Alpha

The 100 Most Anticipated Movies of 2025

Alpha

2025

Julia Ducournau

Mélissa Boros, Golshifteh Farahani, Tahar Rahim, Emma Mackey ...

5.7

949

Drama. Thriller

Drama. Thriller

Alpha, a troubled 13-year-old lives with her single mom. Their world collapses the day she returns from school with a tattoo on her arm.

	Media	Author	Review
		Peter Debruge Variety	"The Palme d'Or-winning director returns to Cannes competition with a muddled meditation on an earlier pandemic, squandering the talents of lead actors Golshifteh Farahani and Tahar Rahim."
		Chase Hutchinson The Wrap	"Ducournau is not here to follow a familiar path. Instead, she pushes us and herself as a filmmaker into something deeper, creating her most exciting, emotional, existential and eviscerating work yet"
		Jordan Mintzer The Hollywood Reporter	"You’ve got to give Ducournau credit for refusing to settle down or take the Hollywood route after winning the Palme, but you also have to wonder if her latest feature will please anyone but her."
		Peter Bradshaw The Guardian	"Strident, oppressive, incoherent and weirdly pointless from first to last (...) even an honest lead performance from Mélissa Boros can’t retrieve it. (...) Rating: ★ (out of 5)"
		Therese Lacson Collider	"Ducournau blends two timelines seamlessly and melts them together to create an intriguing and unique film (...) Rating: 9 (out of 10)"
		Lee Marshall Screendaily	"Alpha is teeming with ideas, even if not all of them mesh in a story that uses some old-school auditory persuasions to try to win us around."
		David Ehrlich IndieWire	"All credit to a newly-minted Palme d'Or-winner for having the courage to step out of their comfort zone, but 'Alpha' is an insufferable misfire."
		Donald Clarke Irish Times	"This is awesome. Few will endure this without admitting they’ve sat through something out of the ordinary (...) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"
		Siddhant Adlakha Decider	"Every narrative and aesthetic decision feels like the wrong one"
		Stephanie Bunbury Deadline	"Its muddle of timescales (...) is frustrating (...) The film’s sheer, unrelenting squalor can wear you down, too. Those three performances, on the other hand, are indelible triumphs"
		Tim Robey Telegraph	"We can’t even claim it’s particularly bananas, all told: just sluggish, messy and confounding (...) Rating: ★★ (out of 5)"
		Sophie Butcher Empire	"Strong performances and the moving familial drama mean [this] is an impactful watch (...) Rating: ★★★ (out of 5)"
		Tomris Laffly AV Club	"An inexplicably shallow AIDS allegory"
		Wendy Ide The New York Observer	"Despite strong performances, the film feels oddly emotionally inert"
		Justin Chang The New Yorker	"A repetitive, unattractive, and finally unrewarding slog, in which Ducournau’s filmmaking verve itself seems to harden into lifelessness"
		Tori Brazier Metro	"I felt really uncomfortable watching it and the mesmerising acting made this a really impactful film that has stayed with me (...) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"
		Brian Tallerico rogerebert.com	"A movie that runs out of ideas and things to say before it’s even close to half over, forcing viewers to suffer the rest of this misfire in a sort of numb daze"
		Alison Willmore Vulture	"[It] is more evidence of Ducournau’s genius for evocative imagery and striking compositions, but it also suggests she’d benefit from boundaries to push against"
		Luke Hicks The Film Stage	"[It] is all flat frames and bland palettes, a creatively stifling choice that should have been a red flag for Ducournau and her team"
		Rachel Barker Paste Magazine	"Ducournau opts for a story both sprawling and soft —but if you’re willing to dredge through the swirling sands, it is just as complex and impactful as her previous offerings (...) Rating: 8 (out of 10)"

Return to movie

We encourage you to check the reviews' original sources. Intellectual property rights of these reviews belong to their authors and/or the correspondent media from which they have been extracted. If you'd like to help us to add more reviews to your favorite movies, just send us a message.