The Believer

An angry young skinhead (Ryan Gosling) calls for the annihilation of the Jews, speaking in articulate flights of pseudo-intellectual doctrine. In fact, he’s a self-loathing Jew himself, filled with conflicted feelings toward his heritage—helping to deface a synagogue, yet secretly protecting the Torah. Writer/director Henry Bean’s film is disturbing, to say the least, but impossible to dismiss, exploring the ugly secret of Jewish anti-Semites—one of those bizarre, nasty contradictions in nature, like Holocaust deniers who say it never happened with one breath then, in the next, that Hitler should have finished the job. The film is no fun, but Bean handles it with an unflinching courage that is matched by Gosling’s seething performance. The ending adds an almost mystical layer of poetic justice.