NYFF 2025 Film Review: Magellan

Lav Diaz's reputation for inaccessibility has always been a matter of runtime, not comprehension — his films are classical narratives told at a geological pace, patient rather than opaque. It's fitting, then, that Magellan, at a comparatively brisk two and a half hours, is simultaneously his most "accessible" work and his least conventional: less a story than a series of tableaus, an art installation masquerading as a costume epic. Gael García Bernal anchors a docu-drama about the birth of an empire, and the result is one of the year's most quietly devastating history lessons. Minor spoilers ahead…