"With his remarkable 'A Prophet', Jacques Audiard takes a genre film about prison and criminality and transcends it, creating a complex work that combines powerful realism, the sensitive portrait of a human journey and a subtle dimension of social metaphor (...) captivating throughout and proves to be an extremely rich film, from its highly sophisticated screenplay (which was fine-tuned over three years by the director and Thomas Bidegain, based on an original script by Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicolas Peufaillit) to its superb direction using a broad technical palette, the pace of its editing, the impressive work on the sound and its score composed by the talented Alexandre Desplat. This is all skilfully woven together by a director who is a master in the art of immersion and gives the narrative tension and pure "

— Fabien Lemercier de Cineuropa

"'A Prophet' was directed by Jacques Audiard, whose talents have deepened with each new film."

— Manohla Dargis de The New York Times

"It comports itself like a modern classic from the very first frames, instantly ­hitting its massively confident stride. This is the work of the rarest kind of film-maker, the kind who knows ­precisely what he is doing and where he is going. The film's every effect is ­entirely intentional (...) Audiard has created a long, involved, relentlessly brutal but gripping and thrilling picture; it has the rangy, ­anecdotal feel of something drawn from real life, but its realism somehow ­accommodates an eerie supernatural shimmer. "

— Peter Bradshaw de The Guardian

"French master Jacques Audiard has challenged the thus-far mostly middling Cannes competition with a powerful prison drama that's an old-fashioned Bildungsroman in in-your-face, intensely realistic disguise."

— Peter Brunette de The Hollywood Reporter