The French Cultural Center’s Ciné-Club de l’Alliance is screening an absolute knockout this month – a real bruiser and a beauty both. Jacques Audiard, acclaimed director of RUST AND BONE (2012) and THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED (2005), inter alia, often lavishes his refined, poetic visual style upon brutal, seamy subject matter. He may have found his perfect foil in Malik, A PROPHET’s bloodied and bewildered protagonist, a Franco-Arab teenager imprisoned for assaulting a police officer who finds himself increasingly enmeshed in – and morally compromised by – a gang allied with the Corsican mafia. Although Audiard very effectively opens the film up and out over its two-and-a-half-hour duration, allowing it to become a fairly full-blown political thriller, he never abandons its initial remit as a closely observed portrait of a haunted, hounded soul confined in uncomfortably close quarters. A Hollywood remake scripted by Dennis Lehane is on the way, but A PROPHET is unlikely to get any better than this.

4/24 – 6:30pm
155 minutes
FREE! $5 suggested donation
RSVP Required (call 617-912-0400)

French Cultural Center
53 Marlborough St
Boston, MA
02116