The Guardian wrote:
Romain Gavras’s new drama-thriller is about racism, violence and injustice in the Paris banlieues – broadly in the tradition of Mathieu Kassovitz’s La Haine and Ladj Ly’s Les Misérables. 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.

It tells the story of four brothers of Algerian origin in the same tough Athena housing estate. Idir has just been killed by a bunch of cops – or guys in cop uniforms – for daring to talk back, an atrocity captured on a viral video. Abdel (Dali Benssalah) is a decorated army hero, Moktar (Ouassini Embarek) is a coke-dealing gangster and Karim (Sami Slimane) is a local guy seething with rage at his brother’s racist murder.

The movie begins with Abdel giving a press conference, flanked by police and politicians, appealing for calm following Idir’s killing and asking people to join him in a “silent march” of peaceful protest. Some hope. In any other movie, that press conference would be a bland opener, a piece of narrative throat-clearing preceding any number of dull dialogue scenes laying out the issues. But not this one. Karim is there at the press conference: he throws a Molotov cocktail at the assembled cops and then, leading hundreds of Athena guys, launches an extraordinary Assault on Precinct 13-style attack on the police station, stealing weapons and a police van before retreating to his inner-city stronghold. This breathtaking action sequence looks like the Battle of Helm’s Deep.

Yet after that audacious coup, the movie loses its dramatic shape as the situation between the three brothers is sketched in. The introduction of a conspiracy theory subplot feels like fence-sitting on the issue of police racism, and the film also brings in a rather perfunctory white “terrorist” figure called Sébastien (Alexis Manenti), who appears to be there to differentiate the brothers from truly fanatical and unjustified violence. The film is very reliant on the news on the TV in the corner to underline the larger, national implications.

Athena is forthright and bold in its way: that opening sequence is a barnstormer. But there is not much human complexity or human authenticity in the drama that follows.

Athena.2022.1080p.NF.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.Atmos.x264-KHN.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 39 min
Size: 	2.35 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 606 kb/s
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Audio
#1:  	French 5.1ch E-AC-3 JOC @ 768 kb/s (French)

https://nitro.download/view/5A1BB08882C9C3C/Athena.2022.1080p.NF.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.Atmos.x264-KHN.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, Spanish, French, Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Swedish, Russian, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, Ukrainian

The post Romain Gavras – Athena (2022) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

1516, Legend has it that the king of Algiers had a wife named Zaphira. When the pirate Aroudj Barbarossa arrives to liberate the city from the Spaniards, he is determined to conquer Zaphira as well as the kingdom itself. But is Zaphira willing to let him, or is she plotting for herself?

The.Last.Queen.2022.720p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-PTer.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 53 min
Size: 	6.67 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1280x690 
Aspect ratio:  	1.85:1
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	7 758 kb/s
BPP: 	0.366
Audio
#1:  	English 5.1ch AC-3 @ 640 kb/s (Arabic)

https://nitro.download/view/754D4CCB3A8CE36/The.Last.Queen.2022.720p.BluRay.DD5.1.x264-PTer.mkv

Language(s):Arabic
Subtitles:English, French

The post Adila Bendimerad & Damien Ounouri – La dernière reine AKA The Last Queen (2022) first appeared on Cinema of the World.