Athena
Netflix | Release Date: September 9, 2022 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
73
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 22 Critic Reviews
Positive:
16
Mixed:
6
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The Irish TimesTara BradySep 23, 2022
This electrifying new film from director Romain Gavras starts as it means to go on: with a riot and fireworks. Read full review
100
New York Magazine (Vulture)Bilge EbiriSep 2, 2022
Its subject is timely but its presentation is timeless — it’s a war movie, a family drama, a Greek tragedy. Read full review
91
The PlaylistMarshall ShafferSep 2, 2022
Especially after the film’s stunning conclusion, Athena is destined to leave jaws on the floor and heart rates significantly elevated long after the credits roll. This is the painful, perilous present tense written in the flash of a smartphone camera and the blaze of a Molotov cocktail. Read full review
90
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Barry HertzSep 30, 2022
It is at times brash and thick-headed in its characters and politics, but it is engineered with such an electric ferocity – a beautiful marriage of high-performance technical expertise and gonzo aesthetic imagination – that it cannot help but knock you out. Read full review
90
Paste MagazineJacob OllerSep 23, 2022
A war epic between the people and the state, it sprints through a grassroots resistance movement like a brushfire: Blinding, dangerous, all-consuming. Read full review
90
Rolling StoneDavid FearSep 8, 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. Read full review
88
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenDec 19, 2022
When it’s clicking—and it mostly clicks—Athena balances aesthetics with import, even interweaving the two into something that has the grave intimacy of Son of Saul and the political potency of The Battle of Algiers. Read full review
88
ObserverDylan RothSep 28, 2022
Athena is shocking, partly because its events seem only about five minutes in our future. One could place its powder keg neighborhood in any city in any divided nation, particularly here in the United States, where another “war that pits brother against brother” seems at least as probable. Read full review
85
PolygonSiddhant AdlakhaSep 26, 2022
Athena is arguably a style-over-substance movie, given how little time and attention it devotes to the personal drama underlying its politics. But in Gavras’ hands, the style is also the substance, with a restrained classicism giving way to baroque staging as each long take accelerates. Scenes build in ways that feel both narratively inevitable and visually prophetic. Read full review
83
The Film StageRory O'ConnorSep 4, 2022
Gavras, for better and worse, is a creature of spectacle; not apolitical, per se, but more concerned with triggers and semiotics than manifestos. Read full review
80
Time OutKaleem AftabSep 26, 2022
Athena’s dystopian view of our present day, showing a collapsing world with black-and-white mentalities, selfishly motivated, and with a desperate underclass left angry and adrift, feels like an urgent message. Anyone who loves their cinema to be spectacular, immersive and a rollercoaster ride will soak it up. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterDavid RooneySep 2, 2022
While the film’s emphatic style can become draining, and its attention to technique risks overshadowing the interpersonal drama, there’s an operatic grandeur here that won’t quit, giving the constantly escalating violence considerable power. Read full review
80
VarietyPeter DebrugeSep 2, 2022
The result is nothing short of an urban war movie, as charismatic characters decide to do something about the outrage people have been expressing toward law enforcement in the real world. Read full review
75
Movie NationRoger MooreJan 5, 2023
Athena becomes a mural of magnificently orchestrated chaos painted over a penny-plain story of brothers in conflict, and one of the most gripping action pictures to come out of France in recent memory. Read full review
75
RogerEbert.comTomris LafflySep 23, 2022
While some of these struggles are specific to the French communities the film follows, they are also universal, with recent echoes deeply familiar here in the US. And despite a morally ambiguous parting note, Athena incisively engages with these battles despite a brassy style that at times overpowers them. Read full review
75
TheWrapSep 2, 2022
Within the first few minutes of Athena, it’s clear this is propulsive filmmaking with thematic substance. Read full review
60
The New YorkerRichard BrodySep 12, 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. It offers no discourse, no practice, no options, no alternatives; strangely, in the process, it denies the residents of Athena agency. In the end, even its protagonists are mere extras in a nation-scaled drama. Read full review
60
Screen DailyTim GriersonSep 3, 2022
Wielding an ambitious visual strategy and volatile political commentary, Athena explodes but then fizzles, its often arresting images slowly undone by fuzzy ideas and a self-important air. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawSep 2, 2022
It’s spectacular and immersive, with a sensational opening. But it gets bogged down in its own one-note, one-tempo uproar and open-ended parkour camerawork – impressive though that is – and suffers from a number of sneaky false-flag get-out clauses that feel like a cop-out. Read full review
58
IndieWireDavid EhrlichSep 2, 2022
Athena effectively taps into the class, racial, and religious angers of modern France, which it sees as a powder keg that’s just waiting for the right spark to explode, but the film’s broad saga of brothers in crisis is so thin and symbolic that any deeper connection to the real world is sacrificed at the altar of intensity. An intensity that resists psychology, muffles sociopolitical context, and eventually swallows itself whole. Read full review
50
The New York TimesA.O. ScottSep 22, 2022
Gavras’s filmmaking is technically impressive. He pulls the camera through complex, kinetic tableaus in long, breathless takes. Some of these sequences are thrilling, but after a while they become repetitive, and Athena feels more like a video game background than an actual place. There’s no modulation. Read full review
50
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangSep 21, 2022
As a sustained piece of action choreography, then, 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. Read full review
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