Napoleon (2023)

Napoleon is at its best when it turns history into lived experience: Ridley Scott stages war not as pageantry but as thunderous, mud-and-blood spectacle, while still finding room for the strange, intimate obsession at the story’s core. Joaquin Phoenix gives Napoleon a bristling, unpredictable interior life—part genius, part petulant bruised ego—and Vanessa Kirby’s Josephine isn’t a footnote so much as the film’s emotional weather, shifting the temperature of every scene she enters. The vibe is grand, darkly witty, and relentlessly cinematic, with images and set pieces that feel built for the biggest screen you can find. It’s also unapologetically R-rated and more interested in the messiness of power and desire than tidy history lessons, so if you want a textbook biography it may frustrate—but if you want a towering, craft-forward epic with real bite, it’s hard to resist.

Ridley Scott’s Napoleon clearly wants to be a sweeping, blood-and-thunder biography filtered through an obsessive, messy romance, and on a purely visual level it often delivers the big-screen grandeur you’d hope for. The problem is it plays like a highlight reel of major events stitched together with an uneven, sometimes oddly comic tone, so despite the long runtime the story can feel rushed, emotionally chilly, and strangely episodic. If you’re hoping for political depth, historical nuance, or a coherent character study that explains how Napoleon works as a leader and a man, the script tends to simplify and skip rather than build. Watch it if you want Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby sparring amid brutal, R-rated battle spectacle; skip it if you want a tighter, more accurate, or more psychologically satisfying epic.