Athena, director Romain Gavras' movie about an uprising in a French housing block following what appears to be a police killing of a child, is a riveting, thrilling, formally astounding rush. It opens with the most spectacular (stitched-together) long take I've seen in years: Without cutting, the camera follows a band of youths as they ransack a police station, steal a safe full of weapons, then flee down a highway back to their housing block, which has been converted into something like a medieval fortress. Somehow, over the course of a tight 97 minutes, the movie never lets up, holding and even building on the spectacle promised in the opening shot.
It feels like a miracle: How, you keep wondering, am I seeing this? How could this have been made? It's a masterpiece, and it is almost certainly one of the best films of the year.
