Bandini Blog

Retrospective screenings are always a dicey proposition for a film festival. With your audience always hungry for the latest and the greatest bringing in old titles can be a sure fire way to bleed money at the box office. If your audience isn’t already familiar with the title they’ll generally pass it up for some brand new film that they won’t be able to see elsewhere. But if they are already familiar with the title they’ve probably already seen it and so are unlikely to drop the money to see it again when there are other viewing options available to them. So kudos go to festivals such as Fantasia and Udine which always include a major retrospective as part of their lineup and kudos again to the Fantasia audience who came out in force, selling out the festival’s first screening of Nikkatsu Action classic A Colt Is My Passport. And that crowd got a major treat.

Throughout the 1960s Japanese film studio Nikkatsu turned out a huge number of films that they brand Nikkatsu Action, films that took the action genres of the west as their starting point. While they are still distinctly Japanese these films ignore the serious yakuza films and the chanbara dramas that were popular at the time in Japan, instead taking Hollywood film noir and the French New Wave as their starting point. And the results were some of the most unique and compelling film to come out of Japan during that era. But as compelling as these things are they have never been widely available in the west. Nikkatsu viewed them purely as disposable local entertainment and, therefore, didn’t even attempt to distribute them outside of Japan. Of the huge catalog of Nikkatsu Action titles only a handful were ever even assigned official English titles. These films were simply never seen until Japan Times writer Mark Schilling put together a major retrospective of them for the U?dine Far East Film Festival a couple years back, a retrospective which has been culled slightly and put on tour of North America by Outcast Cinema’s Marc Walkow. The series finally took its first Canadian bow last night with the premiere screening of Takashi Nomura’s A Colt Is My Passport and what a treat it was.

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Walter Hill’s 1984 “Streets of Fire” is probably the only other film, besides John Carpenter’s “Big Trouble in Little China”, that I have a hard time convincing third parties that it’s really not as bad as they think it is. Unlike the screwball comedy elements of “Little China”, there is none of the humor or tongue in cheek approach in “Streets”. In truth, “Streets of Fire” is a highly imaginative film that, unfortunately, is not terribly well written, acted, or directed. So why do I like it so much?

The one thing you’ll notice first is how anachronistic “Streets of Fire” is. Billed as a “Rock and Roll Fable”, the movie exists in a time bubble of its own making. People sport pompadours and biker gangs roam the streets without much interference from the law. The closest possible era for the film would be the ’50s or ’60s, which may explain the vintage trains, cars, and clothing, but not much else. For instance, race relations are euphoric in the film, and there seems to be no distinction between black and white.

The film takes place mostly at night, and maybe that’s for the best because with too much light the audience might spend too much time wondering about the movie’s timeline rather than pay attention to what’s happening onscreen. And it is the film’s groovy scene transitions and vibrant look that is the real star of this picture, not its then unknown cast and weak script.

Michael Pare, long before he became mired in B-Movie hell, stars as Tom Cody, a rough and tumble mercenary looking for his next job. Cody is contacted by his older sister Reva after Cody’s ex-girlfriend and singing sensation Ellen Aim (a very young Diane Lane) is abducted off the stage by menacing biker Willem Dafoe. Cody is hesitant to launch the rescue operation because he’s still stinging from his past with Ellen, but eventually agrees. With Ellen’s manager and a female mercenary name McCoy (Amy Madigan), Cody heads into the bad part of town where the Bombers, a biker gang, had taken Ellen for their own amusement.

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Alexandra “Xan” Cassavetes’ involving Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession documents the all-consuming movie love of former Los Angeles-area pay-cable outlet Z Channel’s programmer Jerry Harvey, who, with little warning, killed his wife, then himself. The picture stops just short of overtly connecting the mania of a life lived through celluloid heroes with the demons that drove him to his ignoble end, but the suggestion is there, lurking in the margins–it’s the spectre that looms over the luminaries Cassavetes assembles to discuss the influence that Z Channel had on their early appreciation for film and, in some cases, their careers. As Robert Altman, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, Alexander Payne, Alan Rudolph, Vilmos Zsigmond, Henry Jaglom, James Woods, and so many others speak in glowing terms of the opportunities provided them by Harvey’s brilliant, elastic, iconoclastic programming aesthetic, there is the faint whiff of discomfort as we begin to recognize that the same devouring love which swallowed Harvey whole is shared by not only these filmmakers, but also, likely, the audiences for their films, for Z Channel, and, now, for Cassavetes’ documentary. Knowledge that Xan’s father John Cassavetes is also the father of independent cinema only thickens the broth.

A champion of the primacy of a director’s vision, Harvey’s Z Channel was the first to broadcast Stuart Cooper’s films as well as unexpurgated versions of Sergio Leone’s astonishing Once Upon a Time in America, Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, and Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch–acts of critical integrity and what conventional broadcast wisdom branded poison that won Harvey the friendship of Cimino and Peckinpah, for starters. (As Cassavetes’ documentary progresses, one of the more startling (and startlingly poetic) revelations is that Harvey appears to have committed his murder-suicide with a pistol given him by Peckinpah.)

The most affecting testimonial comes courtesy LOS ANGELES TIMES film critic F.X. Feeney, who became fast friends with Harvey early in Z Channel’s run and remembers Harvey’s legacy not in the darker terms of many of the interviewees, but as one where the noble pursuit of exposing others to your obsession with knowledge and passion yielded a bounty of valuable commentary from a generation of filmmakers and scholars.What elevates Z Channel beyond the level of interesting, if unexceptional, documentaries is the unusual extent to which Cassavetes herself is inextricable from the film’s subtext of being reared on a steady diet of unusual, maverick cinema.

Clips from some of the more obscure entries in the oeuvres of Nicolas Roeg, Alan Rudolph, and Paul Verhoeven seem to have been chosen based on their full frontal nudity or surprising violence–mute commentary, perhaps, on just how outside the pale Harvey was but a challenge, too, intended or not, for Cassavetes to assess to what extent Harvey’s genius was reliant on unearthing lost or underestimated treasures and to what extent it was due his ability to program high-class porn.

Cassavetes consistently juxtaposes clips from a regal costume drama like Peau d’Ane with heaving bosom stuff like Dance of the Vampires, or Theresa Russell showing her crotch in Roeg’s Bad Timing with the chamber classic The Important Thing is to Love. Even clips from McCabe and Mrs. Miller and 1900 tend to showcase moments featuring frank nudity, correlating the success of an independent movie store that stocks Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s fourteen-hour Berlin Alexanderplatz with the size of its porn section.

source: http://filmfreakcentral.net

Why does an inflatable sex doll come to life and proceed on a journey of discovery looking to explore the human condition? It just does, apparently. Hirokazu Kore-Eda’s Air Doll is quietly unapologetic about its status as a winsome piece of magical realism long on wide-eyed charm and short on exposition. Based on the manga of the same title, Korean actress Bae Doo-Na plays the titular character risen from her owner’s bed, wandering downtown Tokyo observing the comings and goings of a string of angst-ridden souls and wondering what makes them tick.

It’s an immediately engaging (if not wholly original) premise, one that – initially – Kore-Eda seems to be playing admirably straight. Though not outright graphic, the film does contain everything the setup implies and notably more of it than the manga, which focused much more on the doll herself than the people who interact with her. The people who use her as a receptacle for unfulfilled desire (to paraphrase the dialogue) are shown very matter-of-factly, Kore-Eda obviously well aware individual scenes could provoke nervous giggles, but never explicitly gunning for any kind of strained reaction.

The main narrative thread centres on the doll’s taking a job at a local video rental outlet, and her tentative attraction to one young clerk there. Kore-Eda’s approach to magical realism (Air Doll is his first attempt at outright fantasy) basically involves everyone accepting the doll’s apparent eccentricities without comment, sagely pondering her innocent questions on the meaning of life as if themselves contemplating these things for the first time.

The biggest problem with this is that far too often Air Doll drifts straight past broadly sketched and into outright vacant. The script raises any number of interesting possibilities, but Kore-Eda seems frustratingly ambivalent about following them up, content to drum the same points home again and again through didactic repetition. Yes, human beings are basically all empty inside, searching for something to fill them up – without any further elaboration or engaging symbolism to latch onto this is cause for protracted yawning the second time, let alone the fifth or sixth. The mangaChobits covered much of the exact same ground and proved far more emotive, for all its flaws and lack of subtlety.

The tone also hits a number of jarring notes, never able to push any real kind of morality, whether ambiguous or clear-cut. One moment it seems happy to pitch everything at the level of melancholic, childlike whimsy a la Jean-Pierre Jeunet, then it whiplashes to characters coldly mistreating the doll without a shred of foreshadowing or where previously their actions went without comment. In the same vein a later cameo from Jo Odagiri feels horribly misjudged, his character spouting empty platitudes that just confuse the issue even further.

As the only member of the cast with anything approaching a substantial role, Bae Doo-Na arguably elevates the material more than it deserves. Though her performance basically runs along the same track from start to finish she throws herself completely into childlike wonder to the point much of the doll’s empty musing occasionally starts to seem like pearls of genuine wisdom. Her unconventional features – those giant eyes and prominent nose – sell the transition from plastic to human skin despite the lack of many overt special effects and she seems generally unfazed by the nudity (not to mention the physical acting) the part demands.

Sadly most of the good will the film does engender vanishes come a climax which has to rank as one of the most horribly mishandled on film in quite some time. It introduces the kind of misunderstanding which requires a firm grip on the narrative not to spiral into outright farce, and though Kore-Eda tries his best neither he nor his cast can stop the ending from imploding spectacularly. It isn’t presented in any remotely convincing way, whether tragic, comic or horrific, and it all but ensures the film leaves very little behind other than a sour aftertaste.

It seems frustratingly ironic a film which repeatedly seeks to remind us the human condition is one of emptiness and isolation feels so utterly bereft of any real substance. The production values are polished enough, but little or nothing of Yohei Tanada’s much-touted set design leaves any impression. The score (by the brilliant World’s End Girlfriend) feels largely wasted in service of half-hearted emotional manipulation. The performances don’t lack for talent or effort but end up lost in such a slight, seemingly pointless narrative. There’s enough here after Hana (2006) to suggest there’s some potential in Kore-Eda pursuing genre work after the social dramas that made his name, but right now Air Doll feels like little more than a horribly missed opportunity.

source: http://twitchfilm.com

Imagining yourself as Indiana Jones in the thick of adventure wasn’t difficult to accomplish during the 1980s. He was a fixture of screen heroism and pre-teen cool; a surrogate father for adolescent boys with unfathomable imaginations. However, what would happen if the adoration, that pure impulse of cinematic love, turned into extensive homespun flattery? What of three boys from Alabama, still tipsy from their “Raiders” theatrical experience, decided to create their very own backyard version of the Steven Spielberg pearl armed only with sky-high intentions, collective allowances, and a Betamax camera?

“Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation” is the fruit of this inconceivable labor and a cartwheel of a viewing experience. In the summer of 1982, Chris Strompolos (playing Indy), Eric Zala (playing Belloq and directing), and Jayson Lamb (cinematographer and FX mastermind) hatched a plan to create a shot-for-shot remake of “Raiders” as a way to pay tribute to the picture that rocked their world. The next seven years of their lives would be devoted to this monster endeavor, taking them on a joyride of unique growing pains.

Judge “Adaptation” by its cover, and the embarrassments are too numerous to list. For starters, the pimpled creature called puberty is all over the picture. Since “Adaptation” was shot hilariously out of sequence over a seven-year time period, Strompolos ages up and down during the course of the film. At times he plays Indy like a nervous 12 year-old child, while other moments reveal a much more confident young man with a deep voice and a boost in acting abilities. Keep in mind that some of these whiplash changes occur mid-scene. Once you hear the classic line, “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage” coming from an actor likely sans pubic hair, it’s hard not to feel a least a little dizzy from the wallop of misplaced intention.

Another stain on the production is the camerawork, which jumps in quality depending on the year of the shoot and the superiority of the format. It’s no surprise that many of the finest shots in “Adaptation” were achieved during the production’s twilight in 1988, when the world of VHS was hitting its prime and Zala was at his most confident as a director/enthusiast.

One could easy frown at the limitations of “Adaptation,” but that’s missing the point by a country mile. It’s a big wet smooch to Spielberg, youthful ambition, and suburban stuntwork; every single moment a triumph of construction-paper integrity and geeky exuberance. Even for those who refuse comfort at the altar of “Raiders,” it’s still an enthralling, undeniably uproarious odyssey of children who spent their entire formative years pretending they were big screen men, even if they had to spread ash on their cheeks to pull off thirtysomething stubble.

Impressive is Zala and Strompolos’s craving to match their film to Spielberg’s most crackerjack creation. Staging complex action recreations in family basements, back alleys, or wherever they could find even the slightest permission, “Adaptation” pushes the boundaries of childhood innocence with bountiful amounts of fire-drenched, gunshot-wild action beats (more scary than funny), a rolling fiberglass boulder, and limb-testing stunts that would’ve just killed their mothers, had they known what the boys were truly up to.

The invention is most of the fun here, observing the production dream up ways to reconstruct iconic moments from “Raiders.” Most of the action is incredibly faithful, the boys giving their top effort to preserve what they adored about the source material. To spy stop-motion animated map sequences and iffy-looking set recreation (pine trees in Cairo?) is a thing of homespun beauty; the boys’ enthusiasm only matched by their limitations and the cruel passage of time. Hearing pinched sound effects from muddy “Raiders” audio sources is also a gas, adding monumentally to the fandom angle of the whole shebang. I especially loved the detailed costume work juxtaposed with cheapy fake beards, used to convince the audience that a 10-year-old white kid is Indy’s homeboy, Sallah.

The list of “Adaptation” delights is without end: watching Strompolos engage in his first kiss with a very game Angela Rodriguez, taking top honors as the most identifiable timecode in her role as Marion; the six year-olds in grass skirts portraying angry Hovitos; the use of local pet store snakes for the Well of Souls sequence; hiring Snickers the dog to replace the date-lovin’ monkey from the original film (complete with a fishing-line-enhanced paw “Sieg Heil”); the askew detail of the props; drinking in the makeshift rolling thunder of the Ark finale, which actually attempts to mimic the face-melting-and-ghostbusting of the original film. Does it pull it off? Well, the boys certainly get an A for effort.

Shamefully, the line of homage stops abruptly before the airfield fight between Indy and the beefy German mechanic. The action jumps right to the truck chase, which is executed with head-slapping bravery and delicious little regard for personal safety, but to lose such a bravura sequence when every other possible angle of the picture is attended to? It’s like Christmas without the presents.

“The Adaptation” works primarily as a time capsule of innocence that was gently nursed into obsession. This stitched-together masterpiece of low-fi execution is a chilling testament to the indefatigable persistence of boyhood, bolted to an amateur cinematic expression of bliss that’s gone unintentionally supernova. “Adaptation” is a treasure of comedy, marvel, and accomplishment that fails to surface much these days, and I cheer Zala, Strompolos, and Lamb’s determination to keep their efforts afloat in the face of what must’ve been unholy odds against success or, at the very least, completion.

source: http://www.dvdtalk.com

How about in for a nickel bag? Or a few ounces? That seems more appropriate for “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.”

However you put it, you need to know this going in: Nicholas Cage is so gleefully over-the-top as the troubled cop of the title that you will either be repulsed or fascinated by his performance and, since it lives or dies by it, the movie itself.

I’m in. Say what you will about Cage, but he gives himself to roles like this without reservation. When he fails, he does so spectacularly. Yet when he succeeds, he’s remarkable.

So you need someone to play Lt. Terence McDonagh, a New Orleans cop with a drug habit, a predilection for sex to get said drugs, and the occasional habit of seeing iguanas that no one else can see?

Cage is your man.

And Werner Herzog is the director to push him even further.

About the title: This movie has nothing to do with Abel Ferrara’s 1992 film, starring Harvey Keitel, other than they’re both about a couple of crazily downward-spiraling police officers.

This film is set in a scarred, post-Katrina New Orleans, but. in many ways, it looks and feels like a throwback to the ’70s, when it’s easier to imagine a film this . . . odd being made.

McDonagh is trying to solve a gangland-style massacre, more or less. Following the trail, leads McDonagh, happily, to various drug dealers and assorted bad guys. McDonagh’s as bad as they are, if not worse. When the bad guys realize you’re crazier than them, you’ve probably achieved some sort of investigative breakthrough, though one no sane police manual would recommend.

As he courts Big Fate (Alvin “Xzibit” Joiner), a gang leader who knows the identity of the killer, McDonagh tries to keep his hooker girlfriend (Eva Mendes) happy, which usually means supplied with drugs, and his bookie (Brad Dourif) at arm’s length. And wouldn’t you know it? They put cameras in the evidence room, making it harder to steal confiscated drugs.

McDonagh is above nothing in his quest to crack the case, to get high, to escape his gambling debts. And Cage is similarly driven in his pursuit of a genuinely out-there performance.

Pay attention all the way through. Herzog, working from a script by William M. Finkelstein, takes the film into unexpected places, especially in the final act. And in the last scene, Cage does something with such subtlety, yet such intensity, that it’s funny, until you realize it’s chilling.

Forget the “National Treasure” movies, Mr. Cage. All is now forgiven.

source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com

More about the idea of sex than the act of it, The Girlfriend Experience suits Steven Soderbergh’s career-long detachment regarding all things sensual.

The writer/director whose indie star first rose with sex, lies and videotape, in which people got off by talking about carnal pursuits, takes a similar low-budget and no-touch approach 20 years later.

He’s curious about sex, and big on authenticity, which is why he hired real-life porn star Sasha Grey for the role of Chelsea, a New York prostitute who commands top dollar for providing exactly what the “experience” part of the title implies: the illusion of emotional attachment along with sexual gratification.

And illusion is very much what the game is about, as Chelsea tells a curious interlocutor: “Sometimes clients think they want the real you, but at the end of the day…if they wanted you to be yourself, they wouldn’t be paying you.”
There’s no sex and very little nudity in the film, which will disappoint anyone who doesn’t know the director’s Spartan aesthetic, where art always triumphs over orgasms. This is the same man who made Che Guevara seem more like a jungle poet than a revolutionary icon in last year’s passion-deprived Che.

Chelsea, who goes by Christine during her off-duty hours, spends most of her time talking to wealthy clients, many of whom are in a state of shock from the economic meltdown. The Girlfriend Experience was shot in October just as the stock market nosedived, and it already seems dated, along with its references to the 2008 U.S. presidential election.

Made on the cheap in 16 days from a script by Ocean’s Thirteen scribes David Levien and Brian Koppelman, with Soderbergh doing his own shaky-cam lensing, the film doesn’t have much going for it apart from Grey’s strikingly serene performance.

She’s in the eye of a personal hurricane, as she finds herself foolishly falling for one of her clients (Peter Zizzo), while her personal-trainer boyfriend Chris (Chris Santos) suddenly proves to be less liberated than he had let on.

Chelsea also has business issues to deal with.

Her reputation and marketability may take a hit from the scuzzball operator of a porn website (real-life film reviewer Glenn Kenny) unless she offers some freebie services to essentially buy a good review.

Grey makes for a fascinating Soderbergh surrogate, balancing curiosity and drive with the desire for emotional detachment. On the basis of her work here, she may have a career outside of adult films, which she says she wants.

Soderbergh’s own path is less distinct. The Girlfriend Experience links prostitution with the amorality of capitalism, an idea his hero Jean-Luc Godard worked to better effect 47 years ago with Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live), an avowed influence.

But Soderbergh doesn’t seem all that interested in pursuing it.

The movie ends so abruptly (it runs a scant 77 minutes), it’s a toss-up as to whether Soderbergh was trying to make an auteur statement or simply lost his mojo.

I know we’ve already had a review from the very capable keyboard of James Dennis, but I can’t help wanting to chime in on this package.  He summarized the plot quite nicely, so I think I’ll borrow that, rather than attempting my own:

When Countess Federica Donati (Isa Miranda) is bumped off in the film’s opening moments, it sets in motion a chain of gruesome deaths as an assortment of miscreants attempt to takeover the beautiful bay she owns. Amongst those vying for a piece of the pie (or indeed all of it) are an architect intent on development, the countess’ daughter, son and husband. Add to this their various spouses and lovers, plus some fun-loving but doomed teenagers partying in a disused night club. The film opens with a pair of brutal deaths and continues in this manner as various characters are swiftly dispatched as they arrive at the lake to investigate what’s to be done with the Countess’ legacy.

Oh, the things I love about this film.  It all feels like the product of about three different fever dreams colliding and intermixing.  The opening sequence with the death of the countess feels like something from one of Bava’s earlier gothic horrors, and predates most of Dario Argento’s similar giallo work.  It is a lovely, dark sequence that only hints at the kind of brutality the viewer is in for.  With the introduction of the fun-loving teenagers on the scene, everything starts going haywire, and this is where things really start to get nasty.

Bava takes them out one by one and a pretty rapid clip, but not before showing some fantastically nubile flesh skinny dipping in the tit-ular bay.  As James mentioned in his review, and I in my coverage of Arrow Video last fall, this film is like a blueprint for what became known as the slasher.  A Bay Of Blood came out seven years before the most commonly accepted first slasher, Halloween, and even predates the geek choice of Black Christmas by three years.  Yet, all of the elements are there, especially the camerawork, which may not be technically first person POV often, but it certainly has a voyeuristic feel.

This film was a turning point for Bava, it was his first really brutal and gory film.  His previous films hinted at this brutality, but moving into the seventies, Bava sensed a change was in the air and he went with it.  It certainly bridges the eras between the languid gothic horror films of the late fifties and sixties, and the brutal realistic horror that was so popular among the film crowd in the seventies.  One of the things that betrays the film’s age is the music.  Those of us who are slasher fans typically associate these films with electronic dread; the Halloween theme, Goblin’s work with Argento and Romero, and so on.  A Bay Of Blood has none of that, it hadn’t come into fashion yet.  This is one of the ways the films age shows through, despite being ahead of its time. Read more

(Entertainment Weekly) – A dead 14-year-old girl named Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan), murdered on her way home from school in 1973, tells her story from heaven in “The Lovely Bones.”

In doing so, Susie follows the narrative path set for her in the striking 2002 novel by Alice Sebold on which this much-awaited adaptation by Peter Jackson is based. But as directed by the lord of “The Lord of the Rings” from a screenplay by Jackson, Fran Walsh, and Philippa Boyens, his bleached “Bones” bears little resemblance to the book in either tone or complexity.

Readers will be frustrated; newcomers to the story may wonder why what is now essentially a serial-killer thriller includes so many scenes of a heaven that looks like a gumdrop-colored hobbit shire, a magical place of fanciful special effects.

In Jackson’s simplified, sweetened, and CGI-besotted telling, “The Lovely Bones” is a sad-but-hopeful, dramatic-but-gentle fairy tale intentionally made less upsetting for teens. (There’s no indication that Susie gets raped, as she does in the novel, and her murder occurs off screen.) “Atonement’s” terrific Ronan, with her astonishing glacier-blue eyes, watches from a scenic afterlife as her father (Mark Wahlberg), mother (Rachel Weisz), younger siblings, and selected friends simultaneously heal from their loss and search for her killer.

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Strip away the French and Arabic subtitles, the French-prison setting and the Muslim-messianic title, and A Prophet, opening Friday at The Enzian, would still be the grittiest prison thriller in years. Add those ingredients, and its familiar plot of “prisoner learns the ropes and comes to rule his roost” becomes a parable for life, crime and racism in modern France.

Malik (Tahar Rahim) is just 19 when he’s tossed behind bars, a kid who punched a cop and drew a six-year sentence. He’s assaulted on his first trip to “the yard,” bullied at every turn by the racist Corsican thugs who run the place. The warden and guards are helpless, not that they care what happens to another “dirty Arab.”

Malik says he’s “not religious” upon his admittance, so he’s segregated from the “Muslim cell block.” He’s locked up with the Corsicans and their grizzled mob boss, Cesar (Niels Arestrup of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly). They have nothing but contempt for Malik, but they have a use for him. He is blackmailed into killing a new Muslim inmate who is slated to testify against a Corsican. Director and co-writer Jacques Audiard (Read My Lips, The Beat that My Heart Skipped) tips us to the grim detail he’ll go into in this film here, as Malik is trained to sexually lure the gay Muslim (Hichem Yacoubi) into a situation where he can kill him.

This horrific murder (a razor blade, a small cell, a terrible struggle) doesn’t make Malik a “made man.” But he becomes more and more useful to the Corsicans. And over the course of the film, we see his steady climb up the prison pecking order, his cold-blooded calculations, his tallying of the humiliations at the hands of the Corsicans. And we watch his visions of the murdered man, trying to give him faith or at least make him more loyal to his “own kind.”

A Prophet takes us into the French underworld Malik masters bluffing his way through every dicey situation as Rahim lets us see the wheels turning behind Malik’s eyes — calculating the worst thing that can happen — a beating here, a little time in solitary there. We see his cunning, and his sense of tribe, growing with each move.

Audiard peoples the film with colorful supporting players and vivid recreations of prison life. He underscores each chapter in Malik’s education as he tells us the familiar tale of a new underclass displacing an older one as criminal kingpins. This is the modern French equivalent of “Gangs of New York”or any of a dozen other American mob pictures — Irish gangsters replaced by Italians replaced by African Americans and then Latin Americans.

Audiard (with co-writer Thomas Bidegain) tells a familiar story with verve and violence and tempo; a movie that stands with the best prison thrillers from any country. And it’s a work whose titular metaphor connects it  prison, poverty, discrimination and the violent, radical form of Islam that keeps much of Europe on edge.