Not many films have the ability to touch you while at the same time showing you such horrible human brutality.

| Original Score: A- | May 9, 2024

A punishing, uncompromising prison drama of the highest order...The level of authenticity achieved here is gut-punchingly raw.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 2, 2022

Episode 11: Moving On

| Original Score: 70/100 | Sep 1, 2021

This shocking depiction of prison brutality deftly avoids the pitfalls that so often romanticises time behind bars.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jun 14, 2021

It could easily become pure depression porn, wallowing as one thing after another crushes the protagonist into the floor. But even as bleak as things get, there still exists sparks of joy and love, connection, and glimpses of humanity.

| Original Score: A- | Jun 30, 2020

Midnight Express' meets 'Ong-Bak,' and that's a good thing.

| Dec 21, 2018

The great strength of A Prayer Before Dawn is its relentless physicality and lurking camera which never shies away from any of the filth of the prison.

| Nov 2, 2018

An arresting, if too vacantly handled biographic parable on the karma of ignorance and the value of tolerance, lead by an unreal central performance.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 31, 2018

A Prayer Before Dawn is remarkable in its brutalist mode, in sketching the grainy lives of these jailbirds...to see how far the body, and in effect the soul, could endure the inhuman hellhole that is their everyday surroundings.

| Oct 11, 2018

Part Rocky, part Midnight Express, and part Beau Travail, this adaptation of Billy Moore's best-selling memoir about his three years in some of Thailand's most infamous jails is a harshly immersive experience

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 5, 2018

Ultimately, there is something distasteful about this approach ― especially as the stylistic bravura seems calculated to leave minimal room for thought.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Oct 4, 2018

As an immersive audio-visual experience, it's a rather extraordinary technical feat in creating style and meaning from even the most confronting images.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 4, 2018

...a resolutely tough watch. But... with the hope of redemption and rebirth.

| Original Score: 16/20 | Sep 28, 2018

Overloaded with physical peril and over-strategized to convey the jitters of a strung-out junkie, the movie runs a deficit on emotional intelligence and journalistic information.

| Sep 27, 2018

You can feel the heat. You can feel the clamminess of the bodies. You can feel the rage of the central character... as a piece of experiential cinema, it's really, really overpowering.

| Aug 27, 2018

A ballet of blood and bruised flesh, utilizing handheld camerawork allowing for this boxing/prison/injustice drama into something a tad more intimate and relentlessly reactionary than others of its ilk.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 24, 2018

Once the film settles down and focuses on Billy's goal to box his way through his stay in the prison, it becomes, if not any less forgiving, more meditative, using the sparse score and rare quiet moments to great effect.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 24, 2018

A Prayer Before Dawn will leave you pulsating long after you've left the cinema.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 21, 2018

A Prayer Before Dawn deals with so much ugliness that it's almost impossible to watch at times, but Joe Cole's performance is worth seeing.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Aug 17, 2018

Once the audience adjusts to its rhythms, it exerts a powerful fascination.

| Aug 10, 2018