A Prayer Before Dawn

Midnight Express' meets 'Ong-Bak,' and that's a good thing.

Ultimately, there is something distasteful about this approach ― especially as the stylistic bravura seems calculated to leave minimal room for thought.

Overloaded with physical peril and over-strategized to convey the jitters of a strung-out junkie, the movie runs a deficit on emotional intelligence and journalistic information.

You can feel the heat. You can feel the clamminess of the bodies. You can feel the rage of the central character... as a piece of experiential cinema, it's really, really overpowering.

A Prayer Before Dawn deals with so much ugliness that it's almost impossible to watch at times, but Joe Cole's performance is worth seeing.

Once the audience adjusts to its rhythms, it exerts a powerful fascination.

Not many films have the ability to touch you while at the same time showing you such horrible human brutality.

A punishing, uncompromising prison drama of the highest order...The level of authenticity achieved here is gut-punchingly raw.

Episode 11: Moving On

This shocking depiction of prison brutality deftly avoids the pitfalls that so often romanticises time behind bars.