Excellent but underrated film

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

Rebecca Miller's haunting tale of a young girl driven by her religious obsessions into a frightening world of hallucinogenic images and superstitious delusion. There are touching performances by the two principal girl actors, Miranda Stuart Rhyne and Charlotte Eve Blythe. Rhyne, in particular, is engaging as the young protagonist caught in a heavenly struggle between good and evil to save her mentally ill mother. She convincingly portrays Angela as a determined and feisty but naive and vulnerable child in equal measure; someone who is headstrong but literally open to abuse.There is a fine director's commentary on the DVD narrated by Miller exploring the themes and motivations that went into the making of the film.

Beautifully conceived and executed, this movie touches on something rarely seen—the testing and rituals imagined by a child to address the destruction of the world she knows. Angela (Miranda Stuart Rhyne) senses the presence of sin and angels in the house where her mother Mae (Anna Levine) is falling deeper and deeper into madness as their father (John Ventimiglia) watches helplessly. She and her little sister Ellie wander through the neighbourhood, meet a lot of strange people, and try to find a way to clean their souls of sin, ultimately with tragic results. They summon the Virgin Mary, but the one who hovers outside the window is probably not genuine or safe. The moments when their mother cycles back to something approximating normal make the girls happy again, but these moments do not last and the happy face becomes drawn and stricken. The sleepwalker next door, always checking her mailbox at night, is not an angel and cannot tell Angela the way to heaven. Angela is drawn to pity Lucifer, who lets her see him pale and writhing in the cellar, pleading softly, the stumps of his wings still bleeding. The river where simpler people are baptized cannot help her as she tries to expiate for sins that she does not understand and that she has never committed. The young actor who plays Angela is riveting, her sister open and appealing, the mother a powerful example of the dissolution of personality, the father gentle but strained far beyond his limits. The key concept--that children faced with unbearable facts, can internalize them and try to bear a family's burdens, and that the intelligent, sensitive, and imaginative child is more likely to enter into this struggle completely--is brilliantly conveyed.

The movie Angela, although entertaining in its beginning as a lyrical commentary on the precariousness of childhood, eventually puzzles and disappoints as it declines into David Lynch-like lines and imagery that really don't add anything (except perhaps atmosphere) to the film. In the first half of the film, Rebecca Miller provides us with glimpses and feelings of childhood that trigger vague remembrances of half-forgotten feelings of our own childhood -- the seemingly contradictory juxtaposition of the helplessness of being a non-adult forced to deal with adult problems (e.g., irresponsible or sick parent), with the powerful strength that comes from an ability to believe in worlds that cannot be seen. Unfortunately, the second half of the movie degenerates into cryptic dialogue and confusing imagery and scenarios that are reminiscent of Lynch at less than his best. Mixed in with an increasingly prominent religious-hysteria-in-young-girl story line, the movie just left me feeling annoyed that I'd invested my time in such an unsatisfying film. The main character also began to alienate me, and ultimately cause real antipathy in me, during this second half, where she continues to drag her sister along in her quest for salvation, appropriating other people's property (e.g., horse, family's picture) without compunction because they are "signs" of some holy grail that only she can detect.And although this may seem contradictory to my earlier comment about the cryptic dialogue and imagery, I found the second half to be much too intellectualized. It seems that the filmmaker was trying to tie in the fall of Satan/Lucifer with the fall that every human must experience in his/her maturation process -- through the realization of one's sexuality (signified by Angela's clothing and a particular event), and through the realization of one's own mortality (signified by Angela's search for the way to heaven). But I found these efforts to be generally unmoving (perhaps because they were so confused) and thus, as previously stated, ultimately taking away from the enjoyment of the movie. (Also, I thought a 10-year-old was a bit too young to illustrate these themes, and the film would have been better off staying away from them altogether.) Consequently, the latter half of the movie became a rambling essay on the painful awakenings each child must experience on the road to adulthood, rather than the poem or short story it could have been on the terrible beauty of childhood in an imperfect world.

I caught ANGELA on IFC a couple of years ago; it's been in the back of my mind since then. ANGELA is about two young girls who create their own realities in order to deal with the painful reality of their mother's manic depression. It pinpoints and explores the relationship between the interior self and the subjective world--the process by which we create meaning when meaning runs riot in the "objective" world.Its direction by Rebecca Miller is impeccable -- she coaxes sensitive, complex performances out of each and every character, most notably in the young protagonist and in her even younger sister. Such fine performances are a tribute the script, as well.From cinematography to art direction to costumes, it manages to convey a truly unified, important, tender and thought-provoking vision... The world would be a better place with more films like this one. Thank you, Ms. Miller!