Save your money for something good and enjoyable

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The movie is surprisingly subdued in its pacing, its characterizations, and its go-for-broke sensibilities.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

The Amanda Knox saga, on which this is based, is an incredibly compelling real-life thriller. It has all the elements--xenophobia, exotic location, pretty people, legal saber-rattling, murder most foul, the irrationality of the enraged populace, wrongful conviction and a compelling heroine who wins in the end. Now, how do you take THAT and make this incredibly dull, meandering film? I often criticize films that are "Hollywood-ed up," but here, they could have used some Hollywood attention to character development and pacing. The script is limp. The characters are laconic. Nothing much happens. The director has done better. The actors have done better. One day, someone will make a truly compelling film on this remarkable tale. This is not it.

Thomas (Daniel Brühl) is a film maker in Siena, Italy covering something that looks like the Amanda Knox story. It is almost a film within a film as the film Thomas wants to make has similarities to the one we are watching. Siena is filled with reporters with all kind of spousal issues, Thomas is using a book "The Face of an Angel" written by a journalist (Kate Beckinsale) who also has an angel face. His daughter (Ava Acres) has an angel face as does the waitress (Cara Delevingne) who aides Thomas. Thomas even tells us they changed the names.Thomas relates the angel face with the victim (Sai Bennett) while everyone one else in the world associates it with the accused (Genevieve Gaunt). Thomas wants to make the film as a parallel to Dante's Divine Comedy. So unless you are heavy into the metaphor and symbolism, the film is boring. If you are into it, you will realize he missed the mark and it is just somewhat boring. It comes across as pseudo philosophical with lines like, "Look death in the face to understand life." I had to laugh as I thought of Warhol's famous line, "To know death Otto,...."And remember, the book had two endings, like the Amanda Knox trial. Guide: F-bomb, sex, nudity (Rosie Fellner)

I found this film most affecting. There have been Winterbottom films I've liked when others haven't like, 9 Songs and Killer Inside Me and there again been disappointed with films such as Cock and Bull Story and The Claim. Face of an Angel is confusing and rather difficult to get a handle on at first, partly because of the change of names (place and people) and partly because the director wants it this way. He can't just come out and say, 'You are all fascinated by Amanda Fox, the devil with an angel face who gets off - in more ways than one'. Instead we are shown so many angles, given so many people's opinions and taken down so many dark alleys we become disorientated. The he strikes, the film maker within the film makes desperate attempts to connect with his young daughter via the often appalling Skype facility, confuses us with other possible killers, exasperates us with the Italian legal system and leaves us wondering just who among us has the face of an angel. Halfway through the film I felt that I was just not going to get it and by the end I was almost in tears. The victim really is the victim as is in a lesser way the would be film maker cast aside by his production company for not coming up with a film people might want to watch. Heroic. PS I should mention that Cara Delevingne was a revelation, managing to light up the screen whenever she appeared

'The only way to really tell what happened is to fictionalise it - that's the only way to get to the truth' - Words to this effect are said at the beginning of the film (I can't be sure of the exact quote and would never want to see it again) so I thought okay, I see where they're going with this. Change the names so we can explore everything that needs to be said about this case. What we got however is an incoherent, uneven, self indulgent piece about a coke sniffing delusional film maker who fails to connect with either the story or the people around him while trying to write a script about it. Maybe that is what happened as a result of the director trying to make this film, but then okay, don't make a film about that! The memory of Meredith Kercher is lost here and becomes almost as irrelevant as the title of the film which tries to have a clever double meaning and fails on every level. When I heard this film was in the works under the stewardship of Michael Winterbottom I thought it was going to be in safe hands. He is a brilliant film maker. No stranger to the world of true life drama stories but something went really wrong here. The film feels like it became a parody of what a film maker goes through when trying to make a film of this type - which is complex and difficult to get to the truth of, while that is as maybe this is completely the wrong subject and material with which to explore those issues - For one thing its about a true life murder case when an innocent girl with her whole life ahead of her was brutally murdered and those responsible appear to have got away with it. I was expecting a film with real balls which was going to take on the known facts of this case which captured the media attention of the world and work through them methodically and give some much needed clarity to areas of the case which have been portrayed with ever increasing conflict in the media. If the Kercher family were hoping this film would in anyway give them a sense of closure or at least bring some light to the darker areas of this case, how disappointed they must have been. I find it hard to understand what attracted the cast to the material though Daniel Bruhl is on form in the leading role and redeems himself well but do we really need to dodgy CGI monsters induced by this drug taking? An extremely badly misjudged film which hopefully will be forgotten very quickly.