A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
Metascore
67 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 25 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 19 out of 25
  2. Mixed: 6 out of 25
  3. Negative: 0 out of 25
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  1. Film Threat
    Reviewed by: Don R. Lewis
    90
    Downey Jr. and LaBeouf as Dito as well as Chazz Palminteri as Monty are outstanding. Channing Tatum (who I've never heard of) is also amazing as the tortured soul Antonio.
  2. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Jessica Reaves
    88
    The movie is awash in great performances by actors known and otherwise.
  3. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Lisa Schwarzbaum
    83
    This gallantly imperfect indie pops with attitude.
  4. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: Scott Foundas
    80
    It's forceful and alive and spilling over with crazy poetry.
  5. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kevin Thomas
    80
    In "A Guide," passion and imagination go a long way in transforming seemingly conventional material and characters.
  6. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: A.O. Scott
    80
    hough the picture is wrenching, at times devastating, it leaves you with that buoyant feeling of having encountered a raw, authentic work of art.
  7. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Ann Hornaday
    80
    This is an exceptionally assured debut, and Montiel exhibits rare care with editing and sound design. His real forte, though, is casting, to which a brief scene featuring Downey and the incandescent Rosario Dawson powerfully attests.
  8. New York Post
    Reviewed by: Lou Lumenick
    75
    This is a gifted director who actually has something to say and knows how to say it. We'll be hearing from him again.
  9. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Ruthe Stein
    75
    Compelling.
  10. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Maitland McDonagh
    75
    Scenemaker Dito Montiel's rough, grating memoir of growing up in a poor, violent section of Astoria, Queens, in the mid-1980s features a few too many arty flourishes, but also packs a raw power that's hard to shake.
  11. ReelViews
    Reviewed by: James Berardinelli
    75
    Most viewers will discover this picture - and it is worth discovering - when it is released on DVD.
  12. Slate
    Reviewed by: Dana Stevens
    70
    Like the boys, Montiel's first film is rough and uneven, with more energy than it knows what to do with. But it still manages to feel fresh and authentic, perhaps because it's so deeply autobiographical.
  13. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marjorie Baumgarten
    67
    A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is inchoate, but it demonstrates that instincts and brio can compensate for a lot.
  14. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: William Arnold
    67
    One of the American cinema's rare excursions into pure autobiography: the movie is Montiel's own coming-of-age story, with little or nothing disguised as fiction.
  15. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Scott Tobias
    67
    The film feels like an earnest retread over old territory, albeit one that intermittently comes to life thanks to an amazing cast, expressive cinematography by French master Eric Gautier (Irma Vep), and Montiel's obviously heartfelt sentiments.
  16. New York Daily News
    Reviewed by: Jack Mathews
    63
    The framing sequences with Downey and the climactic scenes between father and son are a mess. Downey, at 41, is too old to be playing a character who can be no more than 31 or 32, and 50-year-old Eric Roberts is an even greater distraction as Montiel's imprisoned friend Antonio.
  17. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Wesley Morris
    63
    The first-time filmmaker aspires to show us what caused him to leave his neighborhood and stay gone for 20 years. All I can really glean is that the place was too loud.
  18. Premiere
    Reviewed by: Glenn Kenny
    63
    For my money, if I'm in the mood for the kind of aesthetic and emotional experience Saints is selling, I'll just blast Jim Carroll's more concise (and rocking!) "People Who Died" out of my iPod.
  19. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Liam Lacey
    63
    As it dips in and out of the boys' lives, and occasionally wanders back to the contemporary Dito surveying the old neighbourhood, Saints never really integrates its two time periods.
  20. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: Rob Nelson
    60
    Whatever the first-time filmmaker lacks in subtlety and finesse--not even the snow-white Sundance Screenwriters Lab could bleach Montiel's script of its corner-deli grit--he recoups by other, more playfully attitudinal means.
  21. Variety
    Reviewed by: Robert Koehler
    60
    Writer-director Montiel creates a movie of many parts that don't always congeal. Mix this with the many meaty scenes and a roster of often exceptional actors and the effect is one of a fabulous acting showcase more than a wholly finished work.
  22. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: Jonathan Rosenbaum
    60
    Given all the filmed memory pieces about screaming, violent Italian-American families in New York boroughs, I'm not especially thrilled by even a well-made example.
  23. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Duane Byrge
    50
    After a while, the crudeness and venality of the central characters proves as stifling as the incessant Queens summer heat does to our dubious protagonists.
  24. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: M. E. Russell
    50
    The story of Dito escaping and then facing his demons is meaningful. But that story is so buried in actorly noise that it feels false.
  25. Salon.com
    Reviewed by: Andrew O'Hehir
    50
    I suspect this guy can make a good movie if he learns the right lessons; he's made about half of one here. But the praise heaped upon A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is way too much, way too soon.

User Reviews

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User Score
7.0 out of 10

Generally favorable reviews- based on 30 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 10 out of 13
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 13
  3. Negative: 2 out of 13
  1. Marco
    10
    Unbelievably beauty, strange poetics, daring choices of voices filtering over scenes and a story that is hard to follow, but draws you in enough to blow your mind away in the end. It seems at time out of balance, but that is the beauty of it. and for some really weird reason, the ending, the compassion, the sincere deeply heartfelt empathy made me even shed a tear.… Full Review »
  2. StevePulaski
    8
    Dito Montiel's A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints takes the style and approach similar to Robert De Niro's A Bronx Tale and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, which both overshadow this film for their grandscale look on issues and the exploration into certain relationships and how they grow and decimate over time. All three films possess common attributes; all three take place in a part of New York, they are directed by first-timers, they are stories that the men hold close to their hearts, all utilize the storytelling method of narration or breaking the fourth wall in some way, and they focus on a large group of characters all with something to say. Whether it's worth hearing or not is up to you.

    A Bronx Tale effected me in a way that totally came out of left field. By delivering its brutal honesty with cold, authentic realism was audacious and showcasing three exquisite talents (one of them, Chazz Palminteri, present here), it delivered a coming of age drama, deeper and more reliant on values than any one I've previously seen. Do the Right Thing was a crisp, lively drama relying on racial tensions and impending chaos that would ensue from enduring a brutally hot day in Brooklyn. Spike Lee brilliantly concocted tension through character development and human conversation, and almost implying, throughout the course of the entire film, that no character did "the right thing." But whatever your definition of the right thing was, you could disagree with me.

    Montiel is more interested with telling his story more than tacking on a fancy moral or showing any deep, subversive element in particular, which is perfectly fine with me. His close-to-home story is buoyant on its own, relying on strong performances from charismatic leads and is elevated by bright, humid, and mercilessly seamy cinematography. Montiel himself is our protagonist, played in his later years by Robert Downey Jr., a successful writer, yet absent family-man, Dito's mother calls him one day, twenty years after leaving behind his home in Queens, to return home to convince his father (Chazz Palminteri) to go to the hospital after falling gravely ill. Upon returning home, he sees Queens isn't much different, still crime-infested and relatively unprotected from the destructive youth and the passive adults, but notices that his longtime friends' ambitions of being lawless and as juvenile as possible have surged into adulthood.

    This story is spliced with flashbacks from 1986, the year when Dito (Shia LeBeouf) abandoned everything he erected in Queens, when Dito was only concerned about hanging with his friends Antonio (Channing Tatum), Laurie (Melonie Diaz), and Mike (Martin Compston), causing trouble and wreaking havoc. The film casually follows the youth's events and run-ins with relationships, sexual encounters, conversations, and troubled instances, and often showing their home-lifes as the least of their concerns.

    Palminteri gives a wonderful performance here, confidently lax, yet remarkably genuine and subdued, often providing his son Dito with father-like guidance that often gets ignored when the going gets tough. When Dito is seen in present time, he is unforgiven by his father who views his move to leave home not noble and commendable, like some would, but rather shameful and deviant. He views his son's return home as no more than a cop out move, somewhat more shameful than him leaving. His offer to make amends feels forced and trite and he ain't buying it.

    A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints consistently maintains a gritty atmosphere and always feels alive and raw, even when it's at its calmest times. The performances, mainly from LeBeouf, Tatum, Downey Jr., Palminteri, and Rosario Dawson, who could've benefited from more screentime, use the story's difficult themes of family relations and devotions to their favor, and never does much of this lack genuine feeling, thanks to Mantiel manning the camera and working the pen on this project. To call this film "solid" would be sort of an understatement, yet to call this "groundbreaking" or even "wonderful" would be a bit much. I'll go with "meaningful:" seems to meet them halfway.

    Starring: Robert Downey Jr., Shia LaBeouf, Rosario Dawson, Melonie Diaz, Chazz Palminteri, Martin Compston, Eric Roberts, Channing Tatum, Dianne Wiest. Directed by: Dito Montiel.    … Full Review »
  3. LiefS.
    8
    Trying best I can not to be bias, having the movie take place in the place I grew up myself; I have to give the movie an 8. I deducted two points for really little things such as catching a few geographical flaws like the trains going the wrong way and the wrong lines of the trains; this is extremely small but as the movie was so realistic; they should have noticed this and also some scenes just ran for a little too long; the actual movie length was fine but just certain conversations like Downy Jr. in the car with his friend could have been cut shorter.… Full Review »
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