A.O. Scott begins his review of the French film, "Of Gods and Men," in today's Times:

In the 1990s, Algeria was gripped by a gruesome, protracted civil war between the government which declared martial law after annulling elections it appeared to have lost and a ruthless Islamist insurgency.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.

And he concludes:

In place of a traditional soundtrack, most of the films music comes from the monks chanted prayers and the cries of the muezzins at nearby mosques. The notable exception the only time recorded, secular music is heard comes during a meal, when the residents of the abbey sit and listen to a famous passage from Tchaikovskys Swan Lake and lose themselves as completely in aesthetic reverie as they otherwise do in religious devotion.The identical music figures, coincidentally enough, in Black Swan, a movie so utterly different from Of Gods and Men that they barely seem to belong to the same medium. In Black Swan, Tchaikovsky delivers the extravagant melodrama that is the films entire reason for being, whereas here his lush, emotive orchestration emphasizes the utter absence of such wanton emotionalism. And yet it also serves as a reminder that even in wartime, and even in lives governed by restraint and self-denial, there is an essential need for beauty, feeling and art.

While, in the current New Yorker, the peerless Anthony Lane also comments on the scene:

as the end draws nigh [Brother Luc] opens two bottles of wine and, in place of the customary spiritual readings, puts on a recording of "Swan Lake." I'm not sure I believe the scene, yet the belief that it enshrines feels true; the monks are saying farewell to worldly things, drinking deep of passing joys. As a result, the Tchaikovsky means more, and rings out more resoundingly, in this one excerpt than it does in the whole of "Black Swan." There it accompanied the dancer in her final fragmenting of self, engrossed in her own mirror image. Here it shows men of older plumage, preparing calmly, even joyfully, to take flight and leave their selves behind.