : ​​​​

" King Richard transcends sport biopic formulas with refreshingly nuanced storytelling -- and a towering performance from Will Smith in the title role ."

The Washington Post :

" Given the horror stories that abound about male coaches and female athletes, “King Richard” provides a welcome, wholesome flip side. "

Related:  Every Major Movie Role Will Smith Turned Down

Roger Ebert.com :

“ Much will be made of Smith’s performance, which is excellent, and I’m hoping Ellis gets all the praise she deserves. But Sidney and Singleton should also be commended for their excellent work as Venus and Serena… because it’s the acting across the board that ultimately saves “King Richard. ”

" The vast majority of sports movies are about exceptional talent. “King Richard" is about exceptional belief: the conviction of one man, Richard Williams, that he could turn his daughters Venus and Serena into the world’s greatest tennis players. Hindsight makes this a story worth telling ."

" What we see on-screen is both rewardingly jagged and uncommonly thoughtful, an engrossing family drama that doubles as a sharp rethink of how a family operates within the overlapping, often overbearing spheres of race, class, sports and celebrity ."

Most reviews touch upon the creative tactics King Richard uses to tell the story: Using the parents to focus on the conviction of spirit rather than the exploitation or triumph of innate talent. While King Richard is a sports movie at its heart, the primary reason why critic reviews are leaning positive is the main actors’ performances. Fresh Prince star  Will Smith , in his bid for a Best Actor Oscar, gives an enthralling performance as Richard Williams. Sports biopics largely rely on actors’ performances, and King Richard properly balances the talents of its cast from the tumultuous marriage of the Williamses to the budding stardom of young Venus and Serena. King Richard is a dramatic showcase of a family that, even amongst controversy and societal criticism, leaves viewers with a warmer, more optimistic view of the world and personal potential, which is a message and tone that has been extremely popular in recent media with the likes of Apple TV+'s  Ted Lasso . Even though King Richard has been widely praised, however, there have still been some critical detractors. Here’s what some of King Richard ’s negative reviews have been saying:

Related:  Why Will Smith Has Never Played A True Villain

The Chicago Tribune :

“ Richard’s rougher edges and harsher parenting and training impulses have been sanded down to a nice, smooth surface. That’s a shame, because Smith is not just a movie star. He’s an extremely savvy dramatic actor, who lets his natural comic ebullience energize all sorts of material. ”

Thrillist :

" King Richard itself is too confused about its protagonist to create a compelling case as to why he should be the focus at all. Smith is caught at the center of that. Though he's putting the full weight of his significant charm behind the characterization, it's not quite enough to illuminate a puzzling figure ."

Slant Magazine :

" Indeed, in pushing back against the image of Richard Williams (Will Smith) as nothing but a greedy narcissist, the film smooths out nearly all of the man’s rough edges... the film excuses, if not outright ignores, the questionable tactics he used to push them toward greatness. "

While even the most negative reviews can’t help but give kudos to Will Smith’s performance as Richard Williams, the most common criticism is that King Richard ’s script doesn’t allow Smith to go dark enough with the figure. While Williams is known for his unconventional approaches and determinism, he was also divisive for his controversial methods and demeanor. Keeping King Richard in a warmer light, the film lets this side of Williams sit below the surface, just simmering, without ever allowing Smith to bring out the deeply dramatic nuances of the character. As such, King Richard shows its main character is an egomaniac with a volatile unlikability, but also situates him as unimpeachable, thus weakening a rounded portrayal of its real-life anti-hero. While not allowing movie star Will Smith to explore the darker side of Williams may have detracted from a complete portrait of the man in question, King Richard is still a fresh, nuanced sports biopic that presents hope and heart for viewers.

Next:  The Queen's Gambit's Ending Shows The Fatal Flaw In Hollywood Biopics

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‘the life of chuck’ review: despite a dancing tom hiddleston, mike flanagan’s stephen king adaptation can’t quite find its footing.

Mark Hamill, Karen Gillan and Chiwetel Ejiofor also star in the genre-tripping film about embracing hope in the face of tragedy.

By Michael Rechtshaffen

Michael Rechtshaffen

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It comes as no surprise that reigning scare-meister Mike Flanagan has a soft spot for Stephen King, having successfully adapted Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep for the big screen. But his latest stab at King, the genre-warping The Life of Chuck , makes for an oddball if less ideal fit.

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But although the resulting feature, which held its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival with the author in attendance, delivers the uplifting goods, it does so at the cost of an initially darkly intriguing premise that grows more diluted and precarious as it moves along — or, backward in this case. The end result offers up such unexpected developments as a dancing Tom Hiddleston and Mark Hamill as a Jewish zayde (grandpa), Flanagan’s rabid fan base might prefer to wait for his planned take on The Exorcist franchise.

The existential third act, which sets up the film, finds the world in a dystopian quagmire of natural and man-made catastrophes — among them a devastating 9.1 magnitude California quake resulting in the state “peeling away like old wallpaper,” Ohio wildfires, widespread flooding in Europe and a volcano in Germany, not to mention a wobbly Internet that’s threatening to disappear permanently at any given moment.

Coping as best they can with the rapidly impending doom are a stoic schoolteacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his ex-wife, an exhausted nurse ( Karen Gillan ). The couple are also trying to make sense of all the mysterious “Thanks Chuck!” billboards, signs and TV ads popping up everywhere showing the mild-mannered face of one Charles Krantz (Hiddleston), congratulating him on 39 great years.

With a game Hiddleston giving it his all, the sequence, however seemingly out of place, can’t help but captivate.

Then, alas, we move onto the much longer first act, which presents Krantz’s backstory in a decidedly Spielbergian framework: He was raised as a young man (Jacob Tremblay) by his grandparents (Mia Sara and Hamill, doing his best Richard Dreyfuss), discovering his love of dance and determined to find out why there’s a padlock on the door to their Victorian home’s cupola.

It’s by every measure the weakest of the three acts; the more that is revealed the less remains that makes the rest special. Flanagan, as demonstrated in his Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mass , excels in creating an unsettling mood and atmosphere that bridges each episode. Here, lacking in tonal connective tissue, The Life of Chuck may still leave in its wake the desired upbeat, life-hugging effect, but it ultimately proves to be an ephemeral one — as transitory as the apparitions who usually haunt Flanagan’s more potent ghost stories.

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• What Is Cinema?

Hugh Grant Is an Unholy Creep in Heretic

Debating religion in the broadest and most casual of terms—is God real? What is the difference between myth and gospel?—is fun, in the liberal-arts dorm room, early Bill Maher, everyone-mostly-agrees kind of way. Someone brings up the many flood stories that exist outside of the Bible; another person mentions the pagan traditions woven into Christianity’s. A smug, Dan Brown-esque consensus is reached, and then you open another bottle of Yellowtail.

Of course, the more fraught kind of debate—with people who really mean it and for whom the stakes are quite high—is less of a good time. That’s the kind we find in the new film Heretic , which premiered here at the Toronto Film Festival on Sunday. For its characters, Heretic is no fun at all. The audience, though, might feel transported back to those pseudointellectual adolescent conversations.

Written and directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods , Heretic is an alternately clever and silly horror-thriller that wants to have a kicky, pointed dialogue about faith vs. reason, free will vs. preordination. It maybe doesn’t arrive anywhere profound, but it has a good time laying out its thesis.

The terrific Chloe East and Sophie Thatcher play young Mormon missionaries evangelizing in a small, picturesque mountain town. East’s Sister Paxton is the more timid, naive one, while Thatcher’s Sister Barnes has a bit of flint to her, something flickering in her eyes that looks a little like doubt. Yet she also has a much higher conversion rate than Paxton, who is looking to land her first baptism. While most locals are resistant (or outright hostile) to this proselytization, the women have at least compiled a small list of the potentially interested.

Which brings them to the home of one Mr. Reed, a friendly and solicitous older chap played with dark charm by Hugh Grant . A storm is whipping up outside his quaint cottage, and he urges his visitors inside, where he promises to listen to their pitch and ask some questions. He seems like a dream candidate: affable, learned in theology but still curious. Naturally, things soon go horribly wrong.

The first part of the film is staged as somewhere between Socratic debate and lecture, as Reed prods the women about their convictions in increasingly sinister ways. The writing here is snappy, pop-literate, pleasingly twisty and ornate. Grant is having a grand old time, using that Oxford sophistication of his to thrill us to Reed’s steadily damning dissection of the world’s monotheistic beliefs. Thatcher proves a capable foil for his line of attack, while East credibly ratchets up the alarm.

The filming is crisp and satisfying too, effectively closing the walls in around Paxton and Barnes as they slowly come to the realization that they’ve wandered into a dreadful trap. The production design of Reed’s ominous home is detailed and thoughtful; it becomes the physical manifestation of a descent into hell.

Once that descent truly begins, Heretic ’s wheels start rattling just a bit. Beck and Woods know they need some creepy, jumpy visuals for the trailer, and so some more outsized elements are introduced. One longs for the simpler mechanics of the film’s first half, though the three performers keep things engaging, as does the unfolding of Woods and Beck’s puzzle box script.

The film is interested in the tenets and dogma and limits of religion, yes, but more so in its practical effect on the world, particularly on women. It is a film about manipulation, and about the ceding of autonomy to a higher power. Heretic might say that such ceding is often done under duress, not of ecstatic free will—if such a thing as free will even exists.

Have we seen versions of this theme before? Sure. But Heretic presents them in some novel forms. And it is refreshing to see a horror movie—especially of the cool, meme-able A24 varietal—that has old, old social issues on its mind, rather than more zeitgeisty hot topics. Of course religion is still a mightily pertinent matter, but Heretic wants to kick at the foundation of all this, the core principle, rather than its contemporary mutations.

It’s also quite nice to see a horror movie that is so largely focused on talk. And what a talker Grant is, during this ongoing realignment of his star profile. If someone had told me back in the floppy-haired 1990s days, or the rakish early 2000s ones, that Grant would someday arrive at this kind of role, I’d have scarcely believed them. But Grant continues to prove himself an adept character actor—he may always be playing some version of Hugh Grant, but he’s been ever resourceful in bending the trope of himself into various shapes. It’s not quite transubstantiation, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a small miracle, either.

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‘Elton John: Never Too Late’ Review: The Original King of Pop Gets the Satisfying Documentary He Deserves

It dives into Elton's '70s heyday, which it captures with astonishing archival detail, cutting back and forth between that and the lead-up to his 2022 Farewell Concert in Dodger Stadium.

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There’s a moment in “ Elton John: Never Too Late ,” a robustly satisfying and emotional documentary about the life and career of Elton John, that captures him, in a most revealing way, in his ’70s heyday.

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I’m not suggesting that everything was just “tossed off.” The great albums of the ’70s — Elton’s and those of many others (Steely Dan, Led Zeppelin, ABBA, Queen, you name it) — were marvels of composition and recording-studio craft. But Elton John, the grandest pop figure of his time, the original king of pop, had an extremely idiosyncratic career, because he was always breaking ground in ways that he never planned to. His songs poured out of him almost as if he had breathed them.  

The pair’s first album together, “Empty Sky” (1969), didn’t really go anywhere. But for their second album, “Elton John” (1970), Elton sought out the producer of what he thought was the best song going (David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”), and that was Gus Dudgeon, who would become to 1970s Elton what George Martin was to the Beatles. Dudgeon brought in the string arranger Paul Buckmaster and decided to record the album live, with Elton singing along with the orchestra — a technique that looks back to what Phil Spector did. The result was that early haunting version of the Elton sound.

Yet none of that could have prepared anyone for what happened when Elton performed his fabled stint at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, a club that accommodated all of 250 people, on three hot August nights in 1970. The documentary includes footage of that legendary gig, which I’ve never seen before. Elton is bearded, looking different than he’s ever looked before or after, and he sounds transcendent. You can see why the audience of industry heavies was spellbound. (Later, in 2022, we see Elton revisit the Troubadour, and standing in the empty club he can’t believe how small it looks, and neither can we. It’s basically just…a bar .)

And none of that could have prepared anyone, even Elton himself, for what he then became onstage: a man who would play the piano, standing up, and shoot his legs behind him straight up into the air. It would be one thing if he were a naturally gymnastic performer, like Mick Jagger or Pink, but Elton, onstage, was a contradiction: a glam geek, clad in outfits no one had seen the likes of before, wearing his array of goggle glasses, strutting around onstage with the fervor of Freddie Mercury — but Elton, as he’s the first to say, had a doughy physique, and didn’t have rhythmic moves. He was like the ultimate awkward kid performing in spandex and feather boas in his bedroom.

Going into “Elton John: Never Too Late,” I’ll confess that I had a bit of a prejudice. I felt as if I’d heard the Elton John story, or at least the part where he becomes a running-on-empty cokehead and alcoholic, and is the biggest star in the world but miserable, and lets this all drag on for too many years to count, and is finally rescued by sobriety and love…I felt like Elton has told this story so often that I never needed to hear it again.

Cutler and Furnish made the very smart decision to focus on Elton’s hottest glory days as an artist (1970-1975), culminating in the night in ’75 that he performed at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles before 110,000 people. His special magic did a quick fade after that. I remember buying the album “Blue Moves,” in 1976, and though I kept playing “Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word,” I could just feel how Elton’s passion had leaked away. He composed a number of good songs in the years after that, but it would never be the same.

The film jumps back and forth between a chronicle of those insanely creative top-of-the-mountain glam years and Elton in 2022, during the last leg of his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour, which culminates in his return to Dodger Stadium for his final concert in America. It may all sound a bit tidy, but the portrait of Sir Elton today — the astonishingly gracious gentleman he is, the family life he found — is revealing and moving. He and David Furnish have two sons, Zachary and Elijah, and you can see that he’s an incredibly warm and loving dad.

So devoted a figure is the born-again-Elton-as-family-man that he can speak of the ’70s days dismissively. He’ll say, “The only thing in my life at that point was work,” as if there aren’t a million 27-year-olds who might say the same thing, and as if his work — writing and performing songs as sublime as “Your Song” and “Amoreena” and “Philadelphia Freedom” and “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” and “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” and “Grey Seal” (if you’ve never heard it, you must listen to the original 1969 version ) — were merely “work” any more than Beethoven composing his symphonies was. Elton should really cut his younger self some slack.

Of course, the bad feelings are all tangled up with what was then his hidden sexuality. And it’s extraordinary, in the film, to hear the original tape recording of the 1976 Rolling Stone interview in which Elton revealed his bisexuality (and his loneliness). At the time, there was some public scoffing at the “bi” part — at the fact that Elton didn’t simply say he was gay. But when you hear the interview, and place it within what stars were revealing (or not) back then, its heroism stands tall. Looking back, Elton now says that it liberated him. It was the first step in his letting go of his demons. The second step, which didn’t happen for another 14 years, was his getting sober (in 1990).

Reviewed at Toronto Film Festival (World premiere), Sept. 6, 2024. MPOA rating: PG-13. Running time: 102 MIN.

• Production: A Disney+ release of a Rocket Pictures, This Machine production. Producers: R.J. Cutler, David Furnish, Trevor Smith. Executive producers: Elise Pearlstein, John Battsek, Mark Blatty, Rachael Paley, Jane Cha Cutler, Luke Lloyd-Davies.
• Crew: Directors: R.J. Cutler, David Furnish. Camera: Jenna Rosher. Editors: Poppy Das, Greg Finton. Music: Elton John.
• With: Elton John.

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