Directed by Xavier Beauvois
(PG-13)
****
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Of Gods and Men is a “remarkable” study of how people of faith cope “when their ideals are challenged by violent reality,” said The Economist. Based on true events, the film follows nine French monks living in Algeria’s Atlas Mountains who must decide whether to flee their monastery when civil war and Islamic terrorist attacks intensify around them. Our sense of what they’d be losing is established early, said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. The Christian monks, with their humble sense of service, fit so gracefully into the lives of their Muslim neighbors that it seems as if both groups were “living in a paradise on earth.” When violence spreads and authorities advise evacuation, the monks are pained by the thought that doing so would be a betrayal to the village itself. As revolts today spread across North Africa and the Middle East, this award-winning film has an “unmistakably timely resonance,” said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. “Beautiful, somber, and rigorously intelligent,” it is a testament to the power of piety as well as to the universal human need “for beauty, feeling, and art.”
