‘Athena’ Trailer: Paris Is Seething In Romain Gavras’ Netflix Drama; Director Talks Immersive Modern Tragedy – Venice

The death of her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II on Thursday at age 96 as prompted Peter Morgan, writer of the 2006 film The Queen starring Helen Mirren and Netflix’s Emmy-winning drama The Crown, said that the series “is a love letter to her.”

Nurses are supposed to make sure their patients are comfortable and well-taken care of. But what if that kindly nurse, who you expect to do what’s best, is actually trying to kill you? That’s the question that is asked in the new Netflix thriller, “The Good Nurse.” As seen in the trailer for “The Good Nurse,” the film follows the astonishing true story of a nurse who is suspected of poisoning his patients, leading to their untimely deaths.

Naman Ramachandran Florian Zeller and the cast of his “The Son,” including Hugh Jackman, Vanessa Kirby, Laura Dern and Zen McGrath, addressed the issue of mental health, the film’s central subject, ahead of its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The film, Zeller’s follow up to his Oscar-winning “The Father,” is an adaptation of his own stage play. It focuses on Peter (Jackman), whose busy but happy life with his infant and new partner Beth (Kirby) is disrupted when his ex-wife Kate (Dern) informs him about their teenage son Nicholas (McGrath), who has been missing from school for months and is disturbed. Addressing a press conference at Venice, Zeller said that he wanted to “explore these very emotional territories in a very honest and humble way” and that his work with the cast “was such a joyful, truthful and intense journey that we shared.”

relentlessly entertaining. This looks delightful! A super bitchy, high school-set variation on Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train,” in “Do Revenge” Camila Mendes (from “Riverdale”) and Maya Hawke (from “Stranger Things”) play picked-on high schoolers who make a pact to go after each other’s bullies.

The Wonder is Gothic without the architecture. Set in rural central Ireland in the wake of the Great Famine of the mid-1800s, director Sebastian Lelio’s adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s 2016 novel methodically moves the chess pieces around in telling the tale of an 11-year-old girl who has locals mystified as to what God is intending by letting her survive for four months without eating. Atmospheric and intriguing up to a point, it nonetheless feels like much ado about a mildly curious situation that’s been milked for rather more than it’s worth.

Vincent Cassel is getting some support on the red carpet.

If you ever questioned it before, let “Bardo” — wordily subtitled ‘or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths,’ as was the director’s wont with 2014’s “Birdman” — lay your queries to rest: Alejandro Iñárritu really, really loves Fellini. He’s not the only one, naturally: comparisons to “8 ½” are par for the course whenever a filmmaker comes out with a notionally autobiographical work, as with Pedro Almodóvar’s “Pain and Glory” in 2019.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Iconoclast, the international production group behind Romain Gavras’ Venice competition film “Athena,” is setting a wide-ranging slate of projects with emerging filmmakers from different audiovisual fields, including Leo Berne from the artists collective Megaforce, and Elias Belkeddar and Said Belktibia from the collective Kourtrajmé. The company is also producing the next projects of Harmony Korine and Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre, among others. In a rare interview, Nicolas Lhermitte, who co-founded Iconoclast with Mourad Belkeddar, says the company has emerged from the pandemic with a record number of developed projects. “We took the opportunity during the pandemic to develop a lot of projects, and today we have around 30 projects in the pipeline, spanning films and series that are set up at our studios in France, the U.S. and Germany,” says Lhermitte, who adds that Iconoclast aspired to “accompany multi-disciplinary artists to venture from one field to another, films, TV series, branded content, and music videos.”

Romain Gavras’ immersive modern tragedy Athena just had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, receiving a 4 1/2-minute standing ovation in the process.

Romain Gavras wastes no time in “Athena” informing the audience of the stakes. There have been three cases of police brutality within two months in the titular majority-minority community.

Designed as something akin to a Greek tragedy for today’s moment, Venice Film Festival Competition title 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. Such conditions exist in most societies, some more dire than others, but here the wages of pent-up anger are presented with a single-minded intensity and extended duration that would be hard to exceed.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic There is no Athena housing project in Paris. That’s a name invented by “Athena” director Romain Gavras and partner in crime Ladj Ly for the banlieu apartment block that becomes a kind of makeshift fortress in an epic standoff between residents — first- and second-generation Black and Arab immigrants tired of being mistreated — and the French national police. Naming it thus lends what unfolds there a classical resonance, one that ties Gavras’ astonishing third feature to the tradition of Greek tragedy, though the situation could hardly be more timely. “Athena” tells the story of four brothers, one murdered on camera by a group of unidentified men in police uniforms, the three others torn about what to do next. Who were these assailants, shown stomping an innocent 13-year-old to death? Why does the French police seem to be protecting the culprits? And what will it take to obtain justice?

EXCLUSIVE: After an exhaustive casting process, Netflix drama The Crown has found its Prince William and Kate Middleton for the show’s sixth season. Producers have gone for a double dose of William, with two actors chosen to portray him as he goes from teenager to young adult, Deadline has learned.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent After the edgy crime comedy “The World Is Yours,” Romain Gavras is back with thriller “Athena.” Produced by Paris-based Iconoclast for Netflix, the ambitious, €15 million film ($15 million) unfolds in the aftermath of the tragic killing of a young boy. A leaked video showing the boy as a victim of police brutality goes viral and ignites an all-out war in an imaginary community called Athena. It’s the first French movie that Netflix is presenting in competition at the Venice Film Festival. “Athena” tells the story of the boy’s three siblings, who are responding to the tragedy in different ways. French star Dali Benssalah (“Les Sauvages,” “No Time to Die”) plays the older brother, Abdel, a French soldier. Faced with an impossible moral dilemma, Abdel is called back from the frontline to help diffuse the all-out war that has been sparked by his younger brother Karim (Sami Slimane), who wants revenge. Athena becomes the backdrop of a tragedy for both the family and its entire community. The film’s stellar cast also includes Ouassini Embarek, Anthony Bajon and Alexis Manenti.

If you ever questioned it before, let “Bardo” — wordily subtitled ‘or False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths,’ as was the director’s wont with 2014’s “Birdman” — lay your queries to rest: Alejandro Iñárritu really, really loves Fellini. He’s not the only one, naturally: comparisons to “8 ½” are par for the course whenever a filmmaker comes out with a notionally autobiographical work, as with Pedro Almodóvar’s “Pain and Glory” in 2019.

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and Media Nicole Power has joined the ensemble of the upcoming Netflix drama series“Glamorous.” She will appear alongside the previously announced “Sex and the City” icon Kim Cattrall, as well as actor, singer-songwriter and YouTuber Miss Benny. In the show, Power will portray Mykynnleigh, a seemingly guileless corporate consultant who rolls into town to help make a business deal happen. Although she seems wholesome and unsophisticated, those appearances are deceiving as Mykynnleigh possesses a lot of backbone and business acumen. “Glamorous” tells the story of Marco Mejia (Miss Benny), a gender-nonconforming queer young man whose life seems to be stuck in place until he lands a job working for legendary makeup mogul Madolyn Addison (Cattrall). It’s Marco’s first chance to figure out what he wants out of life, who he actually is and what it really means for him to be queer.

Lars von Trier stoically put in an appearance at the Venice Film Festival via video link on Thursday for the premiere of his upcoming series The Kingdom Exodus, making his first international appearance since announcing in August that he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor In “The March on Rome,” which world premieres in the Venice Days sidebar of Venice Film Festival Wednesday, Northern Irish-Scottish filmmaker Mark Cousins tracks the ascent of fascism in Italy in the 1920s, and its fall-out across 1930s Europe. He also draws a dotted line from those events to the storming of the Capitol in Washington, D.C., in January 2021. The documentary, illustrated with archive footage and Cousins’ characteristic cinematic analysis, starts with Donald Trump defending his decision to retweet a quote from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini: “It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.” Later in the film, Cousins inserts footage of Trump supporters attacking the Capitol, hoping to overturn Joe Biden’s electoral victory.

David Yates’ Netflix film The Pain Hustlers has begun rounding out its cast, with Andy Garcia (Father of the Bride), Catherine O’Hara (Schitt’s Creek), Jay Duplass (Industry), Brian d’Arcy James (West Side Story) and Chloe Coleman (My Spy) signing on to star alongside Emily Blunt and Chris Evans.