Magellan is a major work, one destined to draw greater awareness to its maker Laz Diaz, Philippine cinema’s reigning auteur. His first film to feature international star power—Gael García Bernal, exceptional in the role, tops the bill—it uses the life and career of 16th-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan (García Bernal) to interrogate the mechanisms and Messiah complex of Europe’s imperialist Age of Discovery.” The seafaring epic, which begins and ends with bloodshed in Southeast Asia, tracks the exploits of the hubristic Magellan, dragging a fleet of Spanish ships across the Pacific Ocean in search of a new spice route to the East. Diaz thoroughly de-aggrandizes the fabled navigator, painting him as a tyrannical colonizer gripped by paranoia and blind purpose, soothed only by memories of the pregnant wife (Ângela Azevedo) he left behind. Taking an anticolonial lens to the legend, Diaz’s visually resplendent film—his first in colour in over a decade—is a staggering achievement.