The Odyssey

★★★★★

173 min | R | July 17, 2026 | Universal Pictures

Christopher Nolan takes the oldest story in the Western canon and makes the most technically accomplished film in recent memory. It also has heart, verve and a point of view, which is the part that makes it great.

Nolan adapts Homer’s epic about a king who spends ten years trying to get home from Troy. He keeps the shape of the poem. There is the war behind Odysseus, the long voyage, and the son and wife holding his house together against the suitors. The adaptation is faithful without being reverent. Nolan strips out the stiffness of the old translations and finds a modern pulse in the story. This is a film about what war costs the men who survive it, and about the people who wait for them. Nolan has a point of view on the material, and he commits to it from the first frame.

Matt Damon gives the best performance of his career as Odysseus. He plays the cunning and the arrogance in full, and he lets the exhaustion show underneath. The man is brilliant and broken at the same time, and Damon never lets either side win. Tom Holland is a revelation as Telemachus, a son who has grown up in the shadow of a father he barely knows. Anne Hathaway gives Penelope a steel that the poem only hints at. Robert Pattinson makes Antinous slippery and dangerous, and Charlize Theron brings a sad, magnetic authority to Calypso. The cast is stacked with A-list names, and every one of them is doing layered work.

The craft is overwhelming. Nolan builds his monsters, storms and ships with practical effects, and the physical weight shows in every shot. The huge-screen format is not a gimmick here. The scale of the sea and the sky makes Odysseus look small, and that is the point. The sound design is a landmark. Waves, wind and battle hit with a force you feel in your chest, and the quiet passages land just as hard. The writing is sharp and economical for a film this big, and the editing keeps the long voyage moving without rushing it.

This is the rare blockbuster that is as smart as it is big. Every department works at the top of its game in service of one clear vision. Nolan has made spectacle before with Dunkirk, Interstellar and Oppenheimer. None of them married that spectacle to this much feeling. The Odyssey is one of the best films of the year and one of the finest epics ever put on screen.