Prompted by Jeannette Catsoulis's Critic's Pick. She's one of the few decent reviewers left at the New York Times.
People of a certain age learnt the essentials of Homer's Odyssey from the fabulous-in-memory French/Japanese space-age Ulysses 31 cartoon. Against this the opening scenes made me fear I was in for another witless, overly literal adaptation: those slow shots of the island, the boat wreckage, a heavily damaged naked man washed up on a beach, a trying realism. But after a while things settle down and the survivor's-guilt inertness of Ralph Fiennes's Odysseus is shown to be cunning circumspection and not world-weariness. Juliette Binoche lights up every scene, especially in a central one where she looses two decades of rage against the beggarly Fiennes. (She rides the ambiguity of her knowing right to the end.) Against that is the miscasting of Charlie Plummer as Telemachus which is almost fatal at times. Marwan Kenzari and Claudio Santamaria are able in support. Co-produced, co-adapted and directed by Uberto Pasolini.
The dire rating at IMDB reflects the unevenness of the production, and perhaps an expectation that this does or should treat more of the story than it does. See, for instance, Radheyan Simonpillai.