Starring Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup. In French, Arabic, and Corsican with English subtitles. Rated 18A. Opens Friday, March 5, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas and the Cinemark Tinseltown

French filmmaker Jacques Audiard has finally arrived. On the evidence provided by his latest film, A Prophet, Audiard must now be placed at the apex of the pyramid, along with such masters of the Gallic crime drama as Jean-Pierre Melville, Henri-Georges Clouzot, and Marcel Carné. He is no longer just very good but the very best at what he does.

A Prophet contains a lot of generic elements, but they’re arranged in a breathtakingly original way. When 19-year-old Malik (Tahar Rahim) is sent to a maximum-security penitentiary, he has no idea how to survive this harsh new environment. It’s only after he’s forcibly taken under the wing of the local Mafioso (Niels Arestrup), that his situation starts to improve. There is a catch, however. Malik is an Arab, his protector a Corsican gangster. The local Muslims mistrust this unwilling “turncoat”, while the godfather’s goons despise him. Only gradually does this outsider’s outsider learn how to make his pariah status work for him. Malik is sharp as a switchblade and, even more helpfully, seems to have a gift of precognition that kicks in at the best possible moments.

Conflict exists on many levels in this film. Although everybody speaks some kind of French, half the protagonists salt their franí§ais with Maghrebi Arabic, while others prefer Corsican Italian. Nobody’s loyalty is absolutely solid, so surviving in this prison is a bit like making good in Stalin’s Kremlin.

As if all this weren’t juicy enough, the action scenes are superb and the acting even better. This isn’t just the crime film of the year; it’s the crime film of the decade.