Magellan

Every astonishing visual composition carries historical and political weight in the monumental new film from singular Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz (Norte, The End of History, NYFF51). Gael García Bernal brilliantly subordinates his stardom to Diaz’s discerning camera, disappearing into the role of the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan, who, at the start of the 16th century, navigated a crew to Southeast Asia after convincing the Spanish crown to fund his journey. Rather than retell the mythical, received narratives of the Age of Discovery, Diaz mounts an impressive and absorbing story of colonial conquest and obsession, depicting Magellan’s charted course to the Malayan Archipelago as a pitiless reckoning with human frailty and brutal violence as much as an evocation of overwhelming natural beauty. A Janus Films release.