Prophet (Blu-ray) (2009)

"It's a highly original film made in a familiar context, and an exciting moviegoing experience you shouldn't miss.  Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com
"A new crime classic.  Peter Travers, Rolling Stone Magazine

Editor's Note At age 18, Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) is just beginning a six-year prison sentence in this drama from THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED director Jacques Audiard. Though he cannot read or write, Malik soon figures out the politics of the prison system, giving him a prime spot in the power struggle between two battling groups of prisoners. THE PROPHET reunites Audiard with two of his stars from THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED, Niels Arestrup and Gilles Cohen, as well as that film?s director of photography, Stéphane Fontaine, and its composer, Alexandre Desplat.

	Tahar Rahim
	Niels Arestrup
	Adel Bencherif
	Reda Kateb
	Hichem Yacoubi
	Gilles Cohen
	Pierre Leccia
	Antoine Basler
	Foued Nassah
	Jean-Emmanuel Pagni
	Jacques Audiard - Screenwriter
	Abdel Raouf Dafri - Screenwriter
	Nicolas Peufaillit - Screenwriter
	Thomas Bidegain - Screenwriter
	Stephane Fontaine - Director of Photography
	Alexandre Desplat - Composer
	Jacques Audiard - Director

Wall Street Journal
?Jacques Audiard?s masterful A PROPHET stretches the concept of entertainment by taking us into the brutish world of a French prison...? 09/11/2009

Film Comment
"[W]ith its lush Alexandre Desplat score, deeply shadowed compositions, and fluid, understated camera movement, A PROPHET is distinctly an Audiard construction." 01/01/2010

Empire
4 stars out of 5 -- "Rahim shifts from wary tough-nut to keen student to aloof enigma in the furrow of a brow. It's a masterful performance..." 01/22/2010

Los Angeles Times
"[T]he masterful A PROPHET, is an answered prayer for those who believe that revitalizing classic forms with contemporary attitudes makes for the most compelling kind of cinema." 02/26/2010

USA Today
"Rahim is superb in a lead role that calls for him to be both sympathetic and ruthless. With his soulful dark eyes, he powerfully conveys a primal need for self-preservation." 02/26/2010

Box Office
3 stars out of 5 -- "It says much for the ability of director Jacques Audiard that he manages to create an emotional intensity that lifts the commonplace on to a higher plain." 02/23/2010

A.V. Club
"[It's] like a Gallic GOODFELLAS: thoroughly absorbing, exciting, even poetic. It's a full evening's entertainment." -- Grade: A- 02/25/2010

Wall Street Journal
"[An] incendiary crime epic....Like THE GODFATHER, which it regularly recalls, A PROPHET serves up crime as metaphor for life and power, set in a world of chaos that is dependent on codes and rules." 02/26/2010

New York Times
"Like his character, Mr. Rahim's performance sneaks up from behind....A thrilling film." 02/26/2010

Movieline
"Contrasting a cold-eyed naturalism with calm, almost soothing hallucinations of his victim and impressionistic internalizations, Audiard creates a seductive psychology..." 02/25/2010

Entertainment Weekly
"[The director] proceeds with calm, unshowy attentiveness, creating a stunning portrait of an innately smart survivor..." -- Grade: A- 03/05/2010

Chicago Sun-Times
4 stars out of 4 -- "The best performance in the film is by Arestrup as Cesar....The newcomer Rahim is an enigma." 03/03/2010

Rolling Stone
4 stars out of 4 -- "[T]his knockout punch of a thriller surpasses its trappings to speak in a universal language about the ways power corrupts the human condition." 03/18/2010

Washington Post
3.5 stars of 4 -- "[Audiard draws] viewers into the densely layered, ruthless ecology of a French prison..." 03/12/2010

Chicago Sun-Times 10 of 10
There is a murder at the center of Jacques Audiard's A Prophet that is unlike most murders I've seen in films. It's clumsy, messy and brutal, and leaves the killer shaking. Whether he shakes with grief, relief or anger we cannot say. That's the key to this film. We look, we see, but we cannot say. It often must be that way when we witness violence. Those capable of murdering live in another country...The movie, one of this year's foreign film Oscar nominees, follows the life of Malik, a young Frenchman of Arab descent, who enters prison as a naive outsider and is shaped into an evil, adult criminal. He wasn't born evil; he was born a shy, passive loser. Prison made him all that he can be. He seems an unlikely protagonist for a prison movie. Played by Tahar Rahim, he's skinny, insecure, trying to raise a mustache. He's behind bars for unclear reasons; he claims he's innocent, although it doesn't matter. Prison efficiently strips him of privacy and self-respect and serves him over to the Corsican gang that controls everything behind bars through violence and bribes...The newcomer Rahim is an enigma. What is he thinking? I believe that's the quality Audiard wants. He's a newly poured man, and when the mold sets, it happens inside. He learns from Cesar to reveal nothing. Many movies and actors are too ready to inform us what everyone is thinking, and why. It's more absorbing for us to read significance from mystery. An actor who reveals nothing, like Alain Delon in Melville's "Le Samourai," is fascinating...But what does go on inside Malik? That's the frightening part. We can only judge by what he does. Now he is prepared to kill. If we must be killed, don't we all rather hope it will be by someone for whom the act has meaning? For whom our life has importance? Malik was such a man once, but that ended in the bloody mess of the prison cell. Now prison has prepared him to return to the streets. - Roger Ebert