8 Films Worth Rewatching: Total Recall, Contact & More

STONES OF ERASMUS — FILM & PHILOSOPHY

Eight Films to Watch Over and Over Again

Some movies invite a second viewing because I want to spend more time in their worlds. Others leave an argument unfinished. Following my earlier list of films worth returning to, here are eight more: a little science fiction, some difficult love, a dreadful disappearance, and a generous helping of comic trouble. On Friday evenings I've been watching one from the list below.

I created a question for you to take with you as you before, during, and after viewing and provided some quirky, philosophical capsule reviews of the 8 seemingly unrelated movies.

8 Quirky Films to watch on Fridays

Date	Film

01

Total Recall (1990)

Friday, April 17, 2026

Directed by Paul Verhoeven

Can a purchased memory become part of who you are?

Some vacations promise a change of scenery. Total Recall offers a change of self. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays Douglas Quaid, a construction worker tempted by a company selling implanted memories of adventures he has never lived. Naturally, the purchase goes spectacularly wrong. Paul Verhoeven turns that premise into a sweaty, grotesque carnival of Martian rebellion, corporate power, and bodies that refuse to behave. I love how the movie lets its philosophical problem wear the loudest possible costume.

What makes a memory yours? How much of an identity can somebody else manufacture? Even the action feels suspicious: perhaps the heroic adventure is exactly what Quaid ordered. Meanwhile, the struggle over breathable air gives the fantasy a blunt political edge. This is a world where survival itself has a price tag. Return for the outrageous effects and breakneck momentum; stay with the uneasy possibility that pleasure can make a convincing substitute for truth.

Film details: AFI Catalog.

02

Contact (1997)

Friday, April 24, 2026

Directed by Robert Zemeckis

What happens when experience outpaces proof?

Contact makes listening look like an adventure. Jodie Foster's Ellie Arroway searches the sky for evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence, but the movie's deepest longing feels human: somebody, somewhere, might answer. Adapted from Carl Sagan's novel, Robert Zemeckis's film moves between radio telescopes, political maneuvering, religious conviction, and private grief. Foster gives the spectacle its center. Her attention is so intense that waiting for a signal becomes dramatic.

I am especially interested in the friction between what Ellie can experience and what she can persuade others to believe. The film sometimes announces its ideas too emphatically, yet its generosity toward wonder keeps pulling me along. Science requires evidence; being human also involves trust, imagination, and the ache of absence. Contact lets those demands trouble one another. Watch it again for the movement from cosmic scale to a single face, and for its insistence that curiosity can be an act of hope.

Film details: Walker Art Center.

03

Raising Arizona (1987)

Friday, May 1, 2026

Directed by Joel Coen; written by Joel and Ethan Coen

Can longing for a family justify taking from another’s?

The Coen brothers give the American dream a stolen baby and send it running through the desert. Nicolas Cage plays H.I. McDunnough, a repeat offender who marries Ed, a police photographer played by Holly Hunter. Unable to have children, they decide a local family with quintuplets can spare one. Their reasoning is terrible. Their longing is painfully recognizable. Raising Arizona gets its energy from that collision: absurd criminal logic rubbing against a sincere wish to become better people.

I delight in the elastic camera, the runaway dialogue, and Cage's expression of permanent bewilderment. Hunter supplies an equally essential conviction; Ed treats this ridiculous enterprise with absolute seriousness. Underneath the diapers, chases, and escalating disasters sits a question about deserving happiness. Can wanting a family excuse what you do to obtain one? The movie keeps its affection for these fools while allowing their dream to look both beautiful and dangerously selfish.

Film details: Disney+ film details.

04

My Night at Maud's (1969)

Directed by Éric Rohmer

A snowy evening, an apartment, a conversation that refuses to end: Eric Rohmer understands how much suspense articulate adults can generate. Jean-Louis, a Catholic engineer, thinks he knows the shape his future should take. An encounter with the divorced Maud makes that certainty less comfortable. My Night at Maud's brings Pascal, probability, desire, and religious commitment into the same room, then watches people use ideas to explain themselves. Or to conceal themselves. That distinction is where the pleasure begins for me.

Jean-Louis Trintignant and Francoise Fabian make intellectual exchange feel intimate, competitive, and faintly dangerous. The beautiful black and white photography gives their talk room to breathe. Pay attention to the pauses as carefully as the arguments. A person can construct an elegant account of his principles while remaining obscure to himself. Another viewing invites us to hear what these characters reveal when they believe they are being perfectly clear.

Film details: The Criterion Collection.

05

Angst essen Seele auf (Ali: Fear Eats the Soul) (1974)

Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Two lonely people dance, and suddenly the room seems to belong to everybody judging them. Rainer Werner Fassbinder builds Ali: Fear Eats the Soul around Emmi, an older German cleaning woman, and Ali, a younger Moroccan migrant worker. Their attachment exposes the racism and possessiveness of neighbors, coworkers, and family. Brigitte Mira and El Hedi ben Salem give the relationship a tenderness that makes each hostile stare hurt. I find the framing devastating: doorways, staircases, and empty spaces turn ordinary places into instruments of exclusion.

Yet Fassbinder also follows prejudice into the relationship itself. Loving someone does not automatically undo the habits a society has taught you. That complication gives the film its enduring force. Its bright colors and deliberately arranged scenes invite us to look closely at behavior we might otherwise accept as ordinary. Return to the dance, then watch how difficult it becomes to sustain that shared space.

Film details: The Criterion Collection; additional context.

06

Spoorloos (The Vanishing) (1988)

Directed by George Sluizer

A roadside stop, a missing woman, a man who cannot stop searching. George Sluizer's original The Vanishing takes an ordinary interruption and makes it feel like a tear in the fabric of daily life. Rex's determination to discover what happened to Saskia becomes the film's terrible engine. What unsettles me is the patience. Sunlight, family routines, and reasonable behavior remain visible while something monstrous takes shape among them. The movie shows us enough of the abductor to redirect our curiosity, making knowledge itself feel increasingly dangerous.

We want an answer because Rex wants one, and that identification becomes a trap. I would keep the ending unspoiled for anyone approaching it for the first time. For a return visit, notice the construction: small gestures, rehearsals, and casual details acquire a dreadful weight. This thriller understands the appetite for certainty so precisely that it makes the desire to finish a story frightening.

Film details: The Criterion Collection.

07

La Cité des enfants perdus (The City of Lost Children)(1995)

Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro

Imagine a fairy tale assembled from rusted machinery, green fog, and the contents of a troubled toy box. Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro make The City of Lost Children a place you can almost smell. Krank, a scientist unable to dream, steals children in an effort to appropriate their dreams. Against his machinery stand One, a circus strongman played by Ron Perlman, and Miette, a resourceful girl played by Judith Vittet. Their unlikely partnership gives the elaborate nightmare a beating heart.

I enjoy the film's willingness to be excessive: strange faces, impossible inventions, and images that seem to have escaped from sleep. Beneath that abundance sits a simple cruelty. Adults want something from children and build an entire apparatus for taking it. Tenderness becomes a form of resistance. Watch again for the details crowded into the frame, but keep your attention on the trust developing between these two vulnerable allies.

Film details: Sony Pictures Classics; additional context.

08

3 Ninjas (1992)

Directed by Jon Turteltaub

After all that metaphysical uncertainty and European anguish, I am making room for three brothers who can handle a kidnapping attempt with martial arts and teamwork. Jon Turteltaub's 3 Ninjas follows Rocky, Colt, and Tum Tum, whose grandfather trains them while their FBI agent father pursues an arms dealer. The setup turns family tension into a child's fantasy of competence: grownups underestimate you, danger arrives, and the skills you practiced suddenly matter. Victor Wong gives Grandpa the warmth that holds the silliness together.

The jokes are broad, the villains broader, and subtlety rarely enters the room. I appreciate the uncomplicated pleasure of watching siblings become allies. Their bickering makes cooperation feel earned, even when the action cheerfully abandons plausibility. On another viewing, the appeal is less about suspense than rhythm: training, trouble, improvisation, escape. Sometimes a movie earns its place through the generosity of letting children imagine themselves capable together.

Film details: D23: Disney A to Z.

Stones of Erasmus — Arts, letters, and a little philosophy at the movies.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey Review: Odysseus Comes Home, But He’s Still Lost

Review: Odysseus Comes Home, But He’s Still Lost

By Greig Roselli | Stones of Erasmus

Spoilers ahead for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and, I suppose, for a story that has been circulating for nearly three thousand years.

“Odysseus makes it back to Ithaca. I’m just not convinced Christopher Nolan lets him come home.”

I saw Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey last night with a friend and his son.

Beforehand, I even said something reassuring: “That’s cool. Y’all will like the story. It has these deep, familiar themes.”

Maybe I should have done my homework.

Nolan’s take on Homer is legitimate Odyssey—the bones of the ancient poem are certainly there—but this is far from the comforting version of the story I had carried into the theater. I expected Athena mentoring young Telemachus. I expected the clever “man of many wiles,” fighting monsters and gods as he struggles toward Ithaca.

What I got instead was something considerably more unsettling: an Odyssey about cognitive distortion, psychological damage, war, memory, and the frightening possibility that a person can return home without ever really coming home.

And Nolan tells us almost immediately what kind of movie this will be.

The Trojan Horse in the Sand

The film does not begin with Odysseus wandering the sea.

It begins with the Trojan Horse.

We see that iconic instrument of Troy’s destruction lodged in the landscape like some enormous effigy—a monument to the violence that has already happened and to everything that will follow.

I wasn’t expecting it.

In fact, strangely enough, I wasn’t expecting to see the Trojan Horse at all.

But its presence makes sense because Nolan is interested not merely in Odysseus’s adventures after Troy but in what Troy has done to him. The war isn’t prologue. The war follows him.

That distinction matters.

This is where Nolan’s adaptation departs most dramatically from the Odyssey I thought I was going to see.

I still have enormous affection for the 1997 television miniseries starring Armand Assante. As a straightforward screen adaptation of Homer’s adventures, I may even prefer it. Nolan is after something else.

His Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, is not simply a wanderer desperately trying to find his way home.

He is a man who may no longer know what “home” means.

Odysseus Comes Home. Does It Matter?

That is the film’s most disturbing idea.

Of course Odysseus eventually returns to Ithaca. That’s the story. Homer told us that part a few millennia ago.

But watch Damon’s face when Odysseus finally looks into Penelope’s eyes.

Has this man actually returned?

I don’t think so.

He seems almost as lost standing before Penelope as he was when he first left his family and sailed toward Troy.

That changes the meaning of the entire journey.

Homer’s Odyssey is obsessed with nostos—homecoming. Nolan seems more interested in asking whether nostos is psychologically possible after a person has been transformed by violence.

And that is where this ancient Greek story begins to feel startlingly American.

Nolan’s Odysseus looks to me less like an ancient king than a modern man disenchanted with the promises that were supposed to organize his life: war, masculinity, marriage, heroism, status, home.

He gets Ithaca back.

He gets Penelope back.

He gets the palace back.

But does he get Odysseus back?

I’m not convinced.

Circe Without the Comfort of Hermes

The same psychological unease runs through Samantha Morton’s remarkable Circe.

In Homer, Circe transforms Odysseus’s men into pigs, but the episode also gives us divine intervention: Hermes provides Odysseus with moly, the magical herb that protects him from Circe’s enchantment.

Nolan strips away much of that reassuring mythological machinery.

Morton’s Circe is terrifying precisely because she doesn’t feel comfortably mythological. She feels damaged, dangerous, unpredictable—someone whose capacity to hurt others seems bound up with her own distorted relationship to the world.

Morton plays her with gasping accuracy.

It is one of several moments when Nolan makes the supernatural feel less like fantasy than psychological horror.

The gods and monsters haven’t exactly disappeared.

But somehow the humans have become more frightening.

And Then There Is Penelope

Anne Hathaway’s Penelope may be the character that most startled me.

Homer’s Penelope is one of Western literature’s great figures of fidelity and cunning. She delays the suitors by weaving Laertes’ burial shroud during the day and secretly unraveling it at night. She survives through patience, intelligence, and an extraordinary ability to control what others know.

Nolan gives us something colder.

Hathaway retains Penelope’s intelligence and regal authority, but this Penelope seems deeply resentful—of her circumstances, of the men surrounding her, perhaps even of the husband whose absence has defined her life.

There is a monarchical aloofness to her.

At moments she seems less concerned with the sentimental preservation of marriage than with power, status, survival, and maintaining control over Ithaca.

Even her relationship with Telemachus carries an edge I wasn’t prepared for.

And then there is Tom Holland’s Telemachus.

I’ve rarely seen the boy portrayed as quite this feckless.

That may sound like criticism, but I think it’s intentional.

Homer’s Telemachus begins the poem immature and uncertain, but Athena pushes him toward adulthood. Nolan gives us a young man who seems almost painfully ill-equipped to inherit the damaged world his parents have made for him.

The old generation went to Troy.

The next generation gets the consequences.

That’s a pretty bleak inheritance.

Homer Without Homework

Here’s the good news: you do not need to know Homer to see this movie.

In some ways, knowing Homer may make the experience stranger.

I walked into the theater carrying Athena, Hermes, nostos, Penelope’s loom, Telemachus’s coming-of-age story, and decades of other adaptations in my head.

Nolan kept knocking those expectations sideways.

Someone encountering the story fresh may simply experience an enormous, brutal, strange adventure about a soldier trying to return to his family.

Someone who knows the poem may find themselves constantly negotiating the distance between Homer and Nolan.

Both experiences are worthwhile.

And My God, Look at It

Whatever reservations I have about Nolan’s interpretation, visually The Odyssey is extraordinary.

This is a movie made for enormous screens.

The landscapes don’t merely illustrate Homer. They make you understand how landscapes might have generated Homeric storytelling in the first place.

Sea.

Rock.

Dust.

Islands.

Palaces.

Bodies against enormous horizons.

There are moments when you can almost imagine Homer—or generations of singers whose stories eventually became Homer—looking upon something like these same Mediterranean landscapes and turning geography into myth.

Even the costumes have an unnerving physicality. Telemachus’s almost boyish armor seems particularly appropriate: a young man dressed for a heroic tradition he hasn’t grown into yet.

Nothing feels clean.

Nothing feels particularly safe.

And very little feels like the sanitized Greece of a museum gift shop.

Nolan’s Mediterranean is gorgeous because it is indifferent to the people struggling across it.

So, Should You See

The Odyssey?

Yes.

But not because Christopher Nolan has finally given us the definitive screen version of Homer.

I don’t think he has.

See it because Nolan has taken one of Western literature’s foundational stories about coming home and turned it into a movie about people who no longer know whether home can save them.

That makes The Odyssey feel less like a revival of an ancient epic than a snapshot of the world in 2026.

War doesn’t end when somebody announces that the war is over.

Families don’t simply resume where they left off.

Children inherit consequences they didn’t create.

People hurt one another and call it survival.

And sometimes the person who finally reaches home discovers that the most difficult distance remaining is the one between himself and the people waiting for him.

Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut once held an uncomfortable mirror up to marriage, desire, privilege, and the anxieties lurking beneath an apparently stable world.

Nolan is doing something similarly unsettling here, only with Homer.

The result isn’t always the Odyssey I wanted.

Maybe that’s the point.

Odysseus makes it back to Ithaca.

I’m just not convinced Christopher Nolan lets him come home.

Rating: ★★★★☆

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is now playing in theaters. See it on the largest, highest-fidelity screen you reasonably can. This is one movie where the scale really does matter.