Lav Diaz sails to new heights in a stunning depiction of Magellan's colonial decay

The audience doesn’t see Ferdinand Magellan for the first seven-and-a-half minutes of Magellan. Instead, the film begins on the wailing fear of the Indigenous people of Malacca at the sight of a white man, grounded in a ritual where they plead to their gods for protection. When the film finally comes upon Magellan (Gael García Bernal), he’s buried amongst a hundred slain men and women—in the aftermath of a Portuguese-incited coastal invasion that left Malay natives slaughtered and enslaved—barely...