"The Odyssey"

 ☆☆☆☆

The same rule applies to Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey as to every other film ever made: Is it a good story? Does it hold your attention and excite your senses and show you something that moves you, whether big or small?

Because if it does, then how it's made is irrelevant. Cinerama Holiday might be a fun novelty, but it fails as a movie. Comin' at Ya! may have shown off 3-D but it was a lousy movie. Now comes The Odyssey, the first-ever full-length movie shot with IMAX film cameras. For months, every IMAX 70mm film screening has been sold out. Over and over on social media, you'll see the posts: IMAX 70mm is the only way Christopher Nolan intends his film to be seen!

Only 41 movie theaters in the world can show The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX, so even if it's true that's the way Nolan would like people to see it, almost nobody will. The numbers don't pan out. At its height in the early 1960s, Cinerama had four times the number of theaters worldwide than IMAX has for 70mm film presentations.

So, what's going to matter most to audiences isn't the format, no matter what Nolan wants — it's the movie. Is it any good? Does it thrill? Does it excite the senses? Does it offer all the things a movie should?

Guess what? It does. This is no Amityville 3-D. It's not a gimmick. I saw The Odyssey projected in 70mm, which means I saw it projected on film more or less in the screen size and format most people over 40 grew up with. Nothing special, you might say. And the good news is, The Odyssey works. It works well.

Which isn't to say it's perfect, but as far as Nolan movies go, it's more accessible than most, it's more narratively engaging and emotionally compelling, and after seeing it I cracked open my print version of The Odyssey to read a little of what I had just seen — if nothing else, Christopher Nolan may turn a whole bunch of movie tech-heads into curious readers, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Nolan's version of The Odyssey, for which he's the credited screenwriter as well as director, begins, as so many of his movies do, with some rushed confusion. Nolan is never particularly concerned with how to accustom audiences to his stories — he throws them right in, and even though it takes some time to acclimate to The Odyssey, once that happens, the movie carries you along.

Matt Damon is Odysseus, both as a younger king and as an older man trying to make his way home after he's victorious in the Trojan War, thanks to that horse. Anne Hathaway is Penelope, his patient wife. Tom Holland is their son Telemachus. Robert Pattinson is Penelope's villainous suitor Antinous. And so forth. There's Zendaya! There's Charlize Theron! There's John Leguizamo! There's Lupita Nyong'o!

It's a wonder the poster for The Odyssey hasn't put all their faces into little boxes at the bottom. This is about as close to an old-fashioned "star-studded" cast as you're likely to find today, and sometimes the movie feels a little like a "spot-the-cameo" disaster movie, but I think that's part of the fun. Yes, it's serious stuff. Yes, it's made at a very high level of quality. But, still, it's a movie — and not just any movie, but one with gods and adventurers, a witch, a cyclops and a whirlpool, sirens and monsters and even a trip to the underworld (which looks an awful lot like Iceland).

In truth, The Odyssey could probably use a little of the levity of those old Ray Harryhausen films where Odysseus' first cousin Jason leads the Argonauts and fights all sorts of monsters on his way to the Golden Fleece. Nolan's Greek mythology is pretty grim and realistic by comparison.

At times, it can also be hard to follow. Nolan's movies are rarely straightforward, and The Odyssey can sometimes suffer from clunky editing that renders the action a little unclear and Nolan's favorite technique of muddying dialogue and overwhelming it with ear-throbbing sound design. It can be an overwhelmingly aggressive movie, at times, and its battle sequences can get pretty confusing.

But The Odyssey always finds its way back to a story that has survived 3,000 years. Nolan doesn't botch it. If anything, he adapts it with, on the whole, so much excitement and flair that he's done something important: Brought Homer into the 21st century and tied it, especially in the film's final few minutes, loosely but pointedly enough to the world as we know it today that suddenly these gods and monsters, who exist in a changing world rocked by war and betrayal, feel excitingly vibrant, real and relevant. In IMAX ... or not.

Viewed July 18, 2026 — American Cinematheque Director's Village

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Favorite Films: "Chinatown"

Not many films have been endlessly analyzed and examined as Roman Polanski's Chinatown. It would be foolish for me to try to add anything to the academic and artistic discussion of the movie. All I can do to explain why it's such a favorite is to try to share why it works on me so well, why it feels as urgent and vibrant and new today as it must have 52 years ago.

There's a scene in Chinatown that's a masterpiece of storytelling and suspense — not as if that doesn't apply to the entirety of this complicated, endlessly rewarding movie. J.J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson, of course) wants to know why a certain dead body has turned up in a certain reservoir. None of his police pals are going to give him anything more to go on. He'll have to do this alone.

So, there he is, behind the gates of the secure reservoir at night. We have no idea what he's looking for, because he has no idea what he's looking for—which, of course, is the plot of Chinatown in a nutshell: Gittes only knows he's onto something, he never has any idea what. Neither do we. Then, from the darkness:

"Hold it there, kittycat!"

An impeecably dressed little man holding a knife, played by Polanski himself, flashes a knife as Gittes' rival Claude Mulvihill pins him to a fence. "You know what happens to nosy fellas?" asks the ltitle man. I know, I know, I'm describing a scene you've probably seen a half-dozen times, but have you ever noticed the way the crickets chirp in the background? The inkiness of the night behind the fence?

These two little details are key to Chinatown, and Polanski doesn't make a big show about either. But, he's included them, perfectly, for a reason: Everything around Gittes is dark and unknowable, and the forces of nature that make it all work are entirely indifferent. As Chinatown progresses, Gittes uncovers and confronts evil and corruption on a magnitude he never imagined possible — and those crickets in the night? They'll keep chirping no matter what.

Chinatown is a despairing movie, a film that confronts real evil — not the imagined kind from The Exorcist, released the year before, but the kind that lives in our world. The kind we have to face every day. Polanski, just a few years after the ghastly murder of Sharon Tate, had lived through the Holocaust, but it's worth noting that J.J. Gittes and the other characters in Chinatown—which is set in 1937—have not. True, unexpurgated evil is unknown to them. So, it's understandable that as Gittes starts investigating the case he thought was brought to him by Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), he has no idea of what he's getting himself into.

I've seen Chinatown innumerable times, and it's grown from a film I admired but didn't entirely understand to a movie that I think is utterly indispensable — not just in my mind, but to Hollywood and, to a larger extent, to an understanding of America. It's a movie whose real meaning is as deeply hidden as its solution, but once you uncover it, Chinatown takes on the feeling of a philosophical treatise.

That last line — "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown" — has been dissected over and over. It's become a cinematic version of semantic satiation, that odd experience of hearing a word so often that it loses its meaning. But keep examining that line, and what happens after it's spoken, and Chinatown truly reveals itself:

There's no explanation. The only thing you can do is walk away, stunned, into the night — that same night that consumes a world that has been here for millions of years and will be here for millions more, and takes no notice of your suffering, of cruelty, of pain and sorrow. You'll never, ever understand it. And the more you dig for answers, the fewer you'll find. People are terrible. The world is awful. And that's just the way it is.

Bleak? You bet. And yet, such despair has rarely been as involving as Polanski and screenwriter Robert Towne make it in Chinatown. As I watched it again a few weeks ago, time fell away — yes, it's easy to recognize young Jack Nicholson and young Faye Dunaway and long-gone John Huston and the rest. It's obvious the film was made a long time ago. And yet, the way it casts its spell, the way it grips the viewer and refuses to let go, makes it feel every bit as fresh and new as a movie made this year. It's perfectly cast, perfectly designed, perfectly edited, perfectly scored (by Jerry Goldsmith), perfectly shot (by John Alonzo), so perfectly crafted it seems almost set apart from other movies.

It's so easy to watch, so entertaining, so compelling, that it's not until those last couple of minutes that you're reminded, yet again, of everything the movie is meaning to say — that Gittes is every one of us. Poor, stupid Gittes, smart enough to find the truth but not smart enough to understand it. He keeps believing that somewhere, somehow, there's got to be a rational explanation. That if he just keeps trying, he'll find a way to stop all this. How painfully familiar all of that sounds right about now.

Like I said, it could have been made today.

"The Invite"

 ☆☆☆☆☆

There isn't a moment in Olivia Wilde's The Invite that feels false. I haven't seen The People Upstairs, the 2020 movie on which Rashida Jones and Will McCormack based their screenplay for this film, but as an exploration of a specific kind of American mores, values and stressors, The Invite feels wholly new, alive and relevant.

It's also very, very funny. The first thing a comedy like this has to do is make you laugh, and The Invite does, which is why some initial comparisons to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? seem off-base — The Invite is a sharply observed, perfectly delivered examination of a certain kind of marriage. I have a feeling a lot of people are going to wonder if Jones and McCormack were eavesdropping on them, especially for the first third of the movie.

In that opening, Seth Rogen and Wilde play Joe and Angela, a married couple in San Francisco who know each other maybe a little too well. They can anticipate almost every word the other will say, yet they have no idea how to adjust their own behavior to that knowledge. When the movie opens, Rogen, a disappointed music teacher, exhausts himself bicycling home. When he gets there, he discovers his wife has been preparing an elaborate dinner for the couple who live upstairs.

This is not what he wants. This is not the time. This is not the day. And there's no wine. Yet, in the way of married couples (straight, gay, young, old — almost any couple will see themselves in this film), she's not going to back down.

Soon enough, there's a knock at the door. It's Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pína (Penelope Cruz), and they are intruding at the worst possible moment for Joe. Then again, Joe doesn't have any best possible moments. Fumbling through an attempt at dinner, the four finally sit down to talk, and it turns out that Hawk and Pína have an ulterior motive. There's something they've been wanting to talk about.

It doesn't take much to find out what the topic is, but I'm not going to reveal it here, and the best way to experience The Invite is not to know it, either. But it's a balm for movie screens that have been beseiged by blockbusters and animated adventures and really loud movies playing in premium formats. The Invite has its sights set both lower and higher than that — it's a decidedly analog affair (Wilde shot it in 35 mm) that finds much more adventure and revelation in conversation than in action.

Eventually, the movie does work itself around to action, at least of a sort, which in turn leads The Invite to the most unexpected of destinations.

Jones and McCormack have crafted a screenplay of uncommon emotional intelligence, and though a lot of the setup is played for laughs, some slapsticky and some awkward, when it gets where it's going, the weight of it all is such that the audience I saw it with stopped the guffawing (there had been a lot of it) and went completely silent.

The Invite deals with the serious, messy, uncomfortable business of being an adult in an uncommonly frank way. The topic at its core is rarely explored in mainstream films, and almost never with this kind of genuine insight and empathy.

As Hawk and Pína challenge Joe and Angela in ways the latter couple could never have imagined when the night began, the movie also challenges the audience to examine long-held views about the way marriages and relationships work. It's serious stuff, but as a director Wilde knows how to handle it — and to balance it with observational, character-driven humor that never feels forced or unwelcome, though often feels like a relief.

In a single set, designed with curious flattening of colors that suggests a lot more about the characters than perhaps it's obvious at the outset, The Invite feels intimate, not claustrophobic. It may be physically constrained, but Norton, Cruz, Wilde and Rogen manage, through the way its characters grow and change in the course of an evening, to make it feel expansive and meaningful.

It's been an uncommonly good year for movies, but The Invite is among the very best of them.

Viewed July 14, 2026 — Regal Sherman Oaks

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