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Men In Black 3

It’s not a sequel that needed to be made, but thanks to the charm of its leads and a tone that harks back to the wit and humour of the original, it’s a pretty enjoyable trip.

Bel Ami

The excellent female support cast saves this patchy effort, which is let down by its leading man and a flat screenplay.

The Dictator

A disappointing, often repulsive and mean-spirited mess of a film with seemingly only one real criterion on its agenda: to shock and offend.

The Woman In Black

Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.

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Of Gods And Men (Film)

by Mark Demetrius | May 23, 2011 16:43 | Edited May 23, 2011 16:44

While it’s slow-moving, this affecting and often beguiling drama is well worth seeing.

In 1996, a group of French Catholic monks were kidnapped from their monastery in Algeria by Islamic fundamentalists. That stark fact is the basis for this movie, but the focus is abidingly on the monks themselves - and their states of mind - rather than on
the terrorists or on historical detail. It's a slow-moving, disturbing and often beguiling drama.
     

Lambert Wilson plays Brother Christian, the unofficial leader of the monks, and Michael Lonsdale is Brother Luc, who doubles as a doctor. The men keep bees, tend the sick, get on well enough with their Muslim neighbours, and of course, pray a lot. Then one horrible day Croatian migrants working in the area have their throats cut by terrorists. It's a distressing scene, graphically rendered. From that point on, conversation in the monastery naturally revolves around whether the priests should flee or stay - and thereby, as one of them puts it, risk committing "collective suicide." The situation unfolds slowly, naturalistically and somehow - for all the unbearable attendant fear and tension - gracefully. Though relatively little "happens" in the conventional cinematic sense, there are a couple of very powerful scenes courtesy of director Xavier Beauvois: notably the one in which the monks drink and listen to an exquisite recording of Swan Lake.
     

Of Gods And Men is a curious film. It makes few concessions to its audience, which means that a few patches are tedious - especially the literally preachy ones - but that others are fascinating. It's a real sleeper; it looks inexorably better in retrospect, and you'll find that certain images from the film stay firmly lodged in your mind's eye. Well worth seeing.