The Odyssey (2026)

Score: 5 / 5

How do you tell a new version of one of the oldest stories in the Western world? You start by telling a story about stories. I was a little nervous at first that Christopher Nolan would pull some of his usual shtick again and mess up the timeline of his own film, but then I remembered that The Odyssey itself isn't really linear. Of course there's no reason not to start in medias res, and in this case it makes perfect sense with Nolan's oeuvre. But the truth is that if you're consuming the foundational epic for its plot, you've already missed the mark. Sure, the whole dang thing is arguably "about" its plot, but what makes it really compelling is its sense of style, its complicated characters, its sense of pacing and propulsion despite its stretched timeline. 

Actually, Nolan's film feels at once like a wildly satisfying (and the first, which is crazy) adaptation of Homer's epic poem for a modern audience and one of the most riveting pieces of filmmaking this year. In a perhaps unobvious move, he starts us focused intently on Telemachus (reliable Tom Holland) and Penelope (a glorious Anne Hathaway), fending off a cadre of suitors feasting and whoring in the king's hall in Ithaca. These scenes take place near the end of the story, chronologically, as Odysseus has been missing for ten years. That's in addition to the ten years he was away from home for the Trojan War. He barely knows his own son, and Penelope is nearing the end of her rope. Or, rather, tapestry, which she cleverly uses (and unravels) to keep the wolfish suitors (led by a sniveling Robert Pattinson) at bay. These scenes, occasionally sprinkled in between flashback episodes of Odysseus's adventure, are filmed like a bleak political thriller, ending in a climactic banquet hall battle that, truly, took my breath away with its sheer barbarism and spectacle.

The bulk of the film -- though, as I say, arguably not its focus -- concerns the titular journey of its hero, told in lengthy flashback sequences. He's on an island with Calypso (Charlize Theron, wasted in the bit part but always a commanding and welcome presence on screen), eating lotus flowers (in a curious but effective change to the source material), suddenly trying to remember why he's there and for how long he's been stuck in a somewhat limbo-esque beachside paradise. He's seeing visions of his past in Troy, wallowing with his army for years outside the city gates until he designs and creates a massive wooden horse; this bit takes several scenes, including a particularly gross montage of the men hiding inside with their piss and shit and dead comrades, getting dragged and flipped around as they're brought into the city (again, not part of the original story, nor from The Iliad). He's also seeing the goddess Athena (Zendaya), though he doesn't always seem sure if it's really her, or a dream, or just his own imagination. All this is to say that his mind is fractured, and so is our approach to his story, a highly effective means of granting us emotional access to these characters and their plight as we, too, attempt to figure out what's happening.

Even a graduate-level familiarity with the material won't save you from at least wondering once or twice, "Gosh, I don't remember that part" or "Wait, who is that again?" That's because Nolan's vision isn't a straightforward adaptation so much as it is a thesis project, combining other sources (like Virgil) along with Homer to deliver a story that's familiar but fresh at the same time. He's uniting stories rather than corrupting them. At its heart, it's very much the story we want to see; in his grip, though, Nolan's story takes on new and important themes paired with some of the most arresting and thrilling visuals we've ever seen from an epic. Not because it's bombastic and loaded with CGI, but because most of it is filmed in seemingly natural light and with practical effects. Perhaps the only scene clearly done with CGI is the encounter with Scylla and Charybdis, and while I didn't love those designs, they worked fine enough. But the Cyclops, the Laestrygonians, the sirens, Circe's animals, and all the "big ticket" creatures and visuals are apparently practical. It's gobsmacking.

Yet for all the spectacle -- even the frustrating moments -- Nolan cares more about the effect of these things on his characters than about our experience of them. He makes it a profoundly human story, grappling with weighty themes of fate and purpose; he makes us wonder about our own lives, our glorious intentions, our miserable failures, our great shames and hopes, inviting us to think about the story of our own lives through the warping lens of memory, regret, and uncertainty. With all these ideas whirling around our minds, it might be easy to say the nearly three-hour runtime is a slog, but it isn't. The simplicity of these proceedings keeps us grounded, compelling us to continue experiencing rather than drifting away. The experience, though, is exhausting, and more than once during the film I had to stretch and breathe deeply, just to attempt to revive my endurance.

Despite the hullabaloo online about this film -- perhaps hypocritically, I'm becoming increasingly convinced to leave social media, if only to avoid people complaining loudly about things they neither understand nor care to -- and as a student of the classics, I had no significant qualms with this film's depiction of history or characters (or the cast, for that matter). Everyone is playing at the top of their games, including Benny Safdie, Elliot Page, Lupita Nyong'o in brilliant double roles, Himesh Patel, and even John Leguizamo. Samantha Morton plays such a terrifying Circe that I nearly choked on my own saliva (and, again, her scene features some of the nastiest and most inventive practical effects I've ever seen on film). The costumes are exquisite, especially Agamemnon's helmet. Ludwig Goransson's score is transportive, utilizing ancient instruments to evoke a unique sonic palette. Sure, some of the dialogue can be off-putting (the repeated use of "dad" in Telemachus's mouth is grating), but any complaints about accents, etc., are little more than stupid hot air from people who have clearly never thought critically about any film.

And we haven't even discussed the analog filmmaking, the brutally physical shoot, Nolan's use of brand new technology for IMAX film cameras, or even Matt Damon's performance as the complicated protagonist. There will be college courses based around this film for the sheer amount of material to be covered. While I'd have liked a few changes, having now seen the film twice (specifically, more cleverness and agency and violence from Penelope, more comeuppance for Mia Goth's character, a better visual on the sirens, less obsession with genre lingo like "Zeus's law," and slightly more elevated dialogue a la The Lord of the Rings), I'm so thrilled that this is what we have. Seeing this on the biggest screen possible and with the best sound system will change you; there were moments of such intense passion from the subwoofers that my seat was vibrating like in a 4D movie. Most importantly, Nolan expects us to both do our homework, denying us the pleasures of modern blockbusters and forcing us to catch up with him in a story that feels almost suspiciously anti-AI and anti-summary. These are complex ideas and characters, and we're meant to approach them with appropriate nuance and thoughtfulness. Harryhausen films and their ilk are fabulous and personal favorites, but Nolan is giving us something brand new. Which is saying a lot when he specifically references such things, including a shot from the original Clash of the Titans (1981) involving Athena's statue's head broken off and tumbling down steps. It's a single shot, and I let out a half-strangled moan and laugh combined that probably unnerved people sitting around me. They should be so fortunate to understand the craft at work here. All hail!

The Whale (2022)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Charlie is in trouble. He's alone in a small Idaho apartment he can't leave. He teaches writing to online college kids from his laptop with the camera off, telling them it's broken. He binges on pizza and fried chicken and sweets, mostly delivered to his door by a faceless driver named Dan who he never sees. He hasn't been outside in years. Charlie has a complex life, one that we learn about over the next two hours, but the gist is this: a decade prior, he left his wife (and mother of their daughter) for a young male lover named Alan, who committed suicide due to religious guilt over his sexuality. Since then, Charlie's depression has led to binge eating and sloth to the point that he now weighs over 600 pounds. He's almost immobile, more or less glued to his sofa, and as of the start of this film, is in the throes of congestive heart failure. The film takes place over the course of one fateful week in his life.

He's got a few visitors, who mobilize the plot. There's a young man named Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a hopeful missionary determined to save the grotesque recluse; his church is the same one Alan belonged to. There's his friend and caregiver Liz (Hong Chau), a nurse who was also Alan's sister, who chastises Charlie for his self-destructive behavior while offering him whatever comfort she can. And then there's Ellie (Sadie Sink), a bitter and wicked young woman who is in fact Charlie's estranged daughter, who shows up because Charlie offers her money to spend time with him. He loves her unconditionally, and her indifference is only slightly mitigated by her desire for money. You see, when Charlie left his wife Mary (Samantha Morton), she took full custody of Ellie and forbade all contact. Oh yes, and Mary shows up in perhaps the film's most emotionally fraught confrontation.

For indeed, Samuel D. Hunter's screenplay (adapted from his own stage play) is essentially a series of confrontations. We learn incredible depth to these characters, and all revolve in and out with horrific new insights. Sometimes appallingly funny, other times devastatingly sad, their revelations finally help us better understand the mystery that is The Whale's titular protagonist. Charlie is, especially in Brendan Fraser's magnificent performance, the most unnervingly empathetic and optimistic person. He genuinely (and repeatedly) believes that people are really, truly good at heart and just want to connect honestly with each other. He wants to help the missionary divorce himself from the trappings of his church and just live faithfully; he wants Mary to stop drinking and forgive him (or herself); he wants Ellie to express her angst in healthier ways; he wants Liz to be free and live her best life on her own terms. The trouble is that Charlie is incapable of any of these things for himself: he's not being fully honest with anyone, he's not making any healthy choices whatsoever, and he is so addicted to self-pity and sorrow that he can't even imagine himself escaping his self-imposed doom.

And the ironies and cognitive dissonance only get worse, just as his intelligence, humor, and loving personality become more clear. He consistently tells the abominable Ellie she's an amazing person -- and she wrote, according to him, the best essay he's ever read -- but then, as she asks him, why doesn't he care enough about living to be around for her now? Why can't he heed his nurse and make healthy choices, if he so desperately wants to see Ellie shine? That's only one example, but each successive confrontation reveals more of these complexities.

A quick note on what has become the dominant discourse around this film: makeup, wigs, costumes, padded suits, and CGI are all tools used by filmmakers and actors to embody and portray characters. Always have been, always will be. Yes, it's good to talk about representation and be mindful and sensitive. But that doesn't precede or preclude the art from happening, and it shouldn't. So don't watch this film if you don't want to, but don't decry it for doing exactly what all performance art has done throughout history. Especially if you don't know what the film is doing with it.

Director Darren Aronofsky, one of my favorite directors, manages to do amazing work in this film with his actors (especially Hong Chau), with the production design (the whole film, with few minor exceptions, takes place in Charlie's apartment, but it never feels too staged or boring), and with his cinematographer Matthew Libatique. It's difficult to watch, both in terms of source material and thematic elements; Aronofsky tends to love psychological trauma in his films, and is used to generating an atmosphere of excess. I wouldn't have thought this was material appropriate for his aesthetic, but now describing it, I see it's exactly right for him. And, with the screenplay's use of Moby-Dick as something between allegory and allusion, it's just about perfect for me.

She Said (2022)

Score: 4 / 5

Another year, another Oscar-baiting journalism procedural. I don't say that as a critique, per se, and indeed I do love this sub-subgenre, but it seems that a major one with award-winning casts and writers shows up during awards season quite regularly. And as long as investigative reporters continue to capture our public consciousness with revelations about abuses of power and corruption, we'll have more A-list dramas like She Said. This one, from director Maria Schrader (Unorthodox on Netflix, which I cannot recommend highly enough) and writer Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Disobedience and Colette) tells the recent story of the downfall of Harvey Weinstein and the popularization of the #MeToo movement. More specifically, it's the story of the New York Times reporters who brought the situation to public light.

Carey Mulligan and Zoe Kazan play Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor, respectively, who in 2017 receive a lead that actress Rose McGowan was sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein. Other names begin to circulate, including Gwyneth Paltrow and Ashley Judd, the latter of whom makes an appearance in the film playing herself. The reporters need more names and more details, but many of the women are unable to speak due to various NDAs or unwilling to be blacklisted in their careers. Weinstein was very well connected as an Indiewood producer at the top of his decades-long game.

What frustrates me about this particular film is that it isn't ever quite as interesting as I wanted it to be. Of course it's loaded with frustrations as a result of the challenges its characters must overcome to publish their story, and that's fine. But the screenplay isn't particularly keen on fleshing out all the legal intricacies of the investigation, and so several moments left me wishing for just a little more dialogue to understand the realities these reporters faced. I'd contrast this film's approach with that of The Report, which is so haunting to watch it feels like a thriller; I'd compare it, on the other hand, to Spotlight in that it sacrifices some of the pleasures and anxieties of suspense in order to more fully engage with the emotional journeys of the survivors whose stories need to be heard.

This makes for a much more emotional than cerebral film, as it forces us to sit with the characters and experience their testimonies head-on. It's an effective approach, in no small part because the #MeToo movement is so recent and so drastically changing the makeup of film business. It's also timely given the last presidential administration, the executive of which is played in this film by James Austin Johnson (the uncanny political impersonator and comedian from SNL) in a single scene in voiceover. Another movie about institutions enabling powerful and abusive men, victimized women being silenced, and then having it all flipped is just what we need right now. 

I love that the film's characters are almost all women. It's telling that the title embraces the important second half of the "he said/she said" dismissal that often arises in questions of sexual assault or harassment. Not unlike Ridley Scott showed us in The Last Duel, that particular idea of believing what the survivor says is crucial, and often ignored in male-dominated spaces. The two leads here are women dealing with female issues; Twohey struggles with postpartum depression while Kantor has two young children at home, and while they are supported well by their husbands and editors (including Andre Braugher), this case sends them both into a spiral due to its immeasurable implications. But the supporting cast, including Patricia Clarkson as another editor and Jennifer Ehle, Samantha Morton, and Angela Yeoh as survivors is all excellent just like the two leads.

Ultimately, it's inspiring to see, like in The Post, their persistence and integrity win the day in the end. It's annoying to know that there are so many people implicated by the crimes in this film (Weinstein certainly didn't do what he did in a vacuum); who exactly paid off all the hush monies and settlements isn't a matter this screenplay wanted to tackle. But then again, I'm perfectly fine with any movie that lionizes this kind of social justice and the importance of a free press in the real world.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016)

Score: 4 / 5

Nervous as we all were about this new venture, Fantastic Beasts proves itself worthy of its notable talent and high expectations. Sure enough, this is no Harry Potter, and it has little in it worthy of much comparison. Whereas the Potter series thematically concerns itself with death, friendship, courage, love, and hope in its coming of age narrative, Newt Scamander's new series seems (at least from its initial installment) more interested in empowerment and autonomy, cleverness and kindness, multiculturalism and diversity, and just a dash of environmentalism. As you might be wondering, yes, this is about as timely as we could want.

It's also unabashedly fun. Eddie Redmayne's Newt is immediately lovable, sweet and quirky, lost in his own mind (and, often, briefcase). Apparently an ex-Hufflepuff, he finds himself quite alone in New York City in the early 1920s -- during the reign of terror of one Gellert Grindelwald -- having come to America to release one of his prize pets in its natural habitat, Newt knows precious little of the Jazz Age and American magical culture. We experience his awe at the detailed cityscape, replete with bobs and pinstripes, speakeasies and typically ignorant No-Majs (the unfortunately named Muggles this side of the pond). While Newt seems all too ready to reveal himself to a No-Maj named Jacob (the scene-stealing Dan Fogler), the ruling magical body MACUSA strictly enforces the secrecy and submission of its citizens. When Jacob inadvertently releases several magical creatures from Newt's care, an ex-Auror named Tina and her sister Queenie get involved. Together, they recapture the lost animals in lovely mini-adventures around the period city.

Of course, JK Rowling couldn't make the film so simple. So in addition to the mesmerizing period detail, she deftly sets up a dual plot, laying down only the skeletal tracks of the latter to, presumably, be fully realized in subsequent films. The second plot concerns young Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller), an abused orphan whose adoptive mother (Samantha Morton) preaches publicly for witch hunts. Her bigotry and violence may seem a bit cheap to those of us familiar with the likes of Bellatrix Lestrange or Dolores Umbridge, but its blatant cruelty stand out in the otherwise buoyant film as impeccably timely.

The film's allegory for empowerment of suppressed culture is made perhaps most abundantly clear in young Credence, a character who is ultimately described as a Squib, but whose repression at the hands of his abusive mother has created a dark force of destructive power, the very force that has been wreaking havoc on the city. Percival Graves (played to perfection by Colin Farrell), a chief Auror, has secretly made Credence his informant through false promises and one of the most chemically intoxicating seductions of the year. Handsome, charming, and single-mindedly Machiavellian, Graves seems hellbent on discovering the violent spirit spreading chaos across the city, and when he does find it, his intentions for it become alarmingly clear only just before his disguise is stripped away.

Dressed in impeccable Colleen Atwood originals, Colin Farrell steals the whole movie away. He looks like a sort of Cruella deVille, and his presence onscreen is at once pleasing and fearsome. His only rival in show-stopping glory is Carmen Ejogo as Seraphina Picquery, President of MACUSA, though the film doesn't use her nearly enough.

What else can we say? The film moves almost too fast at times, and it will require multiple viewings to get all the references and Easter eggs. Watch out for news headlines, names bandied about, background creatures, and a certain symbolic necklace, to warn you about just a few. It's so packed with visual magic that, at times, the film feels anything but magical, and the action gets airy and inconsequential. The movie doesn't delve much into any backstories for the characters or even American culture, and it spends a fair amount of time setting up what will surely be the narrative trajectory of any subsequent films. While the film's obvious pandering to its target audience may cause us some irritation, there can be no doubt that seasoned director David Yates is fully in his element. His awareness of style and heart have few matches in modern big-budget cinema.

IMDb: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them