Gladiator

Following sepia studio logos and an introductory text that swirls inside the mists of time, Gladiator gives its opening seconds over to a hand touching the tips of long, wheat stalks during golden hour. While unseen children laugh, off in the distance, we watch as bronzed fingers lightly grasp at this waving grass, enjoying the prickly sensation. This interlude does not represent the present for Russell Crowe's Roman general Maximus, they are either his memories or a fantasy of home that has wriggled into him then refused to budge. Crowe's soldier blinks himself out of this trance to discover that he is still trapped on enemy territory in the midst of winter, preparing for an imminent, apocalyptic battle. It is, in a way, a dichotomy that is just as pronounced as the one experienced by Rick Deckard in the various Director's Cuts of Blade Runner: a dream that is pointedly disconnected from each character's current reality. Whereas Deckard's drunken, future-shocked reveries depict a muscular unicorn crashing through a forest, Maximus' interior perspective is softer, suggestive of a private moment that this man may have actually physically encountered. 

These personal desires instantly propose Maximus as romantic but beleaguered, an instrument honed by decades of bloodshed that would, quite happily, pack up then leave this place if he enjoyed that level of authority. Maximus returns to these visions again and again as the film presses forward. They expand in scope to explicitly include his wife and son, the situations curdling into precognitive glimpses of their death at the hands of bloodthirsty Praetorians. Later they are fleeting comfort for Maximus, following his failure to show fealty to Joaquin Phoenix's murderous heir. The visions are now drained of colour and life, taking on the same stark, funereal quality as that present in Arnold Böcklin's painting Die Toteninsel, specifically the monochromatic third version, painted in 1883. Scott's film portrays the afterlife as a place of family and comfort, an escape from obligation otherwise thwarted by the machinations of madmen. Happiness then is something always just out of Maximus' living reach. Even before his diseased body is sold into slavery, the General is very specifically a pawn in larger schemes. The dying emperor Marcus Aurelius, played by Richard Harris, may trust and appreciate Maximus but the younger man is still just a tool, a way for this war-mongering monarch to realign a legacy that has emptied his kingdom's coffers and allowed for the rise of Phoenix's poisonous, self-obsessed Commodus. 

These strict states of being for Maximus have structural purchase as well. The General is always subordinated; always stuck answering for somebody else's life-or-death demands. After he is unceremoniously ejected from the Roman army he is bought by Oliver Reed's Proximo, an ex-gladiator turned slavemaster. Later, when he fights before crowds in the Colosseum, he acts on behalf of Connie Nielsen's Lucilla, functioning as a male proxy who can lower himself to violence and vanquish her creeping brother. It is in these later passages that Gladiator reveals itself as a sports movie masquerading as a historical epic. Ridley Scott's film, written for the screen by David Franzoni, John Logan and William Nicholson, may begin with massed, strictly regimented armies blasting flaming rocks at treelines but once the principal characters have returned to Rome, Gladiator gives itself over to a mode of storytelling that has more in common with a pro-wrestling television show than pious, Technicolor biblical blockbusters. Above all there is a complete submission to a very specific format. Secondary characters may plot and plan in shadow but nothing in Gladiator can truly be accomplished unless it involves armed combat staged for sadistic spectators. Scott's film then pointedly elides any of the contextualisation typical to this genre: Maximus isn't saved by the Christian faith. Similarly, he doesn't allow himself to be martyred or transformed into a messianic symbol. His final act is to relay the message, the albatross-like burden, that Marcus placed around his neck at the beginning of the film. He does this job admirably, after getting to enact a ferocious, truly triumphant beating on the new nepotism hire. 

Joker: Folie à Deux

A sequel that doesn't just refuse its place in the ever-expanding comic book movie pantheon, but actively works to sabotage and undermine such an enterprise altogether. In that sense Joker: Folie à Deux can sit proudly alongside other, hectoring second episodes like Exorcist II: The Heretic or Gremlins 2: The New Batch instead. All three films are, after all, the result of the entity formerly known as Warner Bros. demanding a second visit to well-trodden turf. Folie has (similarly) been received as disappointing, if not actually frustrating and outright upsetting, for its obstinate desire to not give the audience the Clown Prince of Crime they so desperately desire. The film very obviously having next-to-no interest in assuming the role of gritty predecessor for a series of period Gotham City spin-offs. Despite this incalcitrant outlook there are a few, brief allusions to DC's wider world of criminality, but they are all so abashed or plain out-of-focus that they might as well have been clipped away in the edit bay. It's as if the piece itself cannot bare the studio notes that have, presumably, been foisted upon it. 

A promise of the kind of gauche, multipurpose continuity that the various Marvel universes have staked their future on does intrude very late in these proceedings but it's all so blurred and indistinct, occurring way in the background while Lawrence Sher's camera stays locked in on Joaquin Phoenix's gasping, drowning performance as Arthur Fleck. That thing that audiences say they want is present then but the execution is deliberately aggravating and disappointing, framed as a wrinkle casually unfolding on the periphery. Wouldn't you rather focus in on the character that the filmmakers actually want to tell you about? Hasn't Phoenix's all-consuming act sated your need to see this heavily merchandised monster revert to trick flower type? With Folie, writer-director Todd Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver have delivered a follow-up that isn't just ambivalent about its billion dollar ancestor, it's angry about it. Put out that the incredible marketplace success that the previous film enjoyed demands another instalment; appalled that a substantial amount of the film's audience saw in Joker an insurrectionist façade that could be applied to social movements from the shallower end of the political waters. 

Phillips' solution then is to underline the foibles and flaws inherent to his interpretation of this character: Fleck is physically meek and easily dominated; his grasp on reality is slippery and prone to fantastical delusion; and perhaps most crucially, he lacks the healthy, psychological scaffolding required to make good on his dearest make-believe. All of which very deliberately works against the expected assumption of a cackling super-identity for this jailed psychiatric patient. The captive audience of an ongoing court trial, as well as the introduction of Lady Gaga as Lee, a shade of Harley Quinn, would seem to suggest an opportunity for mass, cathartic slaughter but the pieces, by design, never quite click into place. Lee isn't the elasticated sidekick we're otherwise used to, she's a troubled rich kid holidaying in her idea of somebody else's mania. She's a fan. In love with the branding rather than the person that is actually stood before her. When Lee's fantasies are not being served she eagerly pouts and recriminates, damning Arthur for his failure to measure up to the persona that she has herself concocted. For his part, the wrinkled and emaciated Fleck doesn't fantasise about orchestrating the kind of orgiastic violence his beloved would seem to prefer. Instead he dreams about himself and her as brightly coloured subjects in a gently mocking variety show. Happiness as a Saturday night television broadcast. Unlike his would-be partner, who at first seems to be a particularly vivid agent of Fleck's imagination, when left to his own devices Arthur is quite happy to sit there medicated, soaking in Technicolor musicals. 

Joaquin Phoenix - True Love Will Find You in the End

Napoleon - Director's Cut

Appropriately enough, given that the feature itself is obsessed with describing folly and decay, Ridley Scott's Director's Cut of Napoleon finds itself dumped, with very little of the expected ceremony, to Apple's streaming service in the midst of a PR downturn for its star, Joaquin Phoenix. As well as torpedoing a Todd Haynes project by walking away at the last possible moment and leaving the rest of the cast and crew in the lurch, Phoenix's Joker follow-up, presumably the guaranteed hit he was expecting to re-write his 2024, attracted far more puzzled shrugs than expected at the Venice Film Festival. As if preternaturally conscious of this widespread cooling on its lead actor, and with nearly an hour more than the theatrical edit to play around with, Scott's second (released) pass at his bored, hateful Napoleon is, at least in its earliest passages, now happy to take the title character off the table for longer periods, apportioning more space to such things as the plight of women during the French Revolution. 

Obviously then that means particular attention is now paid to Vanessa Kirby's Joséphine. Although clearly a crucial aspect of the scaffolding underlining Napoleon's ascent from a canny officer to a crowned Emperor in the previous version of the film, Kirby's former viscountess is almost elevated to a co-lead here. Unlike the armies of soldiers, advisers, and hangers-on that sweep in and out of the piece, her Joséphine lingers, enjoying several successive scenes of her own, all of which are constructed around this woman's perspective and the dilemmas she encounters. Following the arrest and subsequent beheading of her aristocrat husband, Joséphine is herself imprisoned. During this detainment she is instructed, by another jailed lady, to get herself pregnant as quickly as possible, in the hopes that the child she carries will then delay her own execution. Of course the previous assembly held similar material but the telling there was perfunctory, as if in a rush to place Kirby by Phoenix's side. Here we're allowed a few scenes of Joséphine picking apart her place in post-revolutionary France.

We see the sacrifices Joséphine will have to make; the men she will have to sleep with and the alliances she will need to cultivate if she is to keep herself and, more importantly, her children safe from the guillotine. Her marriage to Napoleon offers the status and stability she craves but, in this broader telling at least, the relationship does (eventually) strike a note of equitability. Although Joséphine is dismissed just as quickly as Napoleon's other advisors, her voice is pointedly heard following her husband's less careful decrees. Her notes an informed or steadying influence that isn't heeded. Later, frostbitten and excreting blood in the midst of a Russian winter, it is clearer now that this Napoleon really is nothing without his Joséphine. Her absence, as the film winds its way towards another exile, is much more keenly felt too. The despondency lingers: Napoleon climbing into his former wife's death bed just to feel close to her. Prior to this viewing, the worry presented by a longer telling of Napoleon was that Scott's film would lose the harried but intoxicating energy that previously blasted us through a lifetime that has been exhaustively chronicled elsewhere. Although that style of construction has been mitigated (but not completely eliminated) here, the mode of storytelling that replaces it is one that consistently reiterates then underlines its points. 

For the armchair generals, who chafed when viewing last November's highlights package, Napoleon's battles are, presently, both more frequent and more complex in how they are expressed. Their telling is a little less tidy and therefore better able to generate a feeling that, in the thousands of men gobbled up by cannon fire, we are seeing the pitiless result of machinery coming to bear on vulnerable, goose-pimpled flesh. This awfulness then not simply a spectacle of detonation but the design and application of competing mad men. If the appearance of Chris Morris collaborator Kevin Eldon, or The Death of Stalin's Simon Russell Beale for that matter, weren't enough of a hint then frequent, straining trips to the lavatory in this Director's Cut confirm that Ridley Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa's Napoleon was always intended to be both sardonic and relentlessly improper. No matter how high this Emperor climbs there will always be some rude intrusion from reality to bring him crashing back down to earth. While she yet lives, Joséphine is often this instant adjustment - laughing in the face of a husband who reflexively issues the kind of pounding, master of the universe rhetoric so beloved of history books. When she's no longer available to us, Scott ensures that gnats itch and bother conspiring royals or flocks of birds slather stale Russian throne rooms with their chalky white shit. 

Napoleon

Ridley Scott's latest is an expensive historical biopic bankrolled by two electronics giants, the duo perhaps angling for some award season glory for their respective motion picture subsidiaries. Napoleon though is absent a great deal of the fawning hosannas that are usually deployed to justify the existence of similar films. The piece consistently works against the potential for its subject to be viewed in terms of sainted legend. Given the mammoth spend associated with simulating the massing armies of the distant past, often there's a sense, conceptually, that biographical epics should impart some sort of lesson. To simultaneously bring history to life while reassuring cagey, modern viewers that their time (and money) is being invested responsibly. Clocking in just under two hours and forty minutes, Scott's Napoleon betrays no such pretension. The film abandons the structural propriety, not to mention grave intonation, of this particular genre to arrive at a method of communication that gallops about, restlessly, in both time and space. Scenes begin with very little warning or preamble: the subjects of these arrangements often even seem momentarily startled that they have instantly arrived in these temporal situations.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Napoleon throughout the film, no matter how young or old he is supposed to be. He is our constant, maintaining his usual, indignant murmur regardless of the occasion. Instead of chocolate box laurels, Scott and screenwriter David Scarpa have approached the life and military achievements of Napoleon Bonaparte in terms of a sporting or artistic career: specifically, the ups and downs experienced by, or exerted on, an expert strategist. Campaigns and conquests are presented as individual projects that are often portrayed in terms of one striking image to denote a high (like, for instance, a cannon ball striking The Great pyramid of Giza), rather than a more serious, scholarly interrogation. The human neuroses that powered this series of violent expansions are afforded no small attention too, with the infatuation Napoleon feels for Vanessa Kirby's rather less enthusiastic Joséphine being particularly crucial. This preoccupation is important first in terms of revealing a grunting, human side to this monarch; later though Scott and Scarpa use the relationship to lightly pick at the idea that first-loves - the ones who supported their partners when they were climbing - are held with a regard that transcends any other pairing that follows. So, after his son is born to an Austrian Archduchess, this Napoleon journeys across countries to present a swaddled baby to his ex: a strange, Martian attempt at palliation. 

The hold that Napoleon's work-life has on the film is such that we are never subjected to inquiring glimpses into his childhood; no inciting events that shaped this personification of human ambition. Likewise there is precious little attention paid to Bonaparte's various periods of disgraced exile or the years surrounding his death. We view this Corsican brute as he powers himself up the social pecking order, usually through daring displays of explosive violence. Frequently, Napoleon himself is somewhere inside these swirling maelstroms: sometimes leveraging panic attack-level anxiety to blast himself up a siege ladder; other times riding into the midst of bloody scrums, his sabre drawn then striking. For every moment in Napoleon that teeters (knowingly) on the edge of farce, there's never any attempt made to invalidate the man's skill for arranging artillery or a bravery that sees him, at every level of power, willing to run into battle alongside his soldiers. Scott's Napoleon, for all its horseplay and physical humour, does retain this one note of pure adulation for its subject. As is often the case with Ridley Scott films, we are promised a significantly longer director's cut once Napoleon migrates to Apple's streaming platform. Unlike a Kingdom of Heaven though, the aggressive shorthand evident in this theatrical cut works. This assembly's clipped stanza emblematic of an ageing director who, quite simply, no longer has the time to fuck around with any material that doesn't interest him. 

Joker

Joaquin Phoenix's performance overwhelms Joker. It's by far the film's biggest component, crowding out a rigid sense of reality, the smoking sewer setting and, even, Robert De Niro. Phoenix plays Arthur Fleck, a struggling, mentally ill comedian who is no longer able to access the medication that keeps him level after budget cuts in a rotting, overripe Gotham City. Locating the action somewhere in the early 1980s may allow the filmmakers to pile the streets with static garbage and dress everyone up in layered corduroy, but Joker's social issues are timely: an uncaring ruling class mock the disenfranchised through word and deed, prompting a popular uprising.

Todd Phillips' film, much like The Dark Knight Rises before it, is only interested in these developments as colour to chart an idea of acceleration. Arthur Fleck neither buys into nor attempts to escalate the clown protests his criminal actions inspire. Fleck himself states that he has no political aim or objective, he's just reacting to the hand he has been dealt. This deliberately wishy-washy statement underlines an issue in Joker's plotting. Despite all the terrible revelations thrown Fleck's way, success lands in his lap with very little active manipulation. Fleck doesn't glom onto his disenfranchised copycats, he doesn't need to. One car-crash stand-up performance, somehow taped for posterity, lands the failed comedian exactly where he needs to be: in the company of De Niro's bruiser chat show host, Murray Franklin.

De Niro's work, particularly the actor's collaborations with Martin Scorsese, are positioned as antecedent to Joker. A collage of moments to be reconfigured or riffed on. The chimeric Fleck obviously combines elements of Rupert Pupkin and Travis Bickle (the straining musculature of Max Cady is in the mix too), but while The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver frequently affected a dispassionate, observational distance between camera and subject, Phoenix's work bleeds out of the frame and into his film's structure. Significant portions of Joker take place in and around Fleck's waking delusions, fantasies in which he is able to connect with a father figure or a love interest. This interior life is relatively wholesome, even meek then. That the comedian is raised to the level of a chaotic, modern messiah is an added layer of farce, that recalls the queasy incredulity at the centre of Monty Python's Life of Brian. So while Fleck never cynically leverages the disorder he arouses, Phillips and co-writer Scott Silver give themselves up to it, using Fleck's slippery grasp on reality to litter their film with orphan scenes of Phoenix plying his trade without any pressure to knit these strange little asides back into a more cohesive whole.