Of Gods and Men

One of the most powerful and mesmerizing pictures to date.. A story about 8 Trappist Monks in a North African Monastery are pressurized by Islamist elements and the government to leave.

The country foundered in a state of terror, with beheadings, throat-slashings and large-scale massacres an almost daily feature of life. These grim circumstances provide the setting for “Of Gods and Men,” a beautiful, somber and rigorously intelligent new film by the French director Xavier Beauvois.

Though it takes place in the recent past, “Of Gods and Men” has an unmistakably timely resonance, evoking as it does both the messy wars on terror and the rebellions currently convulsing North Africa and the Middle East. And yet while it takes pains to be historically authentic, the film, closely based on the true story of a group of French Cistercian Trappist monks caught up (and ultimately killed) in the violence, also keeps an eye on less worldly, temporal concerns.