Good morning. President Trump resurfaced widely debunked claims about the safety of American voting systems in an address to the nation last night. And smoke from Canadian wildfires continues to disrupt life for millions.

Before we get to that, though, I’m going to turn to my friend and colleague A.O. Scott, a critic at large for the Book Review who was our longtime movie critic. I asked him to help us understand the place of Homer’s epic “Odyssey” in our cultural lives right now, as Christopher Nolan’s filmed version of the tale arrives in theaters.

By A.O. Scott

“The Odyssey,” Christopher Nolan’s 172-minute adaptation of Homer’s 2,800-year-old, 12,000-line epic poem, opens in theaters today. Back when I was reviewing movies, I would have seen it already. But nowadays I pull a different oar on this battle-weary trireme, and the nearest IMAX screen is a four-hour journey, over land and sea, from where I sit. Like Odysseus wending his way toward Ithaca, I’ll get there as soon as I can.

I suspect many of you will, too. The movie is both a groundbreaking technical achievement — the first feature shot entirely in the mighty IMAX format — and a tribute to a durable and beloved work of literature.

Throwback to the future

That blend of old and new is especially notable given that the original “Odyssey” is one of the earliest and most powerful literary expressions of nostalgia. Compounded from the Greek words for “home” and “pain,” nostalgia has come to mean a longing for the past, and it has become a central principle of modern culture.

In post-pandemic, peak streaming era, movies have become objects of nostalgia in their own right. They don’t make ’em like they used to, and more often than not we don’t see ’em like we used to — in dark rooms full of strangers, clutching tubs of popcorn and hiding our eyes at the scary parts.

Hollywood, in the midst of contentious mergers and haunted by the specter of A.I., is an anxious shadow of its former imperial self. The audience that once filled the theaters is fractured and distracted. Sometimes the crowds turn out — recently for the Gen-Z horror breakouts “Backrooms” and “Obsession” and for “Toy Story 5” (speaking of nostalgia) — but such hits can feel more like a reprieve than a renaissance.

With “The Odyssey,” Nolan and Universal Pictures have laid down a big ($250 million) bet that people will show up for a large-scale spectacle that evokes the grandeur of an earlier time. We’re talking about the sword-and-sandal epics of the 1950s and early ’60s, widescreen productions stuffed with modern movie stars in ancient costumes. The cast of this thing is a veritable glossary of 21st-century stardom: Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron, Robert Pattinson, Zendaya and of course Matt Damon as the hero described (in Emily Wilson’s translation) as “a complicated man.”

From Trojan War to culture war

A few of Nolan’s casting choices have riled up some of the people who live to get mad on the internet. These days you can’t have popular culture without a culture-war skirmish, and before anyone had seen “The Odyssey” we were subjected to a ginned-up online controversy about Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy (and her sister Clytemnestra) and Elliot Page playing a Greek soldier in the Trojan War.

Nyong’o is Black and Page trans, and those objections follow a familiar anti-woke trajectory, rooted in this case in arguably anachronistic assumptions about the Mediterranean Basin in the Bronze Age, when the action takes place. What’s interesting is that both Nolan’s film and the pre-emptive ideological strike against it show how much modern souls still care about the ancient world and its stories. As someone whose journalistic beat has gone from new movies to old poems, I can’t get too mad about that.

Dig in:

• In a rave review, Manohla Dargis calls Nolan’s film “a classic in every sense, a transporting affirmation of the art and a work of pure cinema.”

• In an interview with Melena Ryzik, Nolan said: “If you’re really interested in movies and the history of movies, the one thing you see absolutely is that you have to take risks to succeed. The biggest risk of all is to play it safe.”

• Want to (re?-)read the poem before heading to the theater? Watch this video to figure out which translation to try.

• Our friends over at NYT Cooking invited Damon and Tom Holland, who plays Odysseus’s son, into the kitchen for their signature Pizza Interview.

TODAY’S NUMBER

$12.7 million

— That is the face value of the counterfeit U.S. currency seized from a factory in Colombia. The nation is one of the world’s top producers of funny money.

SPORTS

Baseball: M.L.B. released its 2027 calendar yesterday, with the earliest regular-season game ever, but labor negotiations could push the entire schedule back.

Soccer: With the World Cup ending this weekend, take a moment to appreciate the sport’s mathematically marvelous ball.

PUFF PLANETS

A super-puff planet almost shouldn’t exist. It’s effectively a gas giant with an impossibly tiny core that should be too small to gravitationally pull in the vast volume of gases in its atmosphere. So far, 39 have been identified.

Astrophysicists hope the super-puffs can help them understand the ways that giant planets can form, but so far they raise more questions than they answer. “Every single one is strange,” said one astronomer.

RECIPE OF THE DAY

I don’t want to turn on my stove in the middle of July. I want to open the refrigerator and cabinets and build a party board. The cool kids call it a charcuterie board. My friend Gabrielle says it’s a snack tray. Call it a grazing platter or rando antipasti. What you need: cheese, olives, crackers, tinned fish, carrot sticks, deli meats, pickled things, dips, a ramekin of mustard, some sliced baguette, fruits fresh and dried — basically, whatever is available to you right now, whatever looks good.

The dance company A.I.M by Kyle Abraham recently brought a new work to The Times — literally. They performed an abridged version of their “White Space” in the office of our T Magazine. We captured the artistry with a drone. Watch.

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