Tulkinghorn's picks for the weekend

You didn't ask, but hey:

Un Prophete: Hardly unheralded -- it got the Grand Prix at Cannes -- but surprisingly true to genre rules. Godfather II (as everybody says) meets Le Trou. Jacques Becker and Jose Giovanni would be proud of mise en scene and script. Also Brando/Pacino worthy performances by Neils Arestrup and Tahar Rahim, respectively. (Arestrup is also terrific in Audiard's earlier "The Beat My Heart Skipped", which is worth seeing, but which suffers from a silly premise -- it's a remake of Fingers(!))

Skippy Dies: As good as I had hoped -- in fact, better. What I hadn't expected was how chilling and bleak it becomes -- after hundreds of pages of Apatow-worthy schoolboy humor, it suddenly clouds up...