French critics slam Ridley Scott's Napoleon biopic as they round on 'petulant manchild' Joaquin Phoenix and take aim at 'boring' movie with 'deeply clumsy' and historically inaccurate scenes

French critics have slammed Ridley Scott's long-awaited Napoleon biopic as 'deeply clumsy' and 'boring' as the film premiered in Paris this week. Pictured: Joaquin Phoenix in the film Phoenix plays Napoleon in a hotly-awaited biopic which focuses on his tainted and complex relationships amid a stunning rise to power against the backdrop of the French Revolution A critic for GQ led with the headline: 'Joaquin Phoenix grimaces, Ridley Scott is bored and so are we' Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme this morning, French academic Dr Estelle Paranque acknowledged the film's inaccuracies but insisted that 'it is a movie, it is not a documentary'. Le Devoir slammed Phoenix's Napoleon as a 'petulant man-child who doesn't really seem to know what he's doing', leading with 'Not Waterloo, but not Austerlitz either' Patrice Gueniffey, writing for Le Point, said the film was 'the film of an Englishman. very anti-French' Cnet said the film's inaccuracies ' a certain frustration between what we expected, what we wanted, and what the final result is' C News said the film character was 'too linear to appreciate scope and never 'touched on the substance of what made an essential statesman' Le Figaro took aim at the biopic as a 'reductive version of history' and said the film should be renamed 'Barbie and Ken under the Empire' Patrice Gueniffey, for Le Point, said Scott portrayed the emperor as an 'ambitious Corsican ogre, a sullen boor and a cad with his wife'.