script

Emily Wilson, whose translation of Homer’s “The Odyssey” published in 2017 served as inspiration to Christopher Nolan when crafting his blockbuster adaptation of the nearly 2,800-year-old poem, has some thoughts on the film.

In a biting missive for the London Review of Books, the British American classicist dissected Nolan’s work with a scalpel so sharp that he may need to borrow some of Matt Damon’s armor to read it all the way through. Last fall, the acclaimed director quoted Wilson’s translation when telling Empire magazine why he was drawn to the story. “I think it’s the Emily Wilson translation that begins, ‘Tell me about a complicated man,’” he said. “The genius of the character, the cleverness, the inventiveness of him, that was a huge part of what interested me. He’s not just a soldier. He’s an amazing strategist, a very wily person.”

Wilson, although admittedly “humbled” by the nod from the filmmaker, wrote: “But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”

A professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, Wilson has also translated Seneca and Euripides, as well as Homer’s “Iliad.” In her takedown of the film, she likens Nolan’s nearly three-hour epic to Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and “Game of Thrones” and says that, by the end, she “almost expected everyone to break into Elvish.”

Earlier this month, The Times’ film critic, Amy Nicholson, wrote that “Nolan has sacrificed Odysseus himself to serve his own needs, scrapping the character’s prickly personality to Trojan-horse a message about how empires collapse. … Aghast at the ways of men, he’s dug his own Circe-like fingers into Homer to manipulate the tale into a moralistic ‘Oppenheimer’ prequel.”

Wilson appears to share the sentiment.

“Unlike some of Nolan’s other films,” she wrote, “‘The Odyssey’ is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely. It’s a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle, like an elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display — and with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.”

When casting was announced for the film, it was no surprise that culture wars broke out over the choice of Oscar-winning actor Lupita Nyong’o to play Helen of Troy, with Elon Musk leading the charge.

Nolan responded, telling the Telegraph earlier this month before the film hit theaters, “These conversations that happen before people see the film — they’re always irrelevant, because no one having them knows what the film actually is yet.”

According to Wilson, Nolan’s race-neutral casting had “nothing progressive about it.”

“Most of the non-white actors — Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott — play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist,” she wrote.

Wilson zeroes in on the portrayal of Homer’s female characters in another major critique: “There are more female characters than in most Nolan movies, thanks to the source material. But none of them has much to say, in contrast to the [characterizations] in the poem.”

Where Charlize Theron’s Calypso ought to have been angry, funny, skilled in rhetoric and libidinous, according to Wilson, she’s “an unpaid therapist.” On Anne Hathaway’s Penelope, Wilson writes that the script “gives her nothing to do except yearn for Matt Damon, for reasons unknown.” And Zendaya’s Athena “turns out to be a vulnerable victim of war, or perhaps a projection of Odysseus’ conscience — not a scheming and bloodthirsty war goddess.”

And then there’s the human cost of war — the central theme of the film, and one that Wilson says contradicts Homer’s poem.

“The representation of Odysseus as a reluctant warlord makes a nonsense of the movie’s imagined world,” she writes. “We are not shown that war or killing are bad, only that good men sometimes feel bad about it — a very different point. Any serious depiction of violence, ancient or modern, must show the perspectives of the victims as well as the perpetrators, and the Homeric poems easily clear the bar — but Nolan doesn’t.

“The film asks us both to be horrified at war and to celebrate the action-movie sequences in which the reluctant warrior finally gets his hands on his bow and the blood starts flowing.”

Since Nolan announced “The Odyssey” back in December 2024, various versions of the poem have been in high demand at bookshops and libraries — especially the only English version written by a woman: Wilson’s 2017 translation. Louise Brockett, spokeswoman and head of communications at W.W. Norton, told USA Today that domestic sales of Wilson’s translation surpassed a million copies this year.

Concluding her critique of Nolan’s “Odyssey,” Wilson says the release of the movie is “still an event to celebrate.”

“In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities,’ translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves.”

Nolan spent $250 million making “The Odyssey,” and on opening weekend the film brought in a total of $264.1 million worldwide, according to studio estimates.

Madonna is just a material girl, living in a material world.

The “Vogue” hitmaker graced the cover of Interview magazine for the Summer 2026 issue and in the accompanying chat, the singer revealed the reason the ultra-hyped biopic with “Ozark” star Julia Garner was scrapped: not enough cold hard cash.

Turns out, Universal Studios was not Madonna’s Mr. Right. According to the pop star, the studio didn’t share her vision for a budget for the film.

“I worked on my script for two years and spent two years at Universal Studios with the line producers doing budgeting and casting,” she told the magazine. “We had a falling out, me and Universal, regarding budget because I needed — I’ve had an extraordinary life. I’ve had a huge life, so I needed a big budget. You know what I mean?”

The film had been in the works for years, and in 2021 Universal Pictures won a multi-studio auction to helm the biopic. According to Variety, the script followed Madonna from her upbringing in the suburbs of Detroit, her artistic awakening in 1980s New York City, and concluded around the 1998 release of “Ray of Light.”

“I found a way to make it for less money in Serbia, but I don’t think they were into the idea of — I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe they just didn’t believe in me.”

Madonna said the studio couldn’t wrap its head around what she was suggesting and countered that she wouldn’t “stay in Serbia more than four days.”

“I said, ‘Did you read the script?’ My whole life has been survival. I’m not going there for a holiday.’”

Madonna said that she was in “limbo” when the movie plans fell apart, and she considered telling her life story through a Netflix series when the streamer came knocking. But she wouldn’t be able to use the script she had penned for Universal without buying it from the studio for “an extortionist’s price,” even though she wrote it.

“That’s just the way it goes,” she continued. “I started trying to understand how making a series would work. It’s a very, very different process. You have to meet a lot of writers and find the right showrunner, and I couldn’t find one. This went on for another eight or nine months. I was like, ‘Good thing I have another job because I need to work, I need to create. I need to do what I was put on this earth to do.’”

Representatives for Universal Pictures, Netflix and Garner did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.

Through the process of writing the script, Madonna was bitten by the memoir bug, but she channeled that confessional energy into her forthcoming album, “Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II,” which drops July 3. A 13-minute music video weaving together six tracks from the new album was released earlier this month and featured A-list cameos by Sabrina Carpenter, Kate Moss, Lourdes Leon, Benedict Cumberbatch and more.

While the biopic and buzz around Garner’s portrayal of the “Like a Virgin” star had fans of the two blondes chomping at the bit, all is not lost: Art captures life. Garner and Madonna were spotted filming scenes in Venice two weeks ago for the second season of “The Studio,” in which Madonna plays herself struggling to get her biopic made.

Call “Scary Movie” lazy, dumb and offensive. It would enthusiastically agree. The lowbrow horror parody thrives on shtick about weed, race and genitalia. The only thing that scares it is high expectations.

But amid the rampant stupidity of the first “Scary Movie,” released in 2000, original director Keenen Ivory Wayans discovered two major talents: Regina Hall and Anna Faris. As heroines Brenda and Cindy, respectively, Hall and Faris were daffy, dopey and committed. Alongside a cast of Playmates (Carmen Electra, Shannon Elizabeth) and family members (Wayans brothers Marlon and Shawn), they played stupid like Shakespeare. In two decades since, both gave up the Ghostface to do better things: Hall in “Girls Trip” and “One Battle After Another,” and Faris in “Smiley Face” and “The House Bunny.” (Frankly, Faris deserves to be doing more.) If a sixth “Scary Movie” is going to lure them back for what the ensemble openly frets is a rebooquel — as in a reboot-sequel, here pronounced “re-booty call” — it better be good.

Fine, good is a stretch. The latest “Scary Movie,” which simply recycles the title “Scary Movie,” is as lazy, dumb and offensive as the others. But Hall and Faris, now playing the dotty mothers of the next generation of victims, are hilarious, romping about like their Brenda and Cindy have clearly been knocked on the head too often. (Brenda, fans of the franchise know, has technically already died twice.) I laughed 10 times, which makes this “Scary Movie” the best of the bunch — a pallid compliment.

Directing duties have shuffled to Michael Tiddes, a longtime Wayans collaborator, who gets gutsy performances from three of this entry’s newbies: Olivia Rose Keegan and Savannah Lee Nassif as Cindy’s estranged daughters, a pill-popper and a Wednesday Addams clone, and Ruby Snowber, maximizing every second of her feature debut as a high school tramp.

The Wayans clan left the series early on due to a contract dispute with Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Now seven have returned. Four Wayans (Craig, Keenan Ivory, Marlon and Shawn) co-wrote the script with Rick Alvarez; three more (Kim, Damon Jr., and Gregg) act in the film alongside Marlon and Shawn, who revive their characters Shorty, a stoner with a shrill cackle, and Ray, whose only personality trait is being gay. In one of many homages to “Sinners,” Ray promises a church he’ll act straight. Then he mimes tucking his manhood between his legs and dancing like Buffalo Bill in “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Yes, Shorty and Ray were also murdered in the first movie. No, it doesn’t matter. “Scary Movie’s” one genuinely ingenious move is to resurrect actors without shame. Jon Abrahams’ bad boyfriend (stabbed), Lochlyn Munro’s lout (slit throat), and Electra’s eye candy (pierced through the breast implant) are back, too, as are a pair of erotically linked survivors, Cheri Oteri’s news anchor and Dave Sheridan’s moronic cop, whose spittle-flecked chin is the grossest thing in a film that has a mall Santa costumed like “Terrifier’s” Art the Clown gifting a child a set of severed testicles.

“The Silence of the Lambs” remains the only horror film to win best picture at the Academy Awards. This “Scary Movie” has no delusions of that. Yet in the years since the last installment, 2013’s “Scary Movie 5” — a sequel so awful that even its own director, Malcolm D. Lee, later admitted, “It’s not worth your time” — the horror genre at-large has become ambitious, with “Sinners,” “The Substance,” and “Get Out” earning Oscar nominations and “Weapons’” witchy Amy Madigan seizing the supporting actress prize.

This “Scary Movie” makes fun of all four of those newer hits, as well as the recent rebooquels of “Halloween,” which was earnest, and “Scream,” which couldn’t decide what tone to hit. Each send-up is funny for at least an entire minute, a lifetime when you’re watching Marlon’s Shorty mug for the camera. Either Shorty has the most screen time or he’s just so excruciating that it feels like it.

I cannot make the straight-faced argument that the worst “Scary Movies” were held back by their source material. Still, it’s true that when the series was at its nadir, so few vibrant horror films were being made that it was stuck lampooning the now-forgotten Jessica Chastain chiller “Mama.” Likewise, when this “Scary Movie” takes a jab at Nicolas Cage’s more-kooky-than-tedious “Longlegs,” the limp gag of the creepy Shorthand (Chris Elliot), underscores that the movie itself just isn’t that interesting.

“Scary Movie” inserts two political jokes that earn a solid gasp-giggle-groan. Yet, the most grating new addition is a self-righteous student named Dei Meeks (Sydney Park), who polices the humor. The movie relishes killing the killjoy. A whole mob does her in; it’s the one death that feels angry. I’d have been happy to see her die in her first scene. Not that I empathize with canceled comics who posture as if they’re victims under attack, but it would do this country good if it could occasionally share a laugh.

Don’t waste one brain cell trying to deduce the assassin. The answer is surprising and satisfying. While the script’s hasty nods to “KPop Demon Hunters” and the biopic “Michael” make it feel like it was written on yesterday’s Kleenex, the immediacy allows “One Battle After Another’s” Teyana Taylor to acknowledge that Madigan’s Aunt Gladys stole her Oscar. Swilling tequila shots and hollering “Viva la revolución!,” she’s hysterical in the cleverest opening slasher scene since Drew Barrymore answered the phone in the 1996 “Scream.” I’d watch six more “Scary Movies” if Taylor starred in them. But like Hall and Faris, she deserves better.