What is it with reviewers?

It was with a sad pang of disappointment that I descended the sticky exterior staircase in Covent Garden's Odeon cinema on Saturday evening, having just witnessed the much vaunted Jacques Android thriller Un Prophéte, which seems to have sent film critics into a bizarre apoplexy of adulation.

Android's film, charting the rise of French-Arab Malik El Djebena from small-time petty criminal to hardened mob leader, or rather, wide-eyed ingénu to brutalised maître de criminalité, is far from a bad piece of work. It is a fine piece of work in fact; a sage insight into french prison life harnessing some mean acting and more than a few dramatic, visceral scenes of violence. It is also, however, confusingly sinuous of plot and unsatisfactorily empty of social commentary. Certainly not - not by any stretch - a masterpiece, which is what it has been (repeatedly) described as.

So it was with relief that I read this piece today by Guardian arts writer David Cox, who seems as perplexed as I am by the hyperbole that surrounds the film. It is not so much that the work has been misrepresented; rather, that it does not seem to have been much scrutinised at all. Few of the lionising reviews of A Prophet seem give any indication of why it is supposed to be so good.

Putting aside the issue of what reviewers are for, or how much we should trust them, or (for that matter) whether they are any better qualified than anyone else to pontificate about cinema, it seems fair to say that a certain cinematic topos will always strike a chord with the kind of art house aficionados that write for the broadsheets.

Certainly any film boasting a festival award is unlikely to receive lukewarm reviews in the press. Rarely it seems, more dubiously, is a film with subtitles - particularly one from France - presumably on the logic that no film not worth its weight would have been translated so early on, or (more fatuously) that France is well renowned for art house cinema. Add a few close-ups of scar ridden faces, a few unflinching depictions of mob confrontation, and even the most hollow, meaningless picture seems to be given the stamp of approval.

To reiterate, Un Prophéte falls into neither of these categories (being neither hollow nor meaningless), but it might have been better served by its admirers were audiences not settling into their cinema seats expecting a magnum opus.