Akshay Kumar's Ghis Ghis Ghis is not here to win critics; it's here to hijack weddings, reels and meme pages

There are songs that arrive with mood lighting, designer costumes, international locations, 400 background dancers, drone shots, neon frames and a marketing deck longer than the screenplay. And then there is Ghis Ghis Ghis from Welcome To The Jungle, which seems to have arrived with only one mission: Boss, speaker phaadna hai. In an industry that has become painfully obsessed with looking cool, sleek, premium, curated and Instagram-safe, Ghis Ghis Ghis feels like that one loud baraati who enters the wedding before the groom, dances with the band, argues with the dholwala, eats two plates of chaat and still becomes the most memorable person of the evening. The recently released song from Welcome To The Jungle features Akshay Kumar with Bhojpuri star Akshara Singh has clocked more than 6 million views in the past 24 hours. But the bigger story is not just the song. The bigger story is what the song represents. Bollywood has spent the last few years trying very hard to decode virality. T...

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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