Best movie of this year hands down!

There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

The movie starts out pretty slowly and doesn't really pick up pace before the friends come up with a risky plan to get rich, without spoiling more of the story, that's all I will mention about that.The story told in "The Angels' Share" is about a group of young delinquents who are taken to a whiskey distillery where they concoct a plan that will make them rich.For a comedy then there was surprisingly little to laugh about throughout the course of the movie, which was a shame because it would have spruced up the movie.What worked in "The Angels' Share" was the cast, because they had managed to get some nicely talented actors and actresses. And it was nice to watch a movie with all new faces. There was a good chemistry amongst those on the screen. Another thing that worked well was the colorful and likable characters in the story.I loathe whiskey, so the whole aspect of it being a grand thing with the rare whiskey was lost on me. it all take like charred wood to me.For me, this movie was a mediocre experience, given the lack of comedy, and thus I score it five out of ten stars.

This movie was filmed in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and the Scottish Highlands, all places my son and I visited by train about 20 years ago. For me that was a highlight of watching this, to see those places again.I found it on Netflix streaming movies.It is Robbie's story. Having grown up in a rough part of Glasgow he has already in his young age had a series of bad encounters with the law. He is a hot-head too, and when disrespected can easily go off to almost killing the victim. Now he has also gotten his girlfriend Leonie pregnant, much to the dissatisfaction of her dad, who even tries to bribe him with money to leave and never see his daughter again. Robbie doesn't have very good prospects.Robbie's life begins to change when get gets on a work payback group for non capital offenders, basically being a supervised work crew to pay back society for their crimes. The monitor of the group, and the man with the van, gets them interested in Scotch Whiskey, and the title of this movie arises from a distillery tour when the young guide explains that in barrel aging a small percentage of the whiskey is lost forever through evaporation and they call that "the angel's share." (NB - The Jim Beam company calls the whiskey trapped inside the wood at the end of aging, "the devil's share", and even sell a whiskey of that name where they claim to have extracted it from the wood. I have some and it in fact is pretty good.) Anyway it turns out Robbie has a natural nose for discerning different qualities of whiskey, and I naturally thought that would lead him into getting a job with a distillery and be able to leave his former life, and build something better for Leonie and him. But the movie takes a quite different turn. Good movie, I enjoyed it for the characters and the subject, both redemption and imagining being there in the whiskey tastings.SPOILERS: Robbie finds out a very rare, very old whiskey is to be sold at auction, and in fact one bottle ended up going for over One Million pounds. But before the auction Robbie hatched a plan with his friends on the work gang, they visited the distillery, Robbie managed to hide among the casks through the night, his friends were outside with empty one- liter soda bottles, he opened the valuable cask and used long clear tubing to siphon off enough to fill 4 bottles. Then he took ordinary whiskey to back fill so that the 4 liters would not be missed. Even when cops stopped and searched them randomly afterwards, all the cops saw were 4 bottles of what they thought was soda. Robbie learned of a black market buyer and sold a bottle for 200,000 pounds and split it with the other 3, and bargained for a job for himself in the whiskey business. His hapless friends broke two of the bottles in a moment of stupidity, and he gave the 4th to the work supervisor who had introduced him to whiskey. But Robbie, Leonie, and their new baby were off to a new life near Stirling.(NB- About 20 years ago we spent two nights in a hotel in Stirling which I like to describe as "the worst hotel in all of Scotland." It was their last weekend of operation, I suspect it was being demolished afterwards. The only good part was that they let us stay free, that's how close to "camping" it was. But I will always remember that hotel stay.)

The Angels' Share (2012)A deceptively simple movie that builds slowly and is mixture of outrageous fun and touching social commentary.The main young man, Robbie (Paul Brannigan), has been convicted of a violent crime and is trying to get his life together. His girlfriend is about to have his baby, his old rival is out to get him, and he can't get a job. He also has to do community service, which leads him to the main plot—a growing love of whiskey, a gift with his nose, and an eventual plot to steal some of the rarest of the liquid.It's this last part that dominates the second half of the movie, and it's fun, for sure, but also a little contrived compared to the first half which has a gritty realism to it. Brannigan, and all his supporting actors, is really good. If you don't know Scottish movies, be prepared for some major swearing by everyone. And the Netflix version of the movie has the subtitles on because the accent makes a lot of the movie hard to hear. (I think you'd be better off without them, however, and just get most of it without the distraction of reading.)You might be able to read into the serious parts of the movie and see a valid commentary about the strength of community service, and about the rough life on the streets of Glasgow. But this is more the hard nails backdrop to make the clever, and rather fun (almost joyous) secondary plot shine brighter. It works. The movie pulls it together seamlessly (maybe a hair too seamlessly by the end, as you'll see). So, yes, an enjoyable surprise.

Set in contemporary Glasgow, THE ANGELS' SHARE does not shy away from portraying the squalid reality of many young peoples' lives. Robbie (Paul Brannigan) has to complete long hours of community service, together with his friends Rhino (William Ruane), Albert (Gary Maitland) and Mo (Jasmin Riggins), while having to cope with the perpetual threat of attack from long-time adversary Clancy (Scott Kyle). However Robbie's 'minder' Harry (John Henshaw), who supervises him on his community service, introduces Robbie to the intricacies of scotch whisky, and Robbie's life is transformed as a result. In an attempt to improve his life, he becomes involved in an elaborate plot to steal an exceptionally rare brand of Scotch from a Highland distillery. While Paul Laverty's screenplay does not shy away from the seamier sides of Glasgow life, it nonetheless suggests that people can be redeemed, so long as they are provided with moral as well as emotional support. Harry seems an unlikely figure in this respect, but his basic honesty stands out in a film full of shady characters. The four youngsters (Robbie and his friends) are totally convincing in their roles - so much so that we share their pleasure when their scheme eventually succeeds and they can look forward to a better life, however transient that might be.