20
How do you make one of the decade’s most sensational crimes boring? It’s an odd trick, but director Michael Winterbottom manages it in The Face of an Angel, a stubbornly dull retelling of the famous Italian case.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
60
Winterbottom's The Face of an Angel makes for compelling viewing, painting an arresting character portrait even if it avoids the direct engagement with the original (and much-discussed) crime that some people may have been expecting.
25
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Brad Wheeler
Winterbottom is not out to thrill, but to lecture on the truth, which, he believes, can only be found in fiction.
75
Slant Magazine by Clayton Dillard
Michael Winterbottom's film is a mess of tones, but not of ideas, which could well sum up the director's prodigious but uneven oeuvre.
60
On one level a fascinating refraction of the Amanda Knox trial into an examination of perception, on another an increasingly trying hall of mirrors.
50
The A.V. Club by Jesse Hassenger
Past Winterbottom films have turned “real life” into both comedy and tragedy. The Face Of An Angel turns it into a directionless skulk.
42
The Playlist by Kevin Jagernauth
The idea of turning a true crime story into a intellectual cinematic exercise is novel, and could be witty and sharp, but 'Angel' never comes across that way.
40
The Telegraph by Mike McCahill
Winterbottom’s shapeshifting spontaneity has long seemed as much limitation as virtue, characteristic of a filmmaker unable or unwilling to commit to his own better ideas. Here, you feel him hedging around his subject, less out of sensitivity than a constitutional evasiveness, an inability to formulate a clear line of argument.
50
The Face of an Angel may not be like any other whodunit you've seen, but it's also only superficially smarter than the genre it defines itself against.