English-language adaptations of foreign films are rarely any good and one of my least favorite phenomenons. The magic of the original usually gets lost. On the other hand, foreign-language remakes of US films? Kind of fantastic, if you ignore the recent Zhang Yimou remake of Blood Simple. Granted I only know of one other than that, but it is excellent enough to prove the rule. Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped [1] updates the forgotten Harvey Keitel film Fingers [2] with genius results.
Audiard's follow-up to that bit of awesome is the fantastically tense A Prophet [3], which features the best performance since Jeremy Renner last appeared on screen. Tahir Rahim plays Malik, a young Arab man imprisoned in a French jail who matures into a full-fledged criminal after adopted by the Corsican mafia. It becomes something of a prison David and Goliath story, almost.
Malik survives prison. He grows up in prison. He learns to read, he learns to kill. Whether he's a success story is up to the viewer. What's not in question is the fact that Audiard has painted another masterful portrait of crime.
Check out A Prophet in our catalog. [4]
