by Tony Dayoub
Last week’s most notable DVD release was Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des dieux), winner of the number two prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, the Grand Prix. (Out this week is the comparatively better-known Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, winner of last year’s Palme d’Or.) Curiously, though a sensation in its native secular France, this faith-based drama has received relatively little press in the more religious US. No doubt this is rooted in the fact that Of Gods and Men takes a complicated view of Christian-Muslim relations, a less black-and-white perspective that Americans, still smarting from September 11, may not be ready to accept just yet...
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is certainly asking for it to live up to a lot. I think it was Glenn Kenny, of Premiere, that recently brought this up in regards to another film with a similar name. He was implying that critics sharpen their knives when confronted with a name like that. And a recent survey of some of the titles of the reviews for this bank heist movie confirms Mr. Kenny's theory. Of course, if you're Michael Radford (
), the director, wouldn't you do your best to avoid any such attacks by excising any potential pitfalls from your film?