Rust and Bone (Jacques Audiard, 2012)

5/10
This is not a very good film, and what makes Rust and Bone even more disappointing is the fact that it has so many strong elements - you get the sense that there's a really great movie just outside the frame, waiting to be put together into something fantastic...and either Audiard lost the plot or I just didn't get it.
This movie has absolutely no rhythm, the tone is consistently messy, and it completely wastes the definitely-there chemistry between its two leads (who both give excellent performances). It's soundtrack is overwrought (figures that it's Bon Iver, a band I always suspected would annoy me), no more so than at the end of the film, when the "slow the action down and hit play on the soundtrack" reaches its height of saccharine stupidity. The movie is completely devoid of humanity or humour when it would benefit greatly from both. Just an ugly, disappointing experience that could have been so much more, and frankly baffling coming from the hand that crafted A Prophet.

A Prophet (Jacques Audiard, 2009)

7.5/10
I have to say, after all the monstrous hype and acclaim this movie is receiving, I was let down. I kept waiting for "that moment" where everything would coalesce and hit me and it didn't come. The movie's strongest points are the performances by its two main characters played by Tahar Rahim and Niels Arestrup, they really are the film. The first hour is incredibly engrossing but by the second half (of a 2h35m movie) things were dragging for me and at the end I was left impressed with the story but underwhelmed on the whole.