It is a performances centric movie

Crappy film

Absolutely the worst movie.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

The ten year-old Angela (Miranda Stuart Rhyne) and her little sister Ellie (Charlotte Blythe) move to an old house in the countryside with her parents Mae (Anna Thomson) and Andrew (John Ventimiglia). Their mother has mental illness and has just left an institution and her husband tries to keep the dysfunctional family together. Angela is an imaginative disturbed girl that might have inherited the illness of her mother and is obsessed by purification to get rid of her sins; and has visions of the fallen angel Lucifer and the Virgin Mary. She leads her little sister in her paranoia and uses a circle of toys and dolls to protect them against evil. They have a crazy neighbor that Angela believes is an angel and she asks the woman how to find the way to heaven. When Mae returns to the institution, Angela becomes uncontrollable in her quest to heaven. "Angela" is a weird and bizarre film about mental illness and religious paranoia. Angela seems to have inherited the mental disorder of her mother, having vision of Lucifer and Virgin Mary, and fantasizing purification processes to cleanse the sins to reach heaven. The worst is that she drags her little sister in her fantasy. The tragic conclusion is expected. It is impressive the number of times that the microphone is visible. My vote is six.Title (Brazil): 'Angela: Nas Asas da Imaginação' ("Angela: In the Wings of the Imagination")

A leisurely and ultimately tragic tale of two girls, ten-year-old Angela and her six-year-old sister Ellie, led astray by a dysfunctional life style and fantasies of religious salvation.Travail seems heaped upon travail. Father is distant and brusque. Mother is a bipolar who is hospitalized. The family is recently moved into a small town in upstate New York, and a pretty bleak one at that. Angela and Ellie are baptized in the local stream and run away from home. There is a weird, oneiristic episode in a carnival. A young man seems to befriend them but it's unclear whether his interest is paternal or more raw than that. (Angela is young and scrawny but rather appealing, with her long blond mane and sad face.) By this time Angela has begun to acquire religious delusions and believes the young man to be an friend from heaven -- or maybe a fiend from hell, I couldn't quite figure it out, since my own delusions don't run on a parallel track.The man gently kisses Angela's cheek. In the grip of her conviction, she tells him emphatically, "I know you. I know who you are." The man backs off, nonplussed, agitated, asks, "Who told you?", then runs to his car and drives quickly away. I don't know who he was, what his intentions were, or what he was afraid of, and you won't either.The whole movie is rather like that scene. The two girls wander through it and things happen to them. The significance of the events is only what we attribute to them. A placid white stallion wanders into the picture and Angela indicates the horse's member and explains to Ellie that that's what men have. Girls have to be married before they're twenty-one and do it with men, otherwise the girls begin to shrink. That's why you see so many little old ladies. (I'm not making this up.) Three features of the movie are memorable. One is the acting of the two kids. It's perfectly okay (except for an arguable second or two, here and there). How do they find children so young who can handle parts this well? Second is the location shooting and the everyone-else-is-dead atmosphere. The little town and the surrounding woods and fields aren't themselves ugly, but they're not pretty either. They're more indifferent than anything else. There's no enchantment in them, though there is the hint of a haunt. (A young boy runs into them in a grassy field, punches Angela in the eye, and scoots away.) In no scene is there ever more people than is absolutely necessary to establish even a minimal sense of verisimilitude. The streets of the town are dismal and empty of life. The carnival is practically deserted. The location LOOKS a bit like upstate New York but the atmosphere is misty and ridden with fundamentalist religion, suggesting Appalachia, a little farther South.Third -- look out, spoiler! -- third is Angela's death scene. It's flamboyantly understated. Angela believes that if one baptism is good for you, then an infinite number of them is infinitely better. So she dunks herself and dunks herself and gradually drifts downstream until the shallow creek turns into a wide rippling swiftly moving river and disappears without a sound.The budget is low. The story is despairing. I'm not sure what the point of the film is, outside of its capturing a number of strikingly composed shots. I guess it's tough to come from a broken family and it's tough to face adolescence. And, as the Buddha suggested, let's not take our actions to extremes, not even our attempts at salvation. Maybe, as Angela says, heaven is right here when you're alive, and hell is after you're dead.

This is an amazing if bizarre film. The acting of the two little girls is superb and far surpasses those of child actors in big budget studio films. I've read some disturbing posts accusing this film of child exploitation, particularly in the use of nudity. The nudity in this film is as innocent as a baby on a bearskin rug, but too many narrow-minded morons with internet access confuse this with pornography.The use of nudity in this film is a bit artsy, but very natural and represents the only beauty in these girls lives. Swimming nude with their mother the only time in their lives they've experienced joy. But the religious views of Angela makes her see herself as sinful, and her sister as unclean. This film could have been improved by more nudity to show how this budding adolescent views her own body. She already has a negative view of sexuality. But it's an issue no American filmmaker would dare explore, and I don't blame them.This is where the film becomes a near-satire of the dangers of blind faith in fear-based religions. This view of sin and uncleanliness leads Angela down a dangerous path but in her innocence, she doesn't view her actions as having negative consequences on her sister. Without giving any spoilers, Ellie experiences true freedom at the end only by experiencing, in the director's words, "an intense emotional experience."The only negative comment I have is I already know ahead of time how society views films of this nature. I'm surprised to see that few religious nuts who have seen this film never recognized it as a criticism of their faith. No one seems to be able to get over the sight of a naked baby to be able to do that.tlyoung88

I happened to see this on late night swiss TV(!); as far as I'm aware it was never released in Europe, where it would surely strike a note. Anyway: beautiful in every respect, true poetry in the photography and styling, the two girls are spellbinding, the whole thing is magical. Complimenti to R. Miller - eagerly awaitng your next movie.