Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and now an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film, this exhilarating crime epic from director Jacques Audiard (Read My Lips, The Beat That My Heart Skipped) follows an illiterate French-Arab prison inmate’s six-year odyssey from new kid on the cell block to underworld kingpin.
Along the way, Malik (remarkable newcomer Tahar Rahim) learns how to read not just books but people, too, as the protégé of a brutal Corsican gang leader (the electrifying Niels Arestrup), until the pupil threatens to overtake the master, playing every one of Paris’ rival gangland factions to his own advantage. Don’t miss this early chance to see the movie everyone will soon be talking about!
"Among the great acting moments in recent memory, I would place near the top of the list the following sequence in Jacques Audiard’s immersing organized-crime thriller, A Prophet: newcomer Tahar Rahim, playing the young, resourceful antihero, Malik El Djebena, stands on an airport escalator unable to totally suppress the waves of excitement, confusion, and childlike surprise flooding his face and body as he realizes that he is about to take his first plane ride—as if he were a free man like any other." ~ Amy Taubin, Film Comment January/February 2010.
