| July 24, 2026 
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Hi, movie fans! It’s pretty much all “Odyssey” all the time here at the Film Desk, and understandably so. The new epic from Christopher Nolan is a bona fide event. Interestingly, Nolan is part of the reason: “He himself has become the attraction,” according to my colleague Brooks Barnes, who notes that the director’s fans flocked to theaters on opening weekend to the tune of $124.5 million at the box office and that’s just domestically. International ticket sales brought in roughly $140 million more. As for the film itself, our movie critic Alissa Wilkinson wrote about how “The Odyssey” could be seen as a companion piece to Nolan’s Oscar-winning biopic, “Oppenheimer.” That may seem counterintuitive: What does the father of the atomic bomb have to do with the ancient Greek hero of a nearly 3,000-year-old epic? But she argues that Odysseus was really a proto-modern man who, in Nolan’s conception, understood that his own idea — the Trojan horse, which both stopped a war and destroyed ideas of honor — would bring about the end of an age. And he understood, just as Oppenheimer did, that his achievement would mean both the war would be over but also that civilization itself would possibly be destroyed. If you crave more tales of epic journeys, my colleague Maya Salam has a list of seven movies to stream that are, in her words, “Odyssey”-coded, a.k.a. ones that adapt the ancient text in bold and entertaining ways. To get an idea of just how wide-ranging they can be, her suggestions include both “O Brother, Where Art Thou” and a SpongeBob flick. Whatever you end up watching, enjoy the movies. |
