The Super Mario Galaxy Movie review – bland screensaver of a movie that’s actually worse than AI

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At this point, it’s trite to say that a bad film feels as if it’s been AI generated, but this simplistic sequel is next-level – it’s nothing more than an Easter holiday cash grab Here is an inert and uninteresting animated follow-up to The Super Mario Bros Movie , based on the legacy video game about two wacky Italian-Brooklyn plumbers Mario and Luigi, voiced here by Chris Pratt and Charlie Day; this kind of stereotype is evidently the last in mainstream entertainment to be considered offensive. Now they and mushroom-kingdom ruler Princess Peach (voiced by Anya Taylor-Joy) have to rescue Rosalina (Brie Larson), the adoptive mother of the faintly Minion-y creatures called the Lumas. She has been abducted by Bowser Jr (Benny Safdie), the son of wicked turtle Bowser (Jack Black), who did very much the same sort of thing in the previous film. Of course it’s intended for little kids, but it surely didn’t need to be such a visually dull screensaver of a movie, with even more of the cheesy,...
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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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