Les Hommes Libres (Ismaël Ferroukhi, 2011)

In a gap-filling addition to the Nazi-occupied France genre, Tahar Rahim plays a young Algerian black marketeer in Paris who gets reluctantly sucked into the politics of the resistance. He cuts a diffident and uncertain figure, the film's main point seeming to be that heroism can happen quite without design or intent, and it's down to Rahim's charismatic portrayal that you never end up throwing your hands up in frustration at his non-committal comportment. At the same time, though, a story that was ripe for mining of deep drama never quite takes off: it's a curiously flat affair, with protracted scenes of Magrebi singing that feel like filler, vindicated largely just by its worthiness and adherence to realism.

5/10