Napoleon
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'Napoleon' Has Something to Teach Viewers March 11, 2024
As awards season heats up in Hollywood, one highly anticipated blockbuster film of 2023 will face the disappointing reality of being less decorated than its eponymous 18th century-born Corsican military hero. With four wins (including two satirical “...
The Little Corporal Gets a Little Film December 06, 2023
Among all art forms, the movies have the greatest propensity to glorify violence, brutality, and savagery of all sorts. Because the medium is inherently kinetic, cinema captures the thrill, terror, and barbarism of battle; and because it is empatheti...
History According to Ridley Scott December 05, 2023
Ridley Scott could not have picked a more exciting period in modern history to make a movie about. The years between 1789 and 1815 form one of the most crucial epochs of the last three centuries. The great upheavals kicked off by the French Revolutio...
The Missing Love Story in 'Maestro' December 01, 2023
What do the sex lives of historical figures tell us that we don’t already know? What, for instance, do we stand to gain from learning that Marilyn Monroe called Arthur Miller “Daddy,” that Sanskrit made Oppenheimer horny, and Elvis saved himself for ...
The French Are Not Happy About “Napoleon” December 01, 2023
Americans are so used to seeing history played by Americans that the oddity of it hardly registers anymore. Charlton Heston was the Spanish El Cid and the Hebrew Egyptian Moses and the Judean Ben-Hur—believe it or not, he won an Oscar for that one—an...
Ridley Scott’s Small Man of History December 01, 2023
I watched the trailer for Ridley Scott’s Napoleon this summer in an Airbnb in Paris, with my seven-year-old son crowded up against me, clutching the Playmobil Bonaparte he’d selected at the Louvre gift shop. It was an exciting three minutes for the s...
REVIEW: ‘Napoleon’ November 29, 2023
The British director Ridley Scott has made an American film about the French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte. Reactions to Scott’s Napoleon divide in two ways. First, there is the division between the French and everyone else....
How 'Napoleon' Stacks Up Against the Emperor’s Real Story November 28, 2023
Ridley Scott’s biopic Napoleon, in which Joaquin Phoenix plays the French emperor, hits theaters on Nov. 22. The film tracks Napoleon’s rise to fame during the French Revolution, delves deep into his lifelong love for his wife Josephine, and depicts ...
“Napoleon” Cannot Quite Vanquish Its Subject November 24, 2023
The new movie from Ridley Scott, “Napoleon,” with Joaquin Phoenix in the title role, runs for two hours and thirty-eight minutes. That’s almost as long as Napoleon’s coronation, at Notre-Dame de Paris, in 1804. The ceremony began at midday and lasted...
Ridley Scott Is Daring You to Watch ‘Napoleon’ November 24, 2023
“History,” said Napoleon Bonaparte, “is a set of lies agreed upon.” That sound you hear 200 years later is Ridley Scott banging his fist on a table with appreciation before shooting a scene in which the man known as “The Nightmare of Europe” literall...
I Am Begging My Brain to Stop Thinking About 'Napoleon' November 24, 2023
Genuinely, I'm sorry to do this, but you really need some context before we dive into my experience watching Napoleon. In freshman year history class, Mr. C demanded that I memorize the capital city of each and every state in this damned country. So,...
An Enjoyable Extravaganza November 23, 2023
When it comes to battle tactics, Napoleon Bonaparte (as played by Joaquin Phoenix) is very gun forward. There are few conflicts he marches into that don’t involve the firing of many cannons, an instinct befitting his status as an artillery commander ...
Ridley Scott: Our Anglo-Saxon Maximus November 22, 2023
A decade ago, I rewatched Gladiator in a freezing cold forward-operating base outside Mosul with Kurdish Peshmerga, cocooned in brightly-coloured blankets. When I complained that the sound wasn’t working on the small television, someone replied “Sure...
'Napoleon' Is a Spectacular Mess November 21, 2023
It sounds strange to say that a 2-hour-and-38-minute-long epic like Ridley Scott’s Napoleon feels rushed, but even a runtime that capacious proves too short for this ambitious but muddled film to cover almost three decades of its subject’s absurdly e...
A Great Film That Wasn’t November 16, 2023
How I long for a good new movie. I can only watch the good old ones so many times. Rather than wear them out in my mind, I must leave longer and longer gaps between viewings. I have had this yearning for many years now, and it is not often fulfilled....
Mastery and Command November 15, 2023
When Robert Peel was appointed Under-Secretary for war and the colonies for Great Britain in 1810, in the middle of the greatest war it had seen, he was only twenty-two. On his appointment, he received a letter from his dean at Christ Church Oxford. ...
Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” Complex November 07, 2023
On the morning of the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte was full of catastrophic confidence. His seventy-three thousand troops were camped on a ridge near a tavern called La Belle Alliance. His nemesis, the Duke of Wellington, occupied a slope a...
National Lampooner May 02, 2023
The old story famously goes that to curb vainglory as their victory parades marched onward, conquering Roman generals stationed a slave behind them to murmur “Memento mori”—remember you are mortal. Going the Romans one better, King George III and his...
The Regal Rise of Le Petit Caporal November 22, 2022
With retrospect, Napoleon claimed that there was a specific moment when he first realised he was superior to other men. It was just after the Battle of Lodi (10 May 1796), when he was leading the French revolutionary army in Italy and his soldiers ha...
Educating the Founders November 11, 2022
Andrew H. Browning follows Napoleon’s advice in reconstructing the education of the fifty-five Framers of the Constitution in his Schools for Statesmen. For Browning, the critical agreements and disagreements at the Constitutional Convention cannot b...
‘Napoleon’ Review: The Road to Waterloo August 02, 2022
“Extraordinary times produced an extraordinary man,” Michael Broers writes in the third and final volume of his extraordinary biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor who modernized Europe by military skill, technocratic order and the force of hi...
