Jack nicholson

As we wander our way through life, we encounter all manner of guilty pleasures. Some — say, watching reality television or consuming fast food — can be said to properly induce feelings of guilt, but many others really ought to make no claim on our conscience. Surely the least guilty of all guilty pleasures is the cinematic subgenre known as the inspirational sports movie. This perfectly respectable form has spawned countless enduring films, from National Velvet to Rocky. Their makers recognized that few things rouse an audience like the spectacle of an underdog mastering an athletic pursuit. With the 1986 release of Hoosiers, filmmaker David Anspaugh presented himself as the most gifted modern practitioner of the form.

Two centuries ago — on 5 May 1821 — Napoleon Bonaparte died in a rat-infested house. The fallen Emperor had spent his final years exiled on the British outpost of St Helena. Yet Napoleon’s ignominious last act was only the beginning of his legend. A recent data-driven study, published by Cambridge University Press, crowned him the second most significant figure in history, after Jesus no less. Stanley Kubrick, the virtuoso director of 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining, considered Napoleon the most interesting individual who ever lived. Kubrick’s passion project — never produced — was a biopic of the conqueror. He predicted it would be the ‘best movie ever made’. Napoleon’s life has everything a storyteller could want.