Every Movie By Storm Director Romain Gavras, Ranked
Earlier this year, the Internet was inundated with images of the Swedish rapper Yung Lean casually vaping among a group of pulsating dancers, costumed, just like him, to look like private school kids posing for a class photo.
The director responsible for this beguiling short — titled Storm and is a promo for a project by French producer GENER8ION, aka Surkin — is Romain Gavras, a French provocateur who is one of the latest in a long line of filmmakers who started in the world of genre-defying music videos. In the ‘90s, that career path became the norm for adventurous filmmakers like Michel Gondry, Jonathan Glazer and Spike Jonze. As the music video as an art form has become less prominent, the number of filmmakers taking that path has lessened, too.
This makes Gavras — who is, we should say, the son of the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Costa Gavras — something of a throwback, but the fact that his videos (like his astonishing shorts for Jamie XX’s Gosh, MIA’s Bad Girls and Justice’s Stress) still stand out from all the noise these days speaks volumes to their aesthetic powers. The same can’t yet be said of Gavras’ work on the big screen so far; at their best, his movies have offered fans a visceral rush that’s as thrilling as anything he’s done with the artists he’s collaborated with over the years.
In the list below, you’ll find all five of his feature-length projects to date, which I’ve ranked in ascending order. Read on to learn a bit more about each of them and use the guide to find them on services like Apple TV, Netflix, Prime Video and elsewhere.
If the sight of Gavras returning to short-form work is somewhat surprising given all that he’s achieved, his most recent movie Sacrifice might have something to do with it. In 2024, the filmmaker used all of the clout he’d built up over the years to assemble a cast featuring no less than Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Evans, John Malkovich, Salma Hayek and Charli XCX, but Sacrifice landed with a considerable splat at its Toronto Film Festival premiere last year and, for better or worse, we’ve yet to hear about it since.
The story follows Evans’ Mike Tyler, a movie star who gets abducted by a group of fanatics (led by Taylor-Joy’s Joan) who believe that they can save humanity by sacrificing him and two others (sounds a bit Bugonia, no?). Having sadly not had a chance to see it yet, I'm putting this one in last place based on the movie’s lukewarm TIFF reactions, many of which agree that movies about the vapidness of celebrity starring the most famous people in the world usually tend to feel a bit disingenuous. I’m still kind of dying to see it.
Gavras first made the jump to feature-length filmmaking with A Cross the Universe, a documentary that followed the band Justice’s 2008 North American tour while also coinciding with the release of his boundary-pushing video for Stress — a short film shot in the Paris suburbs that fetishised violent working-class youths (a controversy-baiting trick he would repeat four years later with his video for No Church in the Wild).
In terms of the music documentary form, A Cross isn’t exactly groundbreaking. However, it perfectly captures the French electro duo at the height of their indie sleaze powers — a time when there were few cooler things for a young person to be doing with their time than partying to D.A.N.C.E. in a slim leather jacket.
03
Our Day Will Come
In 2010, Gavras finally moved into narrative features with Our Day Will Come, which weirdly expanded on the controversial, red-haired-people-genocide theme of his notorious nine-minute music video for MIA’s Born Free.
As that introduction might suggest, Our Day Will Come turned out to be at best a little undercooked and at worst a bit of an afterthought to that video — a movie that looked as cool as Gavras’ best work but one that failed to really make use of its feature-length running time. It did, however, begin a relationship with Vincent Cassel, who stars in the movie as a psychiatrist who travels with a red-haired teenager to Ireland as he believes that red-haired people are treated better there — and yes, that synopsis is accurate.
Watching Our Day and The World Is Yours back to back, it’s easy to tell which one was directed by a man in his 20s and which was directed by a 37-year-old. To call The World Is Yours a mature film would be to disregard its most fun and puerile qualities — but in terms of an artistic leap forward, it is pretty much night and day between the two.
This is a film that once again sees the director revel in the fetishisation of French working-class youth culture — a movie that appears like a kaleidoscope of scramblers and football tracksuits; and one that features a sequence in which a group of English louts belt out Robbie Williams’ ‘Angels’ from a karaoke bar in a sunny Spanish resort. The title is ripped from Brian De Palma’s Scarface (which also ripped it from the 1932 original), and most of the reviews were quick to mention Guy Ritchie and Quentin Tarantino.
However, this movie is very much a Gavras joint, and also well worth seeing.
05
Athena
Watching the first 20 minutes of Athena at the Venice Film Festival in 2022 felt like watching a new dawn of the “oner” — a once mesmerising cinematic trick that had become a bit passé thanks to filmmakers like Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman, The Revenant). Still, the intro to Gavras’ fourth movie (which begins in a police station, turns into a riot and a car chase, and ends up back on the roof of the titular apartment block without a single cut) really did take the breath away and suggest there were still exciting things to be done with it.
The movie isn’t short on dazzling moments and memorable images, but if there’s one reason to see it, it’s obviously that breathless opening chase. I was disappointed when the movie went straight to Netflix after the festival (thus denying audiences the chance to witness it in a cinema) and even sadder to see it barely register on streaming. If you have a spare evening, take it for a spin.
