Are you sitting uncomfortably? How Backrooms upended the horror movie

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It was just a creepy picture on the internet. Now it’s the year’s freakiest film. Its 20-year-old auteur Kane Parsons and stars Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve take us through the terrifying labyrinth Chiwetel Ejiofor has been on a lot of movie sets, but Backrooms was something different: a 30,000 sq ft labyrinth of apparently random corridors and chambers, all carpeted, fluorescent lit and decorated in the same sickly yellow wallpaper. It was so big that people were getting lost in it, says Ejiofor: “Especially on those first days. As you try to navigate your way around and you’re like: ‘I’m sure it’s this door, I’m sure that’s the way.’” He’s laughing at the recollection. “And you find yourself just back in the wrong corner of the whole studio and you’re like: ‘Get me some help!’” This is kind of the point of Backrooms – the movie and the online phenomenon that spawned it. It’s a concept that takes some unpacking, but as the premise for a buzzy A24 horror freakout, ...
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Napoleon review – Joaquin Phoenix makes a magnificent emperor in thrilling biopic

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Ridley Scott dispenses with the symbolic weight attached to previous biopics in favour of a spectacle with a great star at its centre

Many directors have tried following Napoleon where the paths of glory lead, and maybe it is only defiant defeat that is really glorious. But Ridley Scott – the Wellington of cinema – has created an outrageously enjoyable cavalry charge of a movie, a full-tilt biopic of two and a half hours in which Scott doesn’t allow his troops to get bogged down mid-gallop in the muddy terrain of either fact or metaphysical significance, the tactical issues that have defeated other film-makers.

Scott cheekily imagines Napoleon firing on the pyramids in the Egyptian campaign as well as witnessing the execution of Marie Antoinette (but not the humiliation of Louis XVI by the Tuileries mob, which he might actually have seen). Out of deference moreover, Scott and his screenwriter David Scarpa suppress all mention of Napoleon’s reintroduction of slavery into the French colonies. But above all, there’s a deliciously insinuating portrayal of the doomed emperor from Joaquin Phoenix, whose derisive face suits the framing of a bicorne hat and jaunty tricolour cockade. Phoenix plays Napoleon as a military genius and lounge lizard peacock who is incidentally no slouch on horseback. Others might show Napoleon as a dreamy loner, but for Scott he is one half of a rackety power couple: passionately, despairingly in love with Vanessa Kirby’s pragmatically sensual Josephine. Scott makes this warring pair the Burton and Taylor of imperial France.

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