A Prophet is an early contender for 2010's best film. It successfully marries engaging entertainment with art-house sensibilities in a way that few films do of late, maintaining intelligent complexity and thematic richness...

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 7, 2024

A Prophet is not casual entertainment, you have to ready yourself to bear it… overwhelming and at time almost mystical. [Full review in Spanish]

| Jul 19, 2022

An incisive crime saga told within the confines of concrete walls and deprived humanity.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 11, 2022

For an intense, gripping two-and-a-half hours, not a minute is gratuitous as every scene contributes details significant to a power shift of brutal proportions.

| Oct 13, 2021

The film's top dog, though, has to be Audiard, who directs with complete control, effortlessly fusing beady-eyed social realism, savage action and hallucinatory fantasy to create a searing crime movie masterpiece.

| Nov 28, 2020

One of the finest prison sagas in recent years.

| Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 20, 2020

Jacques Audiard outdoes himself with a prison-based coming-of-age tale that is also a magic realism-charged ghost story.

| Jun 10, 2020

A Prophet's distinction is its refusal to play to convention.

| Jan 22, 2020

A film that is tense and crackling with fury, a visceral experience that threatens to leap from the screen.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 19, 2019

A taut, solidly crafted drama. Audiard's world is both fully realized and compelling, even if its consideration of Malik as some sort of modern day prophet seems halfhearted and ultimately beside the point.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 5, 2019

It wasn't a whole lot of fun at the time, but it was utterly compelling. It never felt less than real. And months later, it sits well.

| Jul 23, 2019

Usually, I don't much like films in which males throw violence at any problem that comes their way... But this is such an intensely mature piece of work featuring such intensely mature performances that I was too involved to let it bother me.

| Aug 30, 2018

Rahim more than rises to the challenge of making Malik utterly compelling throughout his journey. Mr. Arestrup manages to use his physical frailty to convey enormous threat in a way no English-speaking star of that generation would be willing to match.

| Aug 9, 2018

A Prophet is not a fabulous film, but it is well worth seeing. Although it is 2 hours 29 minutes long and its story is not surprising, it is always riveting.

| Jan 13, 2018

The director uses gritty in-your-face close-ups to immerse us in the daily routine of prison existence, which, like all minutely observed routines, is utterly compelling.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 27, 2017

Un prophète, despite near-universal critical acclaim, languishes in an aesthetic no man's land.

| Oct 3, 2017

But with its lush Alexandre Desplat score, deeply shadowed compositions, and fluid, understated camera movement, A Prophet is distinctly an Audiard construction.

| Jul 12, 2013

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 18, 2011

This is a brutal prison crime drama that shows the transformation of a small-time criminal into a big-time crime boss.

| Original Score: B | Dec 30, 2010

A movie that has more in common with Jean Genet than Frantz Fanon, but there's enough insights into white colonial domination of Arab peoples to make this a cut above the standard prison melodrama. Highly recommended.

| Oct 6, 2010