Angel (2007)

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

This movie could have been great! The cast (all besides the leading role, Angel, awfully played by Romola Garai) is excellent. Fassbender and Charlotte Rampling are superb. If you are a Fassbender's fan, it is worth to watch the movie, because his performance of Esmé is AMAZING. Garai's performance, on the contrary, is SO BAD, fake and exaggerated that the whole movie turns into a parody. Every single moment that she is acting, she is overacting. It's awful to watch. She is like a cheap Scarlett O'Hara. The design of the credits is really tacky (all pink and ugly) and it gives a feeling of watching a cheap soap opera. I almost never write negative reviews, unless the movie really annoyed me. So, sorry, amazing Fassbender, but I had to write this review. It is really a pity, because the movie could have been a great, but Garai really destroys it.

I have to say that after I started to watch this movie I was not sure whether I would be able to finish it. The heroine is so unlikeable to me at first, she is completely detached from the reality. But as I got through the first half-hour, I must say that this is a brilliant movie that touched me to my very core. In a sense it is like 8 femmes - you see only blue skies and you do not realise something is wrong at first but you have this creepy feeling all the time (it cannot go on like that forever, right?). And before you know it, there is a storm so strong that you can barely keep up and the whole perfect world falls apart like the house of cards. I must especially point out the performances by Romola Garai and Michael Fassbender who did an AMAZING job but it would not feel right to leave out all the other supporting actors who made the story complete - Sam Neill and Lucy Russell. This movie reminds me of the Wurthering Heights by Emily Bronte and has everything I seek in a film - bunch of extremely talented people working together with absolute precision, marvelous costume and stages and above all - very deep idea that sticks with you even after the final credits are rolled and makes you think how tricky the life can be... Brava!

Hmmmm... if the reviews and comments I've seen are any indication, melodrama is as divisive as ever. I found Ozon's approach admirable: intelligent and objective but not satirically distanced, like Fassbinder without the cruelty. It seems clear to me that he is showing us not a realistic depiction of Angel's life but a version colored by her imagination. The intention is not to mock her but to allow us to share her experience, and to make up our own minds about the value of her fantasies. The closest to an authorial statement comes from the character least sympathetic to Angel: Charlotte Rampling as the publisher's wife comments that in spite of Angel's lack of talent or self-knowledge, she has to admire her drive to succeed. Of course we're not compelled to agree, but it strikes me as a fair assessment.The reactions to this movie remind me of the uncomprehending dismissal of Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, another story of a shallow, self-involved woman that insists on looking through her eyes. This kind of scrupulous generosity is in line with a tradition going back to Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and both directors have the stylistic confidence to carry it off. It may just be that they don't have the critics they deserve.

What a disappointment. It's hard to know what attracted Ozon to Elizabeth Taylor's fantastic source novel as his adaptation is misjudged on a number of levels. Although he slavishly sticks to Taylor's plot, Ozon has real problems with - or chooses to ignore - the very things that are at the heart of the novel. Taylor's ironic, often cruel wit is missing. Characters are softened in the way one would expect of Hollywood, but not of French cinema. He doesn't seem able to master Taylor's irony at all - the audience at last night's London Film Festival screening were very confused about where and when they should laugh. It was impossible to know what the director felt about the characters. Almost entirely missing was Taylor's exceptional portrait of class - one of the major themes of the novel. The film felt like a classic Europudding - rootless in an implausible world. There was very little sense of being in Edwardian Britain.The film is overwrought and out of control. If I hadn't already read the novel, I would have been completely puzzled by what I was watching and how I was supposed to respond or feel.