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Excellent but underrated film

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

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.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

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)

After reading a short synopsis of this movie it certainly sounded worth a look - that was as close as it got. Why writers and movie makers feel it's their right to make movies about real life murders - then take ugly liberties with the facts in order to spin their own fantasies and selfish motivations go's well beyond any creative forgiveness.Whatever the real life participants may or may not have been - they don't deserve to become an excuse for a fictionalized story about drug and sex abuse by somewhat superficial journalists, novelists, etc - all having nothing to do with the actual case at the center of the movie. This convoluted, sleep inducing, waste of valuable time and resources has earned its failure. BBC and others should have known better.

The movie goes downhill pretty fast and just left me feeling bored and slightly troubled. It's a movie about the Amanda Knox murder case about which many people have strong feelings. Only it's not really about the Amanda Knox murder case. The movie starts out and ends up dedicated to the memory of murder victim Meredith Kercher, but just winds up being all about the unraveling of a depressed director. He has an affair. He snorts a lot of cocaine. He reads a lot. He has a lot of crazy nightmares. For me it was a complete nonstarter. I still don't get what it was about. Lets just say 'The Face of an Angel' goes round in circles and winds up getting nowhere. The movie was really boring and the story didn't make a lot of sense. Good acting but a cast of shallow characters you won't care about. As the plot moves forward the movie loses its thread more and more

I like Michael Winterbottom. It's probably cheap to call this pretentious but it is about a filmmaker hanging around and sometimes sleeping with very beautiful women, writing a film about the Murder of the girl in the film, who has lots of interviews which producers and financiers in which he talks about what he's trying to say in the film and the structure of the film with is based on Dante's Inferno (one of Dante's books at least). I'll call it self reflexive I don't know but I'm gonna say it's about Michael Winterbottooms life and divorce (it can't be another film about Steve Coogans life). The film director (Bruhl) makes reference to him needing a hit after his last film flopped... I wondered which film that was (in real life), because I didn't think any of Winterbottoms films made money. I've always wondered how he got films funded. I like his films a lot, but I just thought it was like funding Derek Jarman, you're always gonna lose money but you'd feel good about it. Like you've done something worthwhile, but not as gay maybe. I mean I didn't think he felt pressure to make money.....I don't think this deserved to be as derided as it was. i was impressed with the accuracy to the real life case. The insanely dislikable daily mail columnist is Nick Pisa, who is insanely dislikable..The Police chief really reminded me of the actual chief and so did a lot of the cast. A lot of the seemingly small events are based on real events and are accurately portrayed. And despite me calling it pretentious I do like the self reflexive nature of this film. I think it worked and I enjoyed it more afterwards thinking about the three act structure (they talk about it in the movie) and its resolution and Cara being a sort or adopted daughter.This would be a great film to talk about over a meal, because it has depth and because it will so obviously polarise opinion, getting under some people's skin and feeling painfully obvious and other people clicking with it.I think with a semi autobiographical film like this, you're more likely to get away with a Woody Allen style approach (I.e. Comedy) and not be called pretentious and Winterbottom has done this before with 'The Trip' and 'A Cock and blah blah' and people found it easier to stomach. When you go later Woody Allen's serious stuff, you upset people. This is 'Interiors' but about a real life murder. So I can see it's pretty difficult for people to separate the art from the fact.I clicked though!