A Prophet

Jacques Audiard's A Prophet arrived at Cannes 2009 and won the Grand Prix, losing the Palme to Haneke's The White Ribbon in a year so strong that Audiard's gangster epic was widely regarded as the runner-up to a peak. It then swept the Césars with nine wins including Best Film, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature. The film established Tahar Rahim as a leading man of his generation and confirmed Audiard, then in his fifties, as a master of the genre form.

Malik El Djebena, illiterate and friendless, enters a French prison for a six-year sentence and is co-opted by the Corsican mafia who run the wing. Over the years, Malik teaches himself to read, learns Corsican, accumulates trust on multiple sides, and emerges from prison as one of the most influential figures in France's criminal ecosystem. Niels Arestrup's César-winning performance as the patriarchal Corsican boss César Luciani is among the great supporting turns of the decade, a study in coiled menace and brittle authority within the wing he controls.

The film operates simultaneously as a propulsive crime thriller, a searing study of race and class within the French justice system, and a dark bildungsroman about education as survival. Audiard's restless camera, Stéphane Fontaine's grimy cinematography and Alexandre Desplat's pulse-driving score build a sense of menace that rarely lets up across two and a half hours.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The greatest French gangster film since Le Cercle Rouge, and one of the few European prison dramas that captures both the sociology and the velocity of criminal life. A definitive answer to the question of what European genre cinema can do when it stops imitating Hollywood.