The Odyssey (2026)

Around the same time that I read Homer's epic, I saw the 1997 miniseries thereof, which didn't blow me away but helped cement a few memories. Not enough that some parts didn't feel new again, as I would discover. If nothing else, I could count on director Christopher Nolan to make it his own, even without Cillian Murphy or a male character mourning a dead wife or girlfriend.

Royalty has a somewhat different meaning in ancient Greece, where King Odysseus of Ithaca (Matt Damon) sees no choice but to fight in the Trojan War himself, shortly after the birth of his son, Telemachus. His side wins, but the return journey is fraught with episodes of supernatural peril, keeping him and his troops away much longer than other veterans. Queen Penelope (Anne Hathaway) holds out hope despite a widespread assumption of Odysseus's death, which leads to dozens of suitors taking up residence at the palace. She can't dismiss them without breaking the oft-cited Zeus's Law (i.e., show hospitality in case a guest is a disguised god). By young adulthood, Telemachus (Tom Holland) is thinking of ascending the throne, but the suitors, unofficially led by Antinous (Robert Pattinson), conspire to kill him first.

Tenet (2020)

Christopher Nolan doesn't seem to have directed any unpopular features, and this was one of the more profitable of the (infamously off) year. But I haven't encountered people discussing it much, and its IMDb rating is relatively low for him, so I hesitated to watch. The 150-minute runtime didn't tempt me either. Only a Netflix notice that it would stop streaming at the end of the year prioritized it for me.

Like in Looper, the time machine hasn't been invented "yet," but its effects can already be seen. Unlike in Looper, it doesn't just send things back; it can send things backwards. Even inanimate objects behave differently that way, as by falling upward to be caught by a "dropper." The curiously unnamed protagonist (John David Washington), a CIA agent, comes across such effects on a mission and is then made privy to a still more secretive agency, Tenet (clearly named just for the palindrome), that tries to use time travel for the greater good. He and recruiter Neil (Robert Pattinson) are among a globe-hopping team out to neutralize the forces of the world's most dangerous time traveler, Russian oligarch Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh).

The Batman (2022)

Despite my friend (that one) saying he could watch this repeatedly, I was not in a great hurry to see it. He told me it resembled Se7en, which is not what I look for in my fare, especially when others had made it sound like the darkest live-action Batman feature yet. Under most circumstances, I would wait and watch it at home. But when my Net went down and I decided to kill a few hours at a local theater, this was the most promising offering.

At the start of this story, Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson) has been donning the cowl for about two years, so many no-name crooks flee at the sight of the Bat Signal, but some are more confident. Gotham City Police Lieutenant Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) trusts the vigilante, but higher-ups are leerier. Regardless, it makes a certain sense to call him in when someone assassinates the mayor (Rupert Penry-Jones) and leaves an envelope labeled, "To the Batman." It becomes clear that the self-styled Riddler (Paul Dano) has several more high-profile targets in mind....

The Lighthouse (2019)

I don't think I'd ever seen a horror movie in a theater before, apart from a Rifftrax edition of Octaman, which made it more of a comedy. I had long assumed that horror, in contrast to comedy, was usually more effective when watched alone. It was high time I tested that theory.

Despite taking some inspiration from the Smalls Lighthouse Tragedy of 1801 in Wales, this story is set somewhere in New England around 1890. A young man who much prefers "Winslow" to "lad" (Robert Pattinson) starts a four-week job assisting old man Wake (Willem Dafoe) in tending a remote isle's lighthouse. Winslow's first sign that he's not going to enjoy it is how ill-kept the place is. His first sign of something strange going on is that Wake insists, against written protocol, that Winslow stay away from the light at the top. Most of the time, the two men have trouble getting along. Their stresses only get worse after bad weather prevents Winslow from leaving on time. At least one of them loses his grip on sanity....