The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

This is for sure one of the best French movie in last 20-30 years. The other two would be the Blue is the warmest color and The Piano Teacher. But it is not easy to digest the Prophet, when the screen is over, and when you start thinking about it. While everything in the seemingly goes the way the viewer would like to, at the some time, the evil is just starting in the end of the story, because the new mega criminal is born. Malik is, actually, a really nice guy, humble, quite and eager to hear a nice word from anyone. But he is not getting it from almost anyone. Actually anyone who is nice to him can become his friend. By chance, he is forced to choose between killing someone and being killed. And he chooses the first option. That is how he becomes a part of the prison gang, and a type of criminal whose life is worth nothing. It seems he was predestined to that, since his birth, because he grew up in correctional facility, without family. The most unconvincing part of the story is exactly that original kindness and innocence of his. We find him as a pretty naive boy at the age of 18, too naive for a guy who had a difficult life from his birth. Hard to believe that such a naive guy would survive and catch up with the worst crimes so quickly, But that is being explained by his abnormal intelligence and intuition. So, this is not just a next door small criminal, it is a real jewel thrown in a horrible place. If you look at the story from this point of view, its believable. But then we open a different question: are people with abnormal abilities allowed to kill, whenever necessary? Malik is cute, quiet and likable, but he is dangerous and notorious like hell, when faced with the danger for himself. Where is the moral of the story? How should we identify with it? Kill and betray before somebody else betrays and kills you? Where is the line not to cross?

This is the first movie I saw of 2016. I certainly hope that it's not prophetic. I think that movies depicting people being locked up in prison hold us in rapt attention because most of us have conscious and sub- conscious fears of being locked up. I certainly identified with the prisoner in this movie because of my fear of being locked up and my fear of people in authority. They're all copies of an authority figure which my father represented to me. Every scene shows the prisoner interacting with authority figures and throws him into deeper complications with authority. His first struggle against authority is striking a blow at a policeman. For this he is convicted to spend the next 6 years in prison. Here he encounter a worse authority figure than the policeman, who is a criminal authority figure, namely of the underworld who makes harsher demands on his obedience than the authority of the law. His obedience to underworld authority ends when he's ordered to murder a Moslem leader. This and the illness of his best friend, also a Mowlem bring him to a realization that there is, after all only one authority to whom he must show obedience and that is Allah. In fact this movie shows the path followed by a prophet according to the Koran: 'We hear, and we obey. We seek Thy forgiveness, Our Lord, and to Thee is the end of all journeys.'" (2:285) The message of the movie is obey and seeing that you must obey someone it might as well be Allah, otherwise you'll find yourself having to obey murderous commands given to you by law enforcement personnel or by criminals.

That proverb applies to young Malik (Tahar Rahim) a young convict with confused eyes, a young man whose life took a rendezvous with a place called jail, and where what was left from his innocence will forever be buried in the deepest depths of human vileness.As soon as he enters the jail, Malik is like a cub who's just lose his herd, he's nowhere and everywhere in the same time, and he becomes a moving target. We've seen enough prison movies ("The Shawshank Redemption" came to my mind first) to know that it's a matter of very short time before things get rough for Malik, especially, since he doesn't have the expansive physique to impress the other inmates. He looks more like a small-time delinquents from Parisian suburbs than a gangster. Much later, this youngish look will become his one saving grace.As for the present, he's instantly bullied by a prisoner, his shoes are stolen, and later in the shower, someone proposes a deal involving drug from one side and from the other... well think Shawshank and shower, and you'll get the picture. But this isn't only a starter, the worst is yet to come. Malik's misadventures caught the eye of Cesar Luciani (Niels Arelstrup) a sort of Don Corleone-like figure Corsican style, a fitting plot device since Corsicans carry are pretty much to France what Sicily is to Italy. The old man with glorious blonde hair that give him the aura of a lion reigning over his jungle proposes another deal to Malik. And like Vito Corleone, he literally made him an offer he couldn't refuse.The reasons he couldn't refuse the offer is because he would either kill or get killed, and he couldn't seek help from any authority for Cesar WAS the authority. Malik had to kill the inmate from the shower, learn how to hide a razor in his mouth and use it in the most gruesome way. From our viewers' experience, we know the killing won't lead to any form of punishment, that the guards would close this eye. But it's all in the killing, Malik, the rookie is all shaky and nervous, and I think I felt for the first time, the same sensation than Michael Corleone in the restaurant scene. But that killing, masterfully directed by Jacques Audiard, turned my blood to ice, and proved me that European Cinema, Hollwyood's eternal disciple started to surpass its master.Indeed, maybe Scorsese lost his touch but the Scorsesian touch wasn't lost, and Jacques Audiard resuscitated the best of American stylistic depiction of the gangster world with a new fresh environment : France. The rivalry went from Italians and Blacks to Corsicans and Arabs. Watching "A Prophet" had the suspenseful thrills of "The Godfather" and the exhilaration of "Goodfellas" with a naturalness all the more European. It's an extraordinary movie with a documentary-like realism that will satisfy all the fans of the crime genre in the world, and it's one of the best French movies of the last decade.It swept off all the major César in 2010 especially Niels Arelstrup who embodied the old-school gangster charisma, a mix of intimidation and fatherly tenderness, and Tagar Rahim who played Malik like a never-ending enigma. We could never penetrate his thoughts, was he proud of earning his protection to men treating him like an 'Arab', or being seen with contempt by his fellow Arabs. As much a gangster film "A Prophet is", it's also a wonderful character study where we follow each step of Malik's evolution without feeling the rush. He grows hair, learns to read, learns Italian, learns to observe, to talk, to tell the truth, to bluff, and to finally ooze enough respect so he can, when his turn comes, dismiss his own mentor.And at the end, when he walks away from the jail, with charismatic confidence, followed by his men driving expensive cars, as he finally become a prophet in his own 'country', yes I could buy it, with the same excitement when I first saw Michael Corleone's bad-ass strut after he killed his brother-in-law. "A Prophet" is of that caliber, a must-see gangster movie, one the French can be proud of.

I mean, I guess this is a better film than I'm giving it credit for. Also, it's not American, so I can't fault it for following every other film of its ilk here. Still, the plot and characters never really rise above being sort of archetypes, and the lead character, although decently played by Tahar Rahim, just isn't very interesting. His arc isn't terribly unrealistic, but it also doesn't go places we haven't seen before, and taken as it is, not terribly effective. However, there are some good things in the film, and despite the weak script, the directing really does do its best to make this rise up. Yeah. not very recommended on my part.