It’s been quite a while since I watched a movie in a constant fugue state of tension and admiration.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 7, 2022

The movie doesn’t have enough to say to start a real argument.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Sep 29, 2022

Athena is an engrossing and unflinching polemic, an “action-tragedy” that’s both a feast for the eyes and a dagger to the heart.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 29, 2022

One of the more thrilling, innovative and genuinely exciting films of the year.

| Sep 28, 2022

It gets a little tidy in the storytelling, but the look of it is just fantastic.

| Sep 23, 2022

A fast-moving political thriller and urban drama that feels genuinely cinematic, with technical finesse to spare.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 23, 2022

Grander in scope and scale than the urban frisson of genre classic La Haine and its immersive, “real-time” design leaves the viewer reeling and scrambling in time

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 23, 2022

While it’s true that there are real issues at play here — police violence, racism, the disaffection of the immigrant underclass — the filmmakers don’t so much explore as exploit them, giving a loud and sloppy genre exercise a patina of relevance.

| Sep 22, 2022

As a sustained piece of action choreography, “Athena” is frequently staggering. As a drama about police violence, the woes of a long-ignored underclass and the complexities of modern French identity, the movie feels thin and overdetermined.

| Sep 21, 2022

The politics are ultimately melioristic, but the action, to the very last minute, is incandescent.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 16, 2022

A visceral tour de force that lands with the impact of a shotgun blast to the chest.

| Sep 11, 2022

“Athena” is a vision of political apocalypse, and it names the enemy while throwing its cinematic hands in the air, along with the camera. It turns its own story into just another figure in the mediascape that it decries.

| Sep 10, 2022

It’s a movie that utilizes every bit of Gavras’ abundant chops and marshals them to make a coherent statement, tapping brains and heart and spleen in the name of forcing you to recognize what he’s putting in front of you.

| Sep 8, 2022

[It] has one eye on the present and another on the eternal. Its subject is timely but its presentation is timeless — it’s a war movie, a family drama, a Greek tragedy.

| Sep 6, 2022

“Athena” is not propaganda. Sure, it could be seen as a passionate call to action, giving audiences a taste of resistance, but the screenwriters — Gavras, Ly and Elias Belkeddar — temper that catharsis with a strong sense of caution.

| Sep 4, 2022

Nerve-rattling, intense and explosive.

| Sep 3, 2022

A more self-aware film might have recognized the weaknesses of its storytelling and embraced the representational essence of Gavras’ direction.

| Original Score: C+ | Sep 2, 2022

Athena is a torrent, an inundation, a cascade of rage, fury and frustration over the realities of life for a particular group of French families.

| Sep 2, 2022

Gavras’ orchestrating reflects the urgency of the cause in the visual energy of the filmmaking: a perpetual state of disarray choreographed to appear organically conceived.

| Sep 2, 2022

The knotty politics of Athena are also its downfall, as the script meanders towards an unconvincing middle ground...

| Sep 2, 2022