In Magalhães, Lav Diaz’s haunted dream of a movie about Ferdinand Magellan’s effort to circumnavigate the world, the Portuguese explorer’s famed exploits are charted selectively. Played with pungent severity by Gael García Bernal, this Ferdinand is at once opaque and obvious, a man of his time, a harbinger of the future, and an instrument of terror. He’s a husband and a father, too, though Diaz is less interested in his personal affairs than in the meaning of notions like discovery and what it portends when one group of people violently imposes itself on another, which also makes this a story of imperialism … Corpses are scattered across the ground when Ferdinand, badly wounded and wearing a metal breastplate, first appears onscreen. It’s 1511 in the aftermath of the successful Portuguese campaign to seize the Malaysian port city of Malacca. Although Diaz inserts times and place names throughout the movie, which function as helpful narrative coordinates, his storytelling is more elliptical than encyclopedic … Here, history and story tend to convene in crystallizing moments, in faces, gestures, actions and in blunt, cruel words. The most arresting way that Diaz telegraphs, though, is through the sheer beauty of his images. The movie is often visually intoxicating, at moments gaspout- loud ravishing, especially in its presentation of the natural world, which can have a soft visual quality that deepens the sense of otherworldliness … Some histories remember Magellan for his adventures, ambitions, tenacity and navigational prowess, as well as for his putative discovery of extant societies. Diaz instead skewers both the man and the familiar, politically expedient, aggrandizing myths … The explorer has his moments of triumph, including in his campaign to convert some Native people to Christianity, an effort that helps undo him. Yet nothing expresses the sweep and scope of his adventures as powerfully as the look of horror that fills the face of an Indigenous woman who, while out one pacific day, looks up and sees the beginning of her world’s end.

Manohla Dargis, “The New York Times”, 8 January 2026 Magalhães