I haven’t yet seen the new Napoleon, but this much earlier (1927) film by French director Abel Gance is well worth taking the trouble to visit. It was controversial at the time of its release and Gance’s career went into a steady decline. However, a superb restoration by Kevin Brownlow, in 1980, went some way to restore Gance's reputation as a major and innovative filmmaker (in his use of triple screen projection for example).
The film was criticised, at the time of its release, for its truncated and one-sided portrayal of the French Revolution and its main players such as Robespierre and Marat. Even Danton (who usually gets a "good press" – see Andrzej Wajda’s film about him) is shown as lacking in human qualities. The rest all are sadists, revelling in blood and executions.
In the words of the prominent French film critic Leon Moussinac (writing in Humanité, the French Communist Party newspaper, 24 April and 1 May 1927) Gance offers us a "…Bonaparte who is a pure figment of the imagination, who emerges from a French Revolution that is historically false and even from a bourgeois point of view totally unacceptable. A Bonaparte for budding fascists".
See if you agree.