Reality blurs with performance and even love is just another scripted role in the big Sundance winner of 2025, 'Atropia.' ...

This is the official image from “Atropia,” courtesy of the Sundance Institute. “Atropia” is almost too real to be called a satire. The film centers on Atropia, a fake city built outside of Los Angeles ...

Welcome to Atropia: an invented city constructed to exercise Western imaginations and soldiers.This mirage of a place is a bizarre, liminal construction of writer-director Hailey Gates ...

Actress and journalist Hailey Gates makes her feature debut as a writer-director with the satirical Atropia, an unfunny ...

Among the many films at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, there was one title on everyone’s lips: “Atropia.” Winner of the U.S ...

An absurdist glimpse at workaday life within one of the very real, very strange U.S. military training grounds where role-players simulate foreign battlegrounds in order to prepare our troops for ...

More a forced, one-note farce than the sharp satire it’s trying to be, “Atropia” is almost impressive in how it manages to allude to so many complicated subjects surrounding U.S. militarism ...

In writer-director Hailey Gates’ directorial debut Atropia, she dives into the Bush-era culture of toxic masculinity, nationalism and Islamophobia with an amusing and profoundly absurdist sense ...

Like Gates’ short, “Atropia” opens with a near-identical scene of an Iraqi woman played by Alia Shawkat, witnessing U.S. troops rolling through her hometown in pursuit of a suspect right as ...

Of course, Atropia is meant to be even more immersive than a film set (the props department is proud of their pungency, which includes the ability to create the smell of burning flesh), but Gates ...