Bitter sweet

The French master film-maker Jacques Audiard has never been anywhere near Hollywood plot school. His films contain gathering menace — something somewhere is going to go horribly wrong — but where the menace will come from, and who will get hurt, is anyone’s guess. In his astonishing prison drama A Prophet the threat to its greenhorn French-Arab inmate comes from all quarters until he himself evolves into the threat. There are two almost unwatchable scenes in Rust and Bone: in one a marine-park trainer of orcas wakes up in hospital to discover she has lost both legs; in another a bareknuckle street fighter has to thump a hole through the thickening ice to rescue his young son.

The one consistent through-line in his films is empathy for outsiders, cut off from the — to Audiard, uninteresting — mainstream by lack of education, or disability (his protagonist in Read My Lips was all but deaf).