page_title: A Prophet
section_title: Critical response
hierarchical_section_title: A Prophet / Reception / Critical response
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Niels Arestrup, Leïla Bekhti, Jacques Audiard et Tahar Rahim au festival de Cannes 2009
context_page_description: A Prophet is a 2009 French prison drama-crime film directed by Jacques Audiard with a screenplay by Audiard, with Thomas Bidegain, Abdel Raouf Dafri, and Nicolas Peufaillit, from a story by Dafri. The film stars Tahar Rahim in the title role as an imprisoned petty criminal of Algerian origins who rises in the inmate hierarchy, becoming an assassin and drug trafficker as he initiates himself into the Corsican and then Muslim subcultures.
context_section_description: A Prophet received widespread critical acclaim. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports that 97% of critics have given the film a positive review based on 147 reviews, with an average score of 8.3/10, making the film a "Certified Fresh" on the website's rating system. Its critical consensus states that "Featuring an impressive star turn by newcomer Tahar Rahim, A Prophet is a French gangster film filled with arresting, immediate details."  At Metacritic, which assigns a weighted mean rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film received an average score of 90, based on 31 reviews, which indicates "Universal acclaim".
  Reception of the film after its debut screening at 2009 Cannes Film Festival at the competition was good. A Prophet was picked as the best film of the festival by a group of sixteen English-language critics and bloggers polled by the daily independent film news site indieWIRE.
  Karin Badt at The Huffington Post called it "refreshingly free". Jonathan Romney of Screen International said that the film "works both as hard-edged, painstaking detailed social realism and as a compelling genre entertainment."
  Luke Davies of The Monthly criticized some of the film's stylistic methodology and content, asserting that the prophetic themes could have been stretched out, but he celebrated the film's central character and his well-executed "improbable rise from invisibility to dominance", describing "what gives [the film] such dynamic energy is the seamlessness with which this transition unfolds". Davies described the film's main achievement as conveying a character as "someone we care about and gun for," who started life on screen as a blank slate.
caption: Director Jacques Audiard (center) and stars Niels Arestrup and Tahar Rahim at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.
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