Before spiraling costs forced him to retreat, Stanley Kubrick famously claimed his planned Napoleon biopic would be "the best movie ever made". Ridley Scott, a visualist with similarly unwavering self-belief, hasn’t reached those unimaginable heights with his own account of the French autocrat’s life, but this masterfully marshaled, entertainingly playful historical epic is one of the 85-year-old director’s finest features in almost two decades.
Opening with the macabre execution of Marie Antoinette in 1793, David Scarpa’s smartly focused screenplay covers Napoleon’s life from his career-making role in ending the Siege of Toulon, to his death in exile on Saint Helena almost 30 years later.
