Metacritic reviews

Featuring hilarious yet acutely observed performances by Michael Shannon and Kevin Spacey as the titular characters, Elvis & Nixon, receiving its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, is a hoot.

And so it does in the deft and delightful Elvis & Nixon, a short, quick and clever recreation of the how that came to pass and an imagined version of the conversation that could have taken place.

While its sense of humor takes some gettin’ used to, the sheer spaciness of Liza Johnson’s stranger-than-fiction political satire ultimately proves its greatest asset.

When you have two of today’s best working actors acting on a high-wire to do justice to two of the most recognisable figures of the 20th century, it’s best to keep the focus solely located on them.

The film is taken with comfy gags that celebrate these men's ownership of pop culture, filtering them through a lens of unrevealing caricature.

The filmmakers rarely go beyond being pleased with how strange this convergence of pop-culture and political figures must have been, and so Elvis & Nixon comes across as both thimble-deep and distractingly self-satisfied.

Johnson’s film is filled with tedium instead of delirium.

Outside of Shannon's performance, Elvis & Nixon is enough to make you long for the nuance of Kissin' Cousins.

Inoffensive as it is inconsequential, this first foray into big-budget filmmaking from director Liza Johnson (“Hateship Loveship”) is a painful disappointment from start to finish, a frustratingly safe and unimaginative effort that squanders the potential of its story.

Told with the gravitas of a comedy sketch and the edginess of the funny pages, Elvis & Nixon at least has the good sense to appreciate that its namesakes were larger than life, each walled off from the world in their own way.