4. Michael Lonsdale for Of Gods and Men
How would saints behave in hell? The way Cistercian monks minister to their Algerian villagers during a terrorist uprising in Xavier Beauvois's starkly beautiful dramatization of a true event. The French monks ignore government warnings of unrest; their lives mean less than their mission. Lambert Wilson radiates a patriarchal grandeur as the group's abbot, but it's Michael Lonsdale as Luc, a doctor-priest, who embodies the serenity of a holy man impervious to danger. The 80-year-old actor — son of an Englishman and a French-Irish woman, and known as Michael or Michel in movie credits — played Hugo Drax in the Bond film Moonraker and the Abbot in The Name of the Rose but is familiar to international audiences as a droll, saturnine figure in films directed by Luis Buñuel, Alain Resnais, Joseph Losey and Marguerite Duras. Of Gods and Men twists the Lonsdale persona away from the Machiavellian and into religious and humanist sanctity. He brings equally compelling conviction to creatures of the devil or the Lord.