To be released tomorrow on DVD

Near the end of A Prophet, one of those rare films in which the moral stakes are as insistent and thought through as the aesthetic choices, there’s a scene in which the lead character, Malik, travels to Paris to kill some men. The scene reverberates with almost unbearable tension but is briefly punctured by a seemingly throwaway image: Seconds before he begins shooting, thereby sealing his fate, you see him catch sight of a pair of men’s shoes showcased like jewels in a boutique window in a rich Parisian quarter. He does a double take, a reaction that might mirror that of the anxious viewer who wonders why he doesn’t just get on with it.

Much of what distinguishes A Prophet (Un Prophète) is revealed in Malik’s brief appreciation of the shoes, as well as the surprise it elicits. He’s window shopping — doesn’t he have some killing to do? Yet these luxury items are resonant, as is their exclusive setting and the way Malik’s admiring gaze momentarily stops the flow of the action: each adds another element to this portrait of an impoverished young Frenchman of Arab descent who is transformed in prison. Over the course of the film Malik will learn to read, to smuggle, to murder, to survive. Which is why when he pauses after unloading his guns, his pale face floating in the sanguineous dark, it looks as if he were emerging from a kind of womb: his metamorphosis is complete.

A Prophet was directed by Jacques Audiard, whose talents have deepened with each new film. (His previous one, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, from 2005, is a superb remake of Fingers, James Toback’s art-pulp thriller.) Like some other prison tales A Prophet, which won the grand prize at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, has the flavor of the ethnographic. Its subject is an individual in a context, and while Malik (Tahar Rahim, a stealth presence) is the story’s focus, he’s also part of an inquiry on power. When he first enters prison for a vague crime involving an assault, he arrives as a relative innocent, but, more important to his trajectory, he’s unschooled both as a criminal and a citizen.

His education is sudden and brutal. The film opens with Malik being ordered to strip for the guards on his arrival, a ritualistic divesting (and humiliation) that the inmates and the prison system continue. He soon attracts the unwelcome attention of César Luciani (the tremendous Niels Arestrup), an old lion who rules over the Corsican gang that controls the prison, including some guards. To protect his own, César orders Malik to murder another prisoner, Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), also of Arab extraction. Without friends or affiliation, Malik believes he has no choice and carries out the murder with a razor blade that he’s hidden inside his mouth and which he fumbles as the blood gushes over him, his victim, the walls.

It takes a few agonizing moments for Reyeb to die, perhaps because of Malik’s awkwardness, or maybe it just takes a while to bleed to death. At any rate it is a ghastly vision. But it isn’t simply the gore or Reyeb’s twitching body that make the scene difficult to watch: it’s the way the murder has been messily, even frantically staged and filmed, the two men thrashing inside a frame that can barely contain them. There is nothing exciting about the violence, and there are no beauty shots of the pooling blood. Audiard effectively turns us into witnesses to a horrible crime, though not in order to punish us for our ostensible complicity in the violence. He is instead, I think, insisting on the obscenity of murder.

This insistence is critical to A Prophet, as is the way Audiard wants you to feel revolted by the murder, even as he encourages you to feel something else for Malik by showing, for instance, how his body continues to tremble after Reyeb’s has stopped shuddering. Audiard doesn’t sex up Malik’s crimes, turning them into easily digestible spectacles, the kind made to accompany a large popcorn and soda. But he doesn’t solicit our pity: Malik is guilty. Yet guilt is like a poisonous gas in this film, it suffuses the prison, permeating the guards’ rooms and the cells in which corrupt lawyers counsel their murderous clients, and the larger world where politicians make decisions that send some to jail while freeing others.

All this is conveyed discreetly as Malik experiences the banalities of prison along with its shocks, surrealism and spasms of weird comedy. Having killed for César, he essentially surrenders to the Corsicans, for whom he serves a second, parallel sentence and who reward him with racist contempt. César keeps Malik busy running errands, which allows Audiard to take him (and us) all across the prison and sometimes outside of it. This expands the story and Malik’s horizon, as do some other prisoners, Ryad (Adel Bencherif) and Jordi (Reda Kateb). Every so often Audiard slows the film down and blacks out some of the image so we can linger on a detail as if to remind us to really look at what we’re watching.

A Prophet is about the education of a young man within a specific social order. You could read it as an allegory about France and its uneasy relations with generations of Arab immigrants and their children. As usual, there is room for diverging, even contradictory interpretations, and the political certainly is as much at play here as the Oedipal. Audiard, for his part, working from a screenplay he wrote with several others, avoids speeches that explain everything and instead opts for a materialist approach that attends to the realities of prison life, showing how guards and porters deliver the prisoners’ food (baguettes!) and how Malik, as he shakes off César’s grip, helps distribute illicit drugs.

Much as he does inside the prison, Arestrup, who played the thuggish father in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, initially dominates A Prophet, boring into the story with unnerving small gestures and the force of his presence. He’s playing another patriarch in this film, of course, the kind who rules small worlds with cruelty. With his overcoats, bulky frame and proud carriage, he can bring to mind the later-life Jean Gabin, though Arestrup’s terrifying smile quickly snuffs out such nostalgic thoughts. César is not a figure of sentimentality. Among other things he is a businessman, and the cold-bloodedness with which he wields his power might be a matter of personal depravity. It also serves his bottom line.

Like his character, Rahim’s performance sneaks up from behind. With his wispy mustache and a body that scarcely fills his clothes, Malik makes an unlikely center for such a thrilling film. The camera doesn’t love him, no matter how closely it hovers. But Malik was not meant for our love, and Rahim’s performance, while strong, is purposefully not flashy, as movie outlaws often are. Audiard seems to be after something else, and in A Prophet he shows us the truth of another human being who might otherwise escape from our sight because he is too foreign, or whom we might try to pity just to feel safe. But the world we make is not necessarily safe, and neither are those we leave alone to fight for their survival. Grade: A-plus

Other recently released films on DVD tomorrow:

The Ghost Writer (2010) A writer (Ewan McGregor) stumbles upon a long-hidden secret when he agrees to help former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) complete his memoirs on a remote island after the politician’s assistant drowns in a mysterious accident. The darkly brooding sky that hangs over much of this film, the latest from Roman Polanski, suggests that all is grim and gray and perhaps even for naught. But this high-grade pulp entertainment is too delectably amusing and self-amused, and far too aware of its own outrageous conceits to sustain such a dolorous verdict. The world has gone mad of course — this is a Polanski film — so all you can do is puzzle through the madness, dodging the traps with ironic detachment and tongue lightly in cheek. Polanski is a master of menace and, working with a striking wintry palette that at times veers into the near-monochromatic — the blacks are strong and inky, the churning ocean the color of lead — he creates a wholly believable world rich in strange contradictions and ominous implications. Polanski delivers this pulpy fun at such a high level that The Ghost Writer is irresistible, no matter how obvious the twists. Everything — including Alexandre Desplat’s score, with its mocking, light notes and urgent rhythms suggestive of Bernard Herrmann — works to sustain a mood, establish an atmosphere and confirm an authorial intelligence that distinguishes this film from the chaff. Unlike many modern Hollywood and Hollywood-style thrillers, which seek to wrest tension from a frenzy of cutting and a confusion of camera angles, Polanski creates suspense inside the frame through dynamic angles and through the discrete, choreographed movements of the camera and actors. He makes especially effective use of the enormous windows in Lang’s house through which the sky and ocean beckon and threaten. It would be easy to overstate the appeal of The Ghost Writer just as, I imagine, it will be easy for some to dismiss it. But the pleasures of a well-directed movie should never be underestimated. The image of Brosnan abruptly leaning toward the camera like a man possessed is worth a dozen Oscar-nominated performances. And the way, when Lang chats with the writer — his arms and legs open, a drink in hand, as if he were hitting on a woman — shows how an actor and his director can sum up an entire personality with a single pose. Polanski’s work with his performers is consistently subtle even when the performances seem anything but, which is true of this very fine film from welcome start to finish. Grade: B-plus

Kick-Ass (2010) Inspired by his love of comic books, high school student Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) decides to transform himself into a masked crime fighter — a decision that eventually thrusts the teenager into Internet stardom. Soon, Dave’s antics inspire a wave of would-be heroes to don costumes and live out their superhero fantasies, one of them a little girl (Chloe Moretz) who’s the star of her own splatter-happy head trip. Fast, periodically spit-funny and often grotesquely violent, the film at once embraces and satirizes contemporary action-film clichés with Tarantino-esque self-regard. There’s something about the killer schoolgirl that turns some filmmakers on, and audiences, too — who knows what further dangers lurk beneath that kilt? However chastely, British director Matthew Vaughn plays on that unsettling image, which shores up the false impression that because Moretz’s character, Hit-Girl, is a powerful figure she’s also an empowering one. Moretz certainly walks the walk and jumps the jump, loading a new gun in midrun like a baby Terminator. But as her deployment of a four-letter slur for women indicates, and as the cop-out last blowout only underscores, Hit-Girl isn’t a wee Wonder Woman. She’s not even a latter-day Lara Croft, who, however absurd, works on screen because of Angelina Jolie’s own outsize persona. A supergimmick, Hit-Girl by contrast is a heroine for these movie times: a vision of female might whittled down to pocketsize. Grade: B

Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010) Middle school isn’t all it’s cracked up to be for self-described “wimpy kid” Greg Heffley, who discovers a frightening new world teeming with boys who are taller, tougher and hairier than he is — and decides to document it all in his diary. In this film adaptation of Greg’s life, however, a team of writers and an uninspired director are responsible for his woes, translating his tale to the screen with little verve, wit or grace. This Diary of a Wimpy kid is too often dull, unappealing and clumsy, hobbled by unnecessary changes and inventions that add no charm, energy or, truly, point. Zachary Gordon and Robert Capron play Greg and his doofy best buddy Rowley, and they’re fine for the most part. But director Thor Freudenthal (Hotel for Dogs) is a klutz, unable to do much of anything except watch along with us. The thing in this film that feels most alive is a slice of cheese rotting on a playground blacktop — which would be a funny joke if it was intentional. Grade: C-plus

Blood Done Sign My Name (2010) A drama from director Jeb Stuart based on the real-life 1970 murder in Oxford, N.C., of black Vietnam veteran Henry Marrow by virulent racists subsequently acquitted by an all-white North Carolina jury despite overwhelming evidence of their guilt. The flatness of the characterizations, combined with the slow, meandering pace of Stuart’s storytelling, drains some of the intensity from the story. This movie has the mood and tone of a made-for-television drama dutifully explaining an important piece of history, and at times the film’s ambitions stretch beyond its abilities. The cast is enormous, and Stuart’s evident desire to respect the truth of the story in all its details leaves him without a clear, emphatic dramatic structure. And yet these very shortcomings sometimes manage to turn into virtues. The difficulty in fixing on a central character means that the town of Oxford becomes both hero and villain. What the film lacks in psychological nuance it makes up for in unassuming, intimate social observation. Some of the people may seem to wear virtual signs around their necks. But the place itself — its physical layout and especially the manners and speech patterns of its citizens — breathes with an unusually delicate sense of reality. Stuart, himself a native of the Tarheel state, takes his time over family meals, informal parties, and the everyday exchanges of news and courtesies that make up Southern life even in times of tumult. He also shows how racism, rather than being the pathology of a few bad apples, was woven into the fabric of daily existence. This is a curious, somewhat ungainly movie. But it is also rich and fascinating. At times you think you are watching a clumsy stage pageant superimposed on a documentary; it’s so stiff, and yet at the same time so real. Grade: C

The Living Wake (2010) When his doctor informs him he’ll die soon from an unnamed disease, self-proclaimed artist K. Roth Binew (Mike O’Connell) — who’s never completed a work of art — decides to celebrate his life with a party. The film seems but a protracted act of stultifying self-indulgence (but then maybe that’s the point) and its star nothing more than a shorter, stockier Conan O’Brien. O’Connell’s K. Roth Binew speaks with unstinting grandiloquence and is transported everywhere in a rickshaw attached to a bicycle ridden by his adoring manservant Mills Joquin (Jesse Eisenberg). Binew remains enraged at having been abandoned in childhood by his father, spouts off on this and that and drinks a lot. None of this seems amusing or enlightening or even all that original. The film becomes a cautionary tale on self-importance fed by a need for recognition so desperate that it smacks of fantasy and madness. Grade: D-plus

After Life (2010) As the life of young Anna Taylor (Christina Ricci) hangs precariously in the balance, funeral director Eliot Deacon (Liam Neeson), who has a mysterious ability to help the dead transition to the afterlife, has complete control over her fate. Though it’s possible she isn’t dead after all, it’s equally possible that she’s already in hell. Director Agnieszka Wojtowicz-Vosloo can’t figure out how to build on her base, overusing a melodramatic score to boost the mild shocks and solemn philosophizing. And as a first-time feature director, she doesn’t have the confident hand needed to guide her actors, who are so out of sync that they barely seem to be in the same film. While nobody comes out especially well, Ricci is the only one required to spend much of the movie naked. And for what? The only thing worse than bad horror is pretentiously bad horror. From title to finish, After.Life takes itself far more seriously than you will. Grade: D-plus

Finding Bliss (2010) Jody Balaban (Leelee Sobieski), a promising filmmaker, works at a porn studio while secretly creating her own “legit” movie when no one is looking. When she’s discovered, Jody is forced to work with porn director Jeff Drake (Matthew Davis) and a cast of adult film stars. This is a carnival of horrors. Writer/director Julie Davis’ Borscht Belt sensibility keeps the jokes coming at a rapid clip and even though nearly all of them are flopping, there’s a generosity to the attempt that keeps the film from scraping bottom. It’s a big-hearted, well-intentioned disaster. Grade: D

Happiness Runs (2010) Having been raised in a polygamous commune — where the clan guru, Insley (Rutger Hauer), uses his powers of persuasion to woo women into his bed — Victor (Mark L. Young) is finally old enough to realize he wants a different life. But now that childhood crush Becky (Hanna R. Hall) has returned to care for her ailing father, Victor is concerned she’ll fall prey to his own mother’s (Andie MacDowell) fate. As the film builds to a feverish hysteria, you have to work hard to keep from laughing. Victor finally escapes and moves to Hollywood to make movies, but first there’s beaucoup nudity, insanity, hallucinogenic mushrooms, self-mutilation with razor blades and suicide. O.K., life without structure or purpose leads to disillusionment and angst, but we knew that already. I’ll be darned if I know what deeper lesson we’re supposed to learn after suffering through 88 minutes of misery. Don’t raise your children in a commune? Duh. The struggle of the individual against the collective is a worthy theme, but the dismal Happiness Runs — amateurishly directed, clumsily written and choppily edited —l acks form and takes on the look and feel of personal therapy at the audience’s expense. Sometimes a filmmaker’s private hell is better off left behind the closed door of an analyst’s office. Grade: D-minus

To Save a Life (2010) After tragedy strikes a childhood friend, Jake Taylor (Randy Wayne) reevaluates his life. By reaching out to lonely outsider Jonny (Sean Michael), Jake risks losing everything that matters most to him, including a college scholarship and his friends. The director, Brian Baugh, was the cinematographer for the conservative screed An American Carol, a clumsy parody of Michael Moore movies, and here similar politics come in adolescent camouflage. The film would be a mere nuisance if not for its shameless exploitation of school shootings to advance its agenda. But forget the lame performances and arch, preachy sentiment; the movie’s sham hip-hop and spurious alternative music alone should keep teenagers from renting this. Thank goodness. Grade: F