Of Gods and Men

• Of Gods and Men strives for simplicity; cinema is usually about dynamism, attraction, ego, but this movie concerns the renunciation of these things, in art and life. But it is also about the question of how to act when this life is violently challenged. The one visual flourish Beauvois permits himself is a shot of a dead jihadist, murdered by his comrades; the foreshortened image is held on screen just long enough for the audience to register its resemblance to Mantegna's Christ.

• With Of Gods and Men, his time for wider recognition has surely come, this thoughtful but urgent piece showing that Beauvois has matured into a masterly director with tight, calm control of his material. Miles from the edgy, confrontational tenor of Don’t Forget…, Beauvois’s new film muses on the meaning of religious vocation in a violent world, and tackles its difficult subject with authoritative, non-sensationalist forcefulness.

• “Of Gods and Men” is based on an event in Algeria in 1996, when eight Trappist monks were taken hostage by terrorists. The film centers on the fact that the monks could easily have evaded this fate but chose not to. Every scene in the film involves these monks, and most of the scenes are set in their monastery. Several times a day, they put on white robes and pray and sing in a little chapel. The rest of the time, they tend crops, keep bees, sell honey, treat the sick of the district.

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