With the eyes of the political world fixed on North Africa and the possibility of an Islamist triumph in elections, it is fitting that a film about the Algerian Civil War and the French Trappist monks caught up in it has just hit the big screen. Yet with the eyes of the movie world fixed on The King's Speech and the possibility of an Oscar triumph at the Academy Awards, you are unlikely to have heard of Of Gods and Men (not least because "Des hommes et des dieux" has been omitted from the Best Foreign Language Film category of Oscar nominees).

This is unfortunate since the story revolves around the fact that Islamic militants wage a war against a secular, military-backed government after it cancels a general election fundamentalists are poised to win. What is more unfortunate, however, is director Xavier Beauvois does not tell you this in, what The Telegraph refers to as, his "monastic murder mystery." Granted, the cinemagoer does not necessarily pay his/her money for a tutorial on post-colonial Algeria with a view to forecasting post-Mubarak Egypt. But he/she deserves context as to why a Cistercian abbey, a vestige of French colonialism high up in the Atlas Mountains about 100 kilometres from Algiers, comes under threat, and how, after three years of living in fear, seven monks are beheaded in 1996. These omissions are all the more depressing given that the movie's "subject matter is", as Philip French, The Observer's celebrated film critic, points out, "urgently topical, the themes raised eternal and universal."

While the recent declassification of French secret service documents (which point to a military blunder by the Algerian army, a theory previously advanced by author John Kiser in Passion for Algeria -"Passion pour l'Algérie : Les moines de Tibhirine", and a hypothesis supported by the director) only add to the controversy surrounding the massacre, there is incontrovertible material not included in the script. Given that history does not occur in a vacuum, an overview of the conflict that the monks are caught up in - between Algerian nationalism and the legacy of French colonialism - would prove helpful, as, too, would a fleeting reference to the rise of jihadism in Algeria, more generally, if only because the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) has been eclipsed by a splinter group, Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, now called Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb.

As Randall D. Law, author of Terrorism: A History (what I consider to be "an error-free and well-presented book", according to my 2009 History Today review), informs us, "One of the GIA's most important influences was bin Laden, who, in 1993, sent an emissary and a small amount of cash. Anywhere from several hundred to several thousand Algerians who had gained experience fighting in Afghanistan", the Associate Professor of History at Birmingham-Southern College writes, "took part in jihad back home." Mahmood Mamdani, author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslism: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror, thinks likewise, quoting as he does Mahfoud Bennoune on the nature of the 'Afghan Legion'. "[T]he nucleus of the terrorist movement in Algeria had combat experience in Afghanistan," the late professor of anthropology illuminates. Of Gods and Men, on the other hand, keeps you in the dark as to the genesis of the Islamist insurgency.

No wonder Steven Erlanger, Paris bureau chief for The New York Times, says what he does: "While the murder of the monks hangs over the tale, and the monks themselves talk about the meaning of the sacrifice they sense is coming, the film is idyllic and bizarrely apolitical. It seems strangely ignorant of the colonial implantation that the monastery represents, so many years after Algeria won its independence, and that a proselytizing Roman Catholicism itself represents. It is an odd obliviousness in a poor, divided country where jihad is on the rise as the political response of the very peasantry among whom the monks live so blissfully, and apparently blindly."

This is not to say, however, that Beauvois completely misses the politico-religious side of things. Luc, for instance, an elderly Catholic monk played by Michael Lonsdale, quotes a pensée of Pascal: "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction." A police chief, meanwhile, irritated by the monks' decision not to seek safety and return home despite being in jihadist crosshairs in Tibhirine, tells Brother Christian, played by Lambert Wilson: "I blame French colonisation for not letting Algeria grow up."

Aside from having the film's best line, the veteran French actor is as magisterial as ever and truly worthy of a Best Actor nomination if not an award; the 79-year-old is, to be sure, as mesmerizing as Colin Firth is as wooden playing King George VI. Lonsdale plays his part in the movie's stand-out sequence, too, in which the monks sip wine as they listen to a cassette of Tchaikovsky's Grand Theme from Swan Lake on an old tape machine. It is at this moment - when the camera pans around the table and zooms in on grey-haired monks as they contemplate imminent death - that you can forgive any of Beauvois' earlier omissions. "It is", as The Guardian's film critic Peter Bradshaw writes, "an overhwelming fusion of portriture and drama," and is the most sensational of scenes you are ever likely to witness. Even those familiar with the events of the mid-1990s cannot fail to be blown away; this heart-rending segment more than makes up for what some might consider Of Gods and Men to be a predictable narrative.

Rest assured, by this stage, you have already warmed to each of the eight monks - immersed as you are in their rituals (singing), tasks (selling) and dilemmas (spiritual), if not their lives in France. This is no mean feat and Etienne Comar, co-writer and producer, deserves considerable praise for sketching such wonderful portraits. Luc, the monastery's resident medic, and Christain, the prior of the community, may take all of the credit (and deservedly so, it must be said), but Christopher (Olivier Rabourdin), the youngest, and Amédée (Jacques Herlin), the oldest, also hold their own, performing admirably.

The "Last Supper" sequence is not the only affecting scene, though; so beautiful is the ending that it, too, could be the stand-out piece for any other motion pciture. When terrorists slay Croation construction workers near the monastery and rumour has it is that Catholic monks are next in line, Christian pens a letter in which he forgives his putative killers. Therein, he cautions readers against judging one of the great religions by the standards of the fundamentalists who so brazenly abuse it. His letter is read out and becomes the voice over as the monks trudge through the snow after being taken hostage.

It is the monks' trudging off to meet their fate in a snowstorm, however, fading from view, which is pure genius. I say genius since I have not seen such a poetic final scene like it elsewhere, save Blackadder, which is errily similar, in fact, but with which the French film team probably have little if any familiarity. (For those unaware of the concluding episode of the fourth and final series of the BBC One historical sitcom, it ends with the main characters going 'over the top' to their deaths in the fog of 'no man's land' during the Great War.)

If Beauvois and Comar were aware of it, I am confident they would have acknowledged such a fact given the lengths to which the pair went to ensure accurcay; the cast were sent to live in an a Moroccan monastery to prepare for monastic life. It comes as no surprise, then, that Of Gods and Men has received plaudits from both the Bishops Conference of France and the French Council of Muslim Faith as well as by one of the survivors of the tragedy (a visiting brother had arrived just days earlier from another North African abbey and lived to tell the tale). Let us hope Christian's message is the one cinemagoers, too, take away and that Christians and Muslims continue to coexist peacefully.