Napoleon is Ridley Scott's grand, irreverent, and deliberately provocative biography of France's most consequential military and political figure, played with idiosyncratic intensity by Joaquin Phoenix. The film chronicles Napoleon Bonaparte's rise from a relatively obscure Corsican artillery officer to Emperor of France, his campaigns across Europe, and his obsessive, mercurial relationship with Joséphine de Beauharnais (Vanessa Kirby) — the woman whose influence over him rivaled even his own ambition. Scott approaches the subject not with reverence but with a destabilizing bluntness, presenting Napoleon as a man of exceptional tactical intelligence married to crippling emotional neediness.

The film's spectacular battle sequences — Toulon, Austerlitz, Waterloo — are staged with Scott's characteristic sweep and visceral precision, finding the chaos and carnage of Napoleonic warfare in a way that makes the glory almost inseparable from the butchery. Joaquin Phoenix refuses to play Napoleon as a legend: this is a man who is awkward at dinner, petulant in defeat, and capable of genuine vulnerability in the bedroom. Vanessa Kirby holds her own in every scene against Phoenix, giving Joséphine a layered intelligence that makes her the film's most compelling character.

Napoleon is not a careful, consensus-seeking portrait of its subject — Scott freely acknowledges his willingness to sacrifice historical accuracy to serve the film's emotional and dramatic logic, and the result is something more vivid and alive than many more dutiful biopics. The film is available to stream on Apple TV+ after its theatrical release, and an extended director's cut running over four hours brings additional scenes and a deeper portrait of the marriage.