Critics reviews

The film's final message of pluralism and empathy is forceful and direct, but the narrative also contains subtler ironies and troubling questions—about martyrdom, complicity, and unintended consequences—that it knows better than to try to answer. In the end, Of Gods and Men is a film about how you cannot live outside of history or pass through it unaffected.

This tale of a group of Christian monks harassed and eventually executed by Islamic extremists not only manages to get the politics of both sides straight, it also wades headfirst into the spiritual questions, rendering all of this remarkably thorny stuff with considerable aplomb. Also like Bresson on occasion, Beauvois knows he's making a thriller and understands real ratcheted-up movie tension need not demolish a finely wrought intellectual superstructure.

...Regardless of [Beauvois'] high-minded intentions, OF GODS AND MEN succeeds at more basic levels—in its portrayals of procedure rather than "good works," ritual rather than faith (especially in how the monks' services and singing relate to their everyday experiences), and characters rather than ideas. A failure that is also, in its own way, a resounding victory.

When does martyrdom slide into martyrbation? The nobility of committed faith stands side by side with its folly in Xavier Beauvois' earnest account of the 1996 massacre of a group of French monks in Algeria, a ponderous crowd-pleaser with stray moments of grave beauty... And I cried, even while deep down wishing for a tougher, less insistently uplifting look at the story's clashing forms of radicalism, perhaps one directed by Bruno Dumont.

Writing on its French reception, New York Times reporter Steven Erlangerunsentimentally noted that the movie seemed "strangely ignorant of the colonial implantation that the monastery represents." Beauvois has no sense of the monks' otherness or the notion that while the brothers enjoy their piece of heaven, those around them might be suffering in hell.

There are no easy answers, and even when decisions are made, Beauvois takes pains to counteract any overbearing sense of righteousness. The most mundane actions are charged with tension... and when the inevitable happens, the reactions run the gamut (cowardice, aggressiveness, confusion, acquiescence---no one is united). Godly as the monks are, they are still human---which makes their ultimate sacrifice all the more devastating.

There's nothing overtly wrong with Of Gods and Men, which is sharply composed, understatedly performed and eager to avoid any potential sensationalism. In Lieutenant, that patience paid off;Gods has even more killings and blood, but dramatically it's watery. The problem's mostly negative, reducing religion on both sides to chanting and ritual, with colorful birthday depictions respectfully presented for Muslims and hymns to Christ for the cowled ones.

Neither a searing, transcendent masterwork nor a mere sampling of French cinematic vin ordinaire, Xavier Beauvois' latest feature is a scrupulous, intelligent, engaging and sometimes quite moving account of what some might call inadvertent martyrdom.

The movie respects the monks' position, and the formal choices reflect that respect. The resulting text is coherent, and stimulating, and even sometimes moving, though I still wanted more from it—other voices, and stronger ones. These gods and men weren't enough.

Of Gods and Men is a classically constructed film, organized according to familiar narrative beats... and for this reason it could be called middlebrow. But it actually withholds many conventional signposts that signal audience response, instead providing a patient examination of the daily circumstances of people of faith, and asking us to evaluate those circumstances and the choices we would take were we to find ourselves in similar circumstances.

Part of what distinguishes "of Gods and Men" is its intelligence and topicality... But much of its pleasure derives from its attention to the monks' liturgical rituals, quotidian habits and manifestly deep love for one another and the world around them. In one scene, the abbot, played by Mr. Wilson, takes a long, meditative walk, stopping to lovingly pat an enormous tree, a gesture that brings to mind the communion between man and nature in Roberto Rossellini's "Flowers of St. Francis."

Of Gods & Men never sets a foot wrong, but neither does it challenge the viewer to feel anything but passive admiration—it's the sort of thoroughly upright docudrama that people hail to the skies but then quickly forget.