Napoleon (M18)

158 minutes, opens on Nov 23
2 stars

The story: Sir Ridley Scott steers American actor Joaquin Phoenix through a dramatisation of French general Napoleon Bonaparte’s three-decade rise, reign and downfall, from the 1789 French Revolution to his death in 1821. English actress Vanessa Kirby co-stars as the adulterous empress Josephine, whose love was the one thing he could not conquer.

“You are the greatest leader in the world,” marvels a royal subject in the US$200 million (S$267.4 million) Apple Studios prestige production Napoleon.

The eponymous warlord, upon crowning himself Emperor of France in 1804, brought Continental Europe under his dominion.

So, yes, his military genius was as unrivalled as 85-year-old Scott’s classical action showmanship in The Last Duel (2021), Kingdom Of Heaven (2005) and Gladiator (2000), which earned Phoenix his first Academy Award acting nomination for portraying another king, the Roman Commodus.

A cannonball ripping into Napoleon’s steed at the 1793 Siege of Toulon is a heart-stopper, topped by a widescreen Battle of Austerlitz set piece that fully displays the commander’s tactical cunning.

And yet, a wilfully uncharismatic Phoenix plays the mighty ruler as little more than a surly insecure cuckold, who is impotent at controlling his consort’s philandering. Josephine even ignores the mash notes he faithfully dispatches from the battlefields.

Scott has situated a historical war epic inside a bedchamber melodrama for a put-down of male power. But his 158-minute narrative is shapeless.

Prominent figures such as Napoleon’s nemesis Duke of Wellington (Rupert Everett) pop by. Years pass, scenes appear. The imperial couple are lustily rutting one moment and petulantly pelting each other with lamb chops the next.

The quasi-comedy struggles to establish a tone and momentum, and the buffoonish anti-hero is no Napoleon complex.

Hot take: This weightless interpretation of the most famous Frenchman will not go down in history.

Anatomy Of A Fall (NC16)

151 minutes, opens on Nov 23 exclusively at The Projector
4 stars

The story: A woman is suspected of murder when her husband is found lying dead in the snow outside their French Alps chalet. As the sole witness, the couple’s 11-year-old visually disabled son faces a moral dilemma.

Did the deceased plummet from his attic by accident? Or was he pushed?

Winner of the Palme d’Or top prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and a current nominee for five European Film Awards including for best film, actress and director, French legal drama Anatomy Of A Fall is really an autopsy of a marriage.

The wife is indicted after a year of inconclusive investigation. German actress Sandra Huller, in her second collaboration with her Sibyl (2019) auteur Justine Triet, is stupendous in the starring role, maintaining her innocence and inscrutable composure over the lengthy trial while ugly details of her marital breakdown are picked apart.

The jury hears all about the resentments, the jealousies, the fights and her bisexual affairs. A remix of American rapper 50 Cent’s 2003 banger P.I.M.P. becomes a critical piece of evidence.

The defendant, Sandra Voyter, is a German novelist far more successful than her French writer husband Samuel, played by Samuel Theis. Both mined their lives for their literature.

Triet does the same by naming her characters after the actors. The French film-maker’s cerebral and drum-tight procedural is straightforward only in its courtroom setting as it layers on the ambiguities for an interrogation into fact, fiction and memory: the subjective nature of what they call truth.

The closing testimony by the son (Milo Machado Graner), a “blind witness”, will leave viewers ever more unsure of whodunnit. They will also be left with P.I.M.P. blasting in their heads.

Hot take: Thanks to the commanding film-making, this art-house crime mystery earns – and deepens – every minute of its hefty runtime.