The Monk

You don't cast Vincent Cassel as a devout monk unless he’s headed for a serious fall. So it goes in Dominik Moll’s arty ecclesiastical horror, as visitations tempt Cassel into Obi Wan-dering with his Kenobi out. Despite the stylish, authentically weird atmosphere, Moll’s ambitions for the source material – a once-scandalous 18th-Century Gothic novel – can’t help but translate into a generic splice of The Name Of The Rose and The Ninth Gate. It might have worked better played for laughs – Moll’s uncertain tone is neither creepy nor darkly comic enough. The Monk News an d Features