‘The Odyssey’ just landed on this list of the 10 best films of 2026

The Odyssey here and, like a vengeful sea god, it’s sweeping all before it at the box office and with critics. It already looks like a hot favourite for Best Picture and a shoo-in for most best of the year list – including Time Out’s, where it comes straight in at number 1.

‘Alongside Oppenheimer, The Odyssey is Christopher Nolan’s finest work as a solo screenwriter,’ says Time Out’s review. ‘It’s an epic weaned on DeMille, Lean and Harryhausen, but the screenplay finds detail and nuance in the intimate moments too.’

‘Even among all the truck flips, atomic explosions and rotating corridors of his back catalogue, this film is the apogee of Nolan’s “do it in camera” ethos, and the sense that this was a shoot with no comfort zone pervades every frame. 

Also in the top 5 are Kaouther Ben Hania’s heartbreaking Palestine war docudrama The Voice of Hind Rajab, Kane Parson’s smash-hit liminal horror Backrooms, the techno-fuelled desert thriller Sirât, and Olivia Wilde’s barnstorming marital comedy The Invite.

A new addition to the top 10 is heartsore documentary Remake, a follow-up of sorts to Ross McElwee’s cult breakthrough doc Sherman’s March.

Here’s the top 10 in full:

10. Project Hail Mary
9. La Grazia
8. Sound of Falling
7. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You
6. Remake
5. The Invite
4. Sirât
3. Backrooms
2. The Voice of Hind Rajab
1. The Odyssey

Read our full list of the year’s best films to date here.

7 spectacular The Odyssey filming locations to visit – and where to stay when you get there.

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