A Prophet

Malik El Djebena is nineteen when he enters a French prison to serve a six-year sentence. He cannot read or write, and he has no family on the outside, which leaves him looking younger and more vulnerable than the other inmates. The prison is controlled by a group of Corsican prisoners, and their leader, César Luciani, decides to make use of the new arrival. Malik is given a series of tasks that gradually harden him, and through them he earns the Corsicans' trust. He learns to read and write while in custody, and he also starts to build connections of his own, quietly working toward plans that go beyond the role he was given.

Jacques Audiard directed the film and wrote the screenplay with Thomas Bidegain. It followed Read My Lips and The Beat That My Heart Skipped in Audiard's filmography, and Tahar Rahim plays Malik, with Niels Arestrup as Luciani and supporting turns from Adel Bencherif, Reda Kateb, Hichem Yacoubi and Jean-Philippe Ricci. The production cost about 13 million dollars and took roughly 18 million worldwide, a modest return for a two-and-a-half-hour crime drama.

Critical notice was strong: critics gave it 8.6 out of 10 across 163 reviews, well above the 7.8 from around 107,000 IMDb voters and the 7.6 from roughly 1,800 TMDB users. Those audience scores indicate a well-regarded film rather than a broadly popular one, consistent with its slow-burn prison narrative.