Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey was released this weekend, and there are no shortage of opinions. In his review, Anatoly Grablevsky writes that Nolan fails to capture the complexity of the central character, reducing “Homer’s andra polytropos to a strangely one-note brooding and shell-shocked veteran. Damon never gets the chance to show the extraordinary range of Odysseus’s character, in large part because the second half of the poem, containing all the most psychologically compelling scenes of Odysseus’s recognition by his household, is squeezed into the last quarter of Nolan’s film.” 

For further reading: Spencer Klavan recently wrote about the effect another Greco-Roman hero had on this life. Read his treatment of Odysseus’s foil: “In the Footsteps of Aeneas” (February 2026).

From the August/September issue: Though many postliberals assume that the rot of liberalism was baked into the American Founding, it is a mistake “to presume that modern liberalism’s conception of the person is the inevitable evolutionary outcome of the American political and constitutional ­tradition,” writes Vincent Phillip Muñoz.

“That is simply not true. Liberalism sharply departs from the Founders’ natural rights republicanism, which offers a dignified understanding of the human person.”

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Until next time,

VIRGINIA AABRAM

Newsletter Editor