One Battle After Another defeats Hamnet and Sinners at Baftas, as I Swear’s Robert Aramayo takes best actor

Paul Thomas Anderson drama enters final Oscars furlong as firm favourite after scoring six awards, as Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley becomes first Irish actor to win leading actress Bafta and Chalamet and DiCaprio denied leading actor award Full list of winners How the ceremony unfolded – the action as it happened One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s counterculture comedy about a washed-up revolutionary trying to protect his daughter from a ruthless military officer, has dominated the Baftas, taking home six awards including best film, best director, best cinematography, best editing, best supporting actor, and best adapted screenplay. The film, inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland , was nominated for 14 awards going into Sunday’s ceremony, the most of any contender – including nods for stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, Chase Infiniti and Teyana Taylor. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/f8BrwG1 via IFTTT

Napoleon review – Joaquin Phoenix makes a magnificent emperor in thrilling biopic

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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