Angel

In this movie we follow a young Irish sax player who accidentally witnesses the murder of a young mute girl he just met. He decides not to tell anything to the police and track the killers down all by himself. Even if it sounds like one, it is all but an action movie. What it really is, is a great psychological drama which in spite of its pretty amateurish style really embarks us in its story. Stephen Rea is as silent and as good as usual. His cold and severe but at the same time fragile look fits magnificently in this tale of revenge and naïveté. Undoubtedly, only an Irish director could have done a movie with such an atmosphere and as much style. We can almost feel the dirt, despair and disillusion in the Irish suburb as well as the corrupted purity and quietness of the country. Danny is the spokes-man of a disenchanted nation only trying to understand what is going on and hoping for a long-awaited revenge.

It is a really splendid first film and although this is in the terrible times of the Northern Ireland troubles Neil Jordan can still use some great photography and some music. At the very start there is a wonderful portrait which captured the excellent Stephen Rea, the haunting saxophone and the young deaf mute wanders over, the name he calls Angel. There is great atmosphere in the Ballroom, especially Honor Heffernan probably Ireland's first and foremost jazz singer but then there will be violence and Rea will find a way to acquire a machine gun. It is a clever way that Jordan mixes the great dialogue, the wonderful music, the horrible killing and some detection.

Compelling drama set amidst the topic of the Northern Ireland Troubles is an atmospheric character study (Stephen Rea excellent as the saxophonist/killer) amongst some great Irish settings.

Bizarre. A philosophical gangster film in the same vein as Stephen Frears' "The Hit"... and if you loved the aesthetic displayed in Jordan's own "Mona Lisa", then you're laughing!

Outstanding performances, Chris Menges expressive, painterly photography, an eloquently humane text, Neil Jordan's stylish, sporadically cruel 80s debut retains all of its dramatic intensity, this eternally lustrous 'Angel' is exceptionally refined cinema. The youthful, strikingly handsome, Stephen Rae, is magnetic, his desire for vengeance manifestly feral, and recognizably human. The gifted, passionate, profoundly insecure musician fatefully switching his cherished saxophone's mellifluous song for the sinister Stentorian discords of a machine gun appears strangely justified; and yet, his inexorable decent into a hell of his own making is well deserved.

Artfully directed, and undeniably wonderful, Neil Jordan's elegiac drama is emphatically a product of its turbulent times, with threats of sectarian reprisals omnipresent throughout and, yet, somehow it also feels miraculously timeless; a lively, emotionally complex world of rousing music, ceaselessly shifting light and shade, the profane carnality of murder, and the euphoria of deeply felt love. Whether bathed in hot neon or the cooler, earthier tones of Ireland's mythical countryside, Jordan's captivating aesthetic is remarkably assured, earnest, and profoundly moving,'Angel' remains unleavened cinematic poetry. Andy's retribution is bluntly expressed in an almost prosaic manner; swift, brutal, frequently haphazard, even shorn of all its fetishized glamour, the dark allure of his violence remains utterly compelling.