Better Man

Michael Gracey's Better Man opened in 2024 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 2025. It is a biographical musical about Robbie Williams, unauthorised but made with his active collaboration, covering the Take That years, his solo career, the addiction crises and the long recovery. Its governing conceit, and its biggest technical feat, is that Williams appears throughout as a CGI chimpanzee, voiced by Williams himself and motion-captured by Jonno Davies.

When the idea was first announced it met a good deal of scepticism; once people saw the film, the reaction turned to broad acclaim. Gracey, previously the director of The Greatest Showman, handles the chimp metaphor (Williams's own image for how he saw himself during the years of addiction and depression) with far more discipline than the premise would seem to allow. Steve Pemberton plays Williams's father Pete, Kate Mulvany his mother Janet, and Damon Herriman his Take That bandmate Gary Barlow.

The musical sequences restage Williams's catalogue as full production numbers, and the best of them, an extraordinary Rock DJ down Regent Street, belongs with the most accomplished commercial musical numbers put on screen this decade. Commercially the film reached only a modest audience, but critically it was one of the real surprises of 2024. The New Zealand VFX house Wētā FX received the Best Visual Effects nomination for the work.