Better Man

Michael Gracey's Better Man opened in 2024 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 2025. The film is the unauthorised-but-actively-collaborated-with biographical musical of Robbie Williams — Take That years through his solo career, the addiction crises, and the long recovery — rendered, by structural conceit and visual-effects execution, with Williams played as a CGI chimpanzee voiced by Williams himself and motion-captured by Jonno Davies.

The conceit was widely greeted with skepticism on first announcement and broad acclaim on first viewing. Gracey, previously the director of The Greatest Showman, deploys the chimp metaphor — Williams's own framing of his self-perception during the years of addiction and depression — with a discipline the premise rarely earns. Steve Pemberton plays Williams's father Pete; Kate Mulvany plays his mother Janet; Damon Herriman plays his Take That bandmate Gary Barlow.

The musical sequences — Williams's catalogue restaged as production numbers, including a particularly extraordinary Rock DJ down Regent Street — were widely received as some of the most accomplished commercial-musical-numbers staged for the screen this decade. The film's commercial reach was modest; its critical reception placed it among the genuine surprises of 2024. Australian-Japanese stop-motion-VFX house Wētā FX received the Best Visual Effects nomination.