Outside the Law

Name: Outside the Law
Director: Rachid Bouchareb
Released: 2010

Rachid Bouchareb

2010

Synopsis

After losing their family home in Algeria in the 1920s, three brothers and their mother are scattered across the globe. Messaoud joins the French army fighting in Indochina; Abdelkader becomes a leader of the Algerian independence movement in France and Saïd moves to Paris to make his fortune in the shady clubs and boxing halls of Pigalle.

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Recommendations

91
Entertainment Weekly
Rachid Bouchareb's intensely dramatized, passionately partisan story of militancy in the struggle for Algerian independence from France after World War II makes effective use of "Godfather" storytelling theatrics.
75
Chicago Sun-Times
At the very least a superior action film, in which the action sequences are plausible and grounded in reality.
75
New York Post
A powerful, decades-spanning epic about that country's fight for independence centering on three brothers.
75
Philadelphia Inquirer
A gripping French-Algerian coproduction that makes Algeria's epic struggle for independence from France look like a gangster movie.
70
Los Angeles Times
The filmmaker is at his best unspooling the politics of independence, which he does with such confident fervor that you always understand the fight.
65
Movieline
A companion film to "Days of Glory," Rachid Bouchareb's 2006 feature about Algerian soldiers who fought for France in World War II, Outside the Law is another historical drama with a heavy heart and a knack for genre.
60
Time Out
Even the movie's trio of outstanding actors come off like mouthpieces from a creaky Group Theater play, spiced with an occasional Cagneyism or two.
50
The New York Times
As powerful and well made as it is, Outside the Law is too schematic and single-minded to lodge itself in your mind as a fully realized cinematic epic. Its few female characters are sketchy at best. It is all politics, all the time.