​Get The Greek To Me: The Odyssey (Dir. Christopher Nolan, 2026)
Review by Connor McLaughlin

By the time you're reading this, I will have seen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey four times in the theater. You might ask why. I would answer by pointing out the film opens with the text “An age of apparent magic,” and that is exactly what this feels like… movie magic. The Odyssey is the true meaning of the cinematic experience.

Based on Homer’s epic saga, Nolan transports audiences back to the foundational, source code of his oeuvre, namely a complicated man, full of sorrow, attempting to get home. In this era of the director’s career, one might think that the pre-Christian text would drone on, as it might have in a high school English class. However, just as Homer's tales of Odysseus, this film burns with urgency and satisfying pathos.

Filmed entirely in IMAX 70mm and across seven countries, Matt Damon headlines an impressive ensemble cast. He is Odysseus, beset by many challenges on the two-decade-long voyage home to his kingdom of Ithaca. Damon delivers career-best work by combining the character’s hubris with his own everyman quality to poignant effect. His co-stars showcase equally impressive work, notably Samantha Morton’s Circe, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, and Himesh Patel as second-in-command Eurylochus.

It is true, of course, that this is a Christopher Nolan film, so his signature of nonlinear, densely layered storytelling remains intact. What separates this film from his others is how straightforward and digestible the narrative feels. By crosscutting between Odysseus’ son Telemachus, his wife Penelope and her suitors, and the adventures of Odysseus and his crew, the story never feels as lost as the legendary hero of the Trojan War himself.

Nolan’s vision for a swords and sandals epic is utterly distinct, at once grounded and grotesque, but with enough changes to tell this story through a modern lens. Though we never see the gods Zeus and Poseidon, their wrath is real, their monsters are real, and humans are the fodder of their choices.

The most striking takeaway of this film is how much it thematically riffs off on Oppenheimer. If Nolan’s previous work was concerned with the final nail in the coffin of modern civilization, The Odyssey examines the rot at the core. “To the burn the walls of Troy was to burn the world entire,” laments Odysseus. This is a deeply human and potently anti-war story about the failure of humanity and the hope to make our world resemble home again.

The film is heavy and bleak, and although it reckons with our inhumanity, it is also classically entertaining and satisfying. From the infamous Cyclops to the slaughter of the suitors, the film features one incredible sequence after another. And no matter how many times I see it, there's one particular cue from Ludwig Göransson’s thunderous score that will never cease to give me goosebumps.

*If you're seeing one movie this year, make it this. Run, don’t walk to see it, especially on its beautiful 70mm film print at the Prytania Uptown, the best screen in New Orleans. Nothing can stand between you and this movie. Not even the gods… or the bathroom.

​Shifting sands: Macbeth @ The Lupin Theatre, part of the New Orleans Shakespeare Festival
Review by Lauren Malara

The Lupin's black box theatre is set in the round. Audience members sit on all sides of the stage like a sporting arena, projectors wrapped around the theatre and above the audience. At the center of the stage sits a large sandbox.

​Within it, Director Graham Burk conceptualizes Shakespeare's classic story about absolute power. Some characters tiptoe around it, while others aren't afraid to get their hands dirty. Those who enter draw lines and plant flags, yet the ground is constantly shifting beneath their feet. Those who grasp for power find it slipping through their hands like so many grains of sand.

In the modern age, a sandbox is more than a playground fixture. In gaming, it allows players to choose their own path. In software development, it provides a space for trial runs. In cybersecurity, it isolates and eliminates threats. Burk's sandbox similarly becomes a place where Macbeth's ambition is developed, tested, and ultimately eliminated.

The production is spectacular. Throughout the performance, the box transforms through multimedia projections and LED lighting. At the same time, arena-style projectors encase the audience in a virtual box of their own. These projections allow for minimal scenery, quickly transporting the audience from Birnam Wood to the halls of Inverness. They also conjure eerie apparitions, illustrating Macbeth's descent into madness.

As Macbeth, David Lind (previously reviewed here in last year's The Lehman Trilogy) maintains a compelling connection with the audience. During his asides, he invites us into his dangerous game. The costumes by Kaci Thomassie are stunning. Lady Macbeth, played by Jana Mestecky, is especially striking, at one point wrapped regally in a down comforter.

Ryan Hayes brings a warm affability to Banquo, making his return at the banquet all the more ghastly. The witches (James Bartelle, Georgia Morgan, and Zarah Hōkūleʻa Spalding) are real strange, y'all. Honestly, they remind me of the girl from (horror movie)The Ring. They acrobatically collaborate to create a supernatural being.

The warmth and playfulness between Anja Avsharian and Lucien Grace, as Lady Macduff and Macduff's child, is filled with love. It makes the tragedy that follows all the more devastating. Edward Carter Simon's Macduff delivers grief so raw that his thirst for vengeance feels inevitable.

Of note, Robert A. Mitchell's performance remains grounded despite the constantly shifting terrain, his Duncan exuding ease and grace. Similarly, Robinson J. Cyprian has a commanding stage presence with his silk-smooth voice. Sofia Severson (Fleance) delivers a bright, spirited performance full of fight, and stage manager Jenny L. Billot deserves special recognition for the production's extensive integration of technology.

Macbeth runs through July 12 at the New Orleans Shakespeare Festival at Tulane. Click here for show information and ticketing

​A room with askew: Backrooms (2026, Dir, Kane Parsons)
Review by Paul Oswell

Horror and its related genres (in this case intense psychological drama with horror elements) has always served as a metaphor for real life anxieties. Dracula tells on Victorian England’s fears of reverse colonization and repressed sexuality, while Frankenstein has unchecked scientific ambition and the isolation of ‘the outsider’ as themes. 

Kane Parsons – a YouTuber tapped by A24’s cinematic distribution juggernaut – has created something that is genuinely unsettling, which is impressive given how desensitized we all are to, well, everything. Mr Parsons was born in 2005, and already has years of lore about The Backrooms concept online. It’s largely a Gen Z phenomenon, so we can perhaps extract data as to their generationally-specific demons.

Backrooms is a dreamlike experience, abstraction and surrealism featuring heavily. David Lynch may have approved. The plot, such as it is, is ostensibly about Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect in the early '90s who's separated, alcoholic, and managing a tatty discount furniture store called 'Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire'. He makes humiliating TV ads dressed as a pirate, aware that he should be a sultan for the pun to work. He sees a therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve), a morose woman hawking self-help tapes. Both are broken in their own ways. 

One day, Clark finds an impossibly porous section of wall in the store's basement that leads to an infinite network of backrooms, like a portal.  These rooms are uncanny, installation-style areas showing snapshots of different realities. It's like someone took every beige corridor, every fluorescent-lit waiting room, every soulless corporate space you've ever been trapped in and the physical reality matches your memory of them a week later. 

Clark begins to warily explore the rooms, mapping them as best he can amid half chairs in the walls, narrowing corridors, stairs that go nowhere and nonsensical masonry. Noises and shadows hint at a hidden population that inhabit the rooms. Clark’s young media team - Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and Bobby (Finn Bennett) - and eventually Mary are also drawn into the space. The less you know about what comes next, the more your appreciation for it will be. 

It's not really the supernatural horror that gets to you. This is a film about Gen Z’s most pressing existential terrors dressed up as found video footage. It's about being lost in systems designed as traps. These aren't haunted mansions or cursed graveyards, they're waiting rooms and office buildings. Dead yellowish light leaks from strip lighting, and what you feel is the dread of being one of millions of people stuck in the same beige nightmare, unable to escape.

We're all just wandering through the backrooms, looking for a way out. But it probably doesn't exist.
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Backrooms is playing at cinemas across the city

​Is God Is (2026, directed by Aleshea Harris)
Review by Lauren Malara

Is God Is tells the story of twins Racine and Anaia. As children, they were disfigured in a fire started by their father. As adults struggling to find their place in the world, they receive a message directly from God, their mother. Vengeance is mine, said the Lord. With that, the twins set out on a pilgrimage to murder their father. 

Holy opening sequence. From the start, it is clear we are in for a wild ride. The fast-paced storytelling is complemented by screenwriter and director Aleshea Harris’ visual risk-taking. The film, like the stage play it is adapted from, is poetic and visceral. 

Most refreshing of all, every character is Black, yet there is not a single mention of racism. Thank God! The story is dark, but at the forefront is Black joy and beauty. Think Bill Gunn. The film is delightfully Black, from Janelle Monáe singing Prince’s Thunder to unforgettable dialogue like “YOooooooU AIN’T SH*T DEVIL!”

Then there are the gorgeous images of Blackness. Talking about waist beads, box braids, and drip. Filmed in New Orleans, the twins are serving looks on the levees, beneath the Crescent City Connection, and surrounded by Spanish moss hanging from old oaks in City Park. 

Ultimately, this is a story about what is seen and unseen. Acts of violence are hidden from the audience, until they aren’t. Much like the twins, we are allowed to turn away from the horrors of the past. We are given permission to overlook that which is too painful to see. But how do we heal scars if we ignore them? Is God Is asks us to face ourselves, accept the ugly truths, keep faith and hold on to hope for a happy ending. 
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Is God Is is playing at theaters across the city

​Soul crushing: Obsession
(2025, dir. Curry Barker)

The premise announces itself with disarming simplicity: a lovesick retail worker buys a New Age store novelty 'wishing stick' to win over his friend and colleague. What follows is a meditation on corrosive desire and modes of control dressed up as genre cinema.

Bear (Michael Johnston) works alongside Nikki (Inde Navarette) in the deadened environment of a strip mall music shop. They're best friends, and it’s purgatory for him. When Nikki’s talismanic gem necklace falls into a drain, Bear seizes the moment to employ a strategy, stumbling into the shop and leaving with a replacement stone and his occult geegaw.

The wish, delivered half jokingly to himself, is granted, and immediately delivers a romantic payload with algorithmic precision. Nikki becomes utterly, consumingly his. Her behavior – sexual, social, even spatial – knows no bounds.

The dream inserts itself into Bear’s life with such thoroughness that it begins to collapse under its own weight. Proximity becomes suffocation; devotion curdles into psychosis. Nikki’s personality has been eradicated - like a zoomer Nosferatu, she is appetite.

Director Curry Barker, emerging from YouTube into feature-length narrative, demonstrates no little ability, but this is Inde Navarrette's film. Her transformation – vocal, physical, psychological – charts the dissolution of selfhood with uncomfortable precision. We see personality become pathology, person become possession. Her occasionally-heard screams from the ‘beyond’ suggest something clawing its way up from some hellish ethereal substrata. In among the personalities is character work matching the maturity of Jessie Buckley or Anya Taylor-Joy. 

The violence, when it arrives, is brutal, but much more devastating even are the implications that we’re left with as the heft of the aftermath sits on us. Obsession is a parable about consent and love's totalitarian impulses. It's nasty, effective, and deeply uncomfortable. I can't say I completely enjoyed it, but I couldn't look away (PO).

Obsession is playing in cinemas across the city