From the word go, “Banged-up” surprises and spellbinds the audience with its mixture of high visual stylization and the striking realism of the actors’ performances. A credits sequence, visibly inspired by “Seven”, sets a tone of cold, metallic hardness and shrill, savage sounds. The images of the corridors and cells oscillate between a Bresson- or Cavalier-like abstraction and the power of the dialogues and situations, where humor and violence are strung together in a world that makes the head spin when the doors clang shut on the ordinary inmates in their cells or the con in solitary. Shot in only four and a half weeks at the La Plaine Saint-Denis studios after four years of writing and on-the-spot research, ‘Banged-up’ is a hyper-realistic snapshot of the prison environment such as France has rarely seen. Bouhnik’s lively camerawork is matched by a superb trio of actors: Pascal Greggory as the powerful, painful, victimized gang leader, Gael Morel as the corrupted innocent and the astonishing Jamel Debbouze, the bouncy comic from Canal+. At a time when prison spares nobody, from inner city kids to VIPs, ‘Banged-up’ is a virtually eye-witness account impossible to ignore.”(Michel Pascal in “Le Point”, August 22nd 1998)