Ridley Scott's 2023 epic puts Joaquin Phoenix in the bicorne and Vanessa Kirby beside him as Joséphine, and races through the whole arc in a little over two and a half hours: the young artillery officer at the siege of Toulon, the coup, the self-crowning at Notre-Dame, Austerlitz, the burning retreat from Moscow, and the final reckoning at Waterloo.
It is spectacle first and textbook second. The big set-pieces are extraordinary (the artillery duel on the frozen lake at Austerlitz alone earns the ticket), and the film hangs the politics on Napoleon's turbulent marriage to Joséphine rather than on the campaign maps. Historians have cheerfully picked over the details, so take it as a gorgeous, opinionated sketch rather than the last word. For the straight story, see the Napoleon page in the Learn section.
Three of our Paris stops turn up on screen: the coronation inside Notre-Dame, the Arc de Triomphe he commissioned to glorify the army, and Les Invalides, where his tomb still sits under the golden dome. A painless way to put faces and rooms to the history before we walk through them.