Napoleon

Like a tour of the optometrist's: there's a lot of grind and not enough spectacles. Ridley Scott made the dubious decision to focus the lens of Napoleon Bonaparte's biopic on his love life rather than his military expertise and failures. So, instead of examining his expansion into the Americas and the political savior faire required to unify a divided France (by, for example, naming the Place des Vosges in Paris after the first French region to send taxes to the empire), we get overlong scenes of him having bad sex with his wife while both of them wear all the clothes. Not to mention, and I won't because I'm alone in this, that the movie is made entirely in English, which is the intellectual equivalent of watching a civil war movie where the North and the South run around speaking German. Nope, sadly, instead of a film worthy of an emperor we get a pile of reenactments based on some famous paintings.

The fights and battle scenes were nice. However, the romance scenes were really cringe (that it was actually almost uncomfortable to watch) - was Napoleon really like this or are they exaggerating it? The performance of Phoenix was really weird when he was talking about fighting at the Toulon port, was really monotoned for some reason but his voice acting got better as the show went on.