Cannes looks beyond Hollywood as US film-makers mostly fail to make the grade

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The 79th edition of the influential festival boasts an auteur-heavy lineup – with one, very big, country conspicuous by its almost total absence Gillian Anderson and Cara Delevingne to hit Cannes as auteur heavyweights dominate festival lineup Has Europe fallen out of love with the US? Has Cannes fallen out of love with Hollywood? Will the festival, like Nato, become a non-American institution? Either way, the annual announcement of the Cannes selection has revealed a list that skews away from Hollywood towards a renewed dominance of world-cinema auteurs and heavy hitters, including Pedro Almodovar, Cristian Mungiu and Asghar Farhadi. There’s certainly nothing to compare with last year’s Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible extravaganza, although there are directorial debuts out of competition for Andy Garcia (also starring) with his crime drama Diamond, and John Travolta directs Propeller One-Way Night Coach, expressing his love of aviation, based on his own novel. There are no Britis...
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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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