GreenCine Staff Pick: Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival, The Believer is carried through with a mesmerizing performance by Ryan Gosling, frighteningly believable as young man - based on a real person, Daniel Burros - who rejects his Jewish orthodox upbringing(!) and falls in with neo-Nazi skinheads. This is a film that takes big chances, most notably by making its main character both complex and articulate in his hateful rhetoric, and by providing no easy answers, for not patronizing the audience or its characters. It's also even more powerful and complex than the similarly plotted American History X, for which Edward Norton received an Oscar nomination. Gosling should have had one, too (although he did get an Indie Spirit Award nomination), but this fireball of a movie may have been too hot to handle in 2001. But Believer is anything but an ode to anti-Semitism; Henry Bean, a screenwriter making his directorial debut, called his film "a paean to Judaism," and taken as a whole, when you watch it you'll see why. An angry, absolutely provocative film with a towering performance at the center. -- Craig Phillips