A Prophet

France, Italy 2010, 155 mins
Director: Jacques Audiard
Starring: Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup

Synopsis

Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, blistering crime drama A PROPHET demonstrates Audiard's (THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED) ability to rise beyond a genre to exceptional heights of emotional intensity.

Malik (Rahim) lands himself in jail at 19.

After a violent crash course in the ways of the ruling gang, he slowly begins, through his self-education, to challenge the prison power structures.

And as the long years of his sentence roll on, he uses his ruthless cunning to establish himself as a major new player.

A PROPHET moves fluidly from art-house subtlety to genre pyrotechnics in an endlessly powerful and absorbing tapestry of criminal life, which has all the epic human drama of such classics as SCARFACE and THE GODFATHER.