Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Executscan Expected more

Stellead Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Fatma Suarez The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Antonia Tejeda Barros 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.

ferdinand1932 The source book was a satire on a truly dreadful author of the late 19th century, a sort of Barbara Cartland, but only more schlocky. If the intent was to have fun on this idea it was missed and badly; if it was taken at face value, it is a sign of incipient idiocy.It plays the whole thing very straight and it seems as if no one saw that this is utter complete trash. Douglas Sirk used to take rubbish - real mediocre uneducated garbage - and make a thing with it as Fassbinder extolled him for doing. It looks as if Ozon has done a Fassbinder and taken real nonsense, which has become a joke cliché of romantic fiction and not seen that it had always been a joke; a wry in-joke on the reader, and on the original writer.Why anyone ever signed up to do this is curious - apart form the money. Why it was financed is even more puzzling. No doubt people will watch this in 10 and 50 years and see something else altogether but none of it will do anything for the creative team behind this.The classic, "Cold Comfort Farm" was a parody of the romantic rural fiction popular in the early 20th century and this work is a roman a clef of the same type of demotic garbage that is consumed in bulk.Under no circumstances go anywhere near this and wipe all playback technologies that may have accessed it.

princehal 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.

film_riot Watching "Angel" by French filmmaker François Ozon was a quite interesting experience. As often, when a film turns out to be different than I had thought, at first I didn't really like what I saw. I went into the cinema knowing practically nothing about what I had to expect and found myself in a movie with over the top acting, corny dialogue and a dislikeable main character. It was after some time in the movie that I realized, Ozon used the style of old Hollywood melodramas to enforce the pompous and passionate character of Angel's writing and to at the same time add ironic breaks to an otherwise fairy tale story. But still, Ozon shows a lot of love for Angel on screen and does not use the irony to demonstrate his superiority. Now, quite a while after watching "Angel", the film still sticks in my mind and crosses my thoughts now and then, which is a proof to me that I really saw an impressive work, that mixes an antique style with narrative intransigence unseen in melodramas of the old days.