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90The endlessly resourceful Nicolas Cage, as a celestial angel, and a terrifically engaging Meg Ryan, as a pragmatic surgeon, create such blissful chemistry that they elevate the drama to a poetic level seldom reached in a mainstream movie.
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80A stand-out romantic fantasy and surefire hit of Ghost-ly proportions. But all you cynical and smart-arsed brethren, beware: this is definitely not for you.
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80Though far from a seamless work, the film is gorgeously crafted, and Silberling obviously has a passion for angels. But then these days, who doesn't?
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75What I did appreciate is that City of Angels is one of the few angel movies that knows one essential fact about angels: They are not former people. ”Angels aren't human. We were never human,” observes Seth. This is quite true. Angels are purely spiritual beings.
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75An odd hybrid but a successful one. It marries the lyricism and heavy atmosphere of a European art film with the soaring spirit of a Hollywood love story.
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75I suspect City of Angels is going to remind many viewers of “Ghost,” but there's a big difference: this film is more true and less manipulative.
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75A lovely oddity.
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70Neither Ryan nor Cage indulges in their usual excesses -- hers a perky, chipmunk vivacity and his a rampant goofiness that's always struck me as disingenuous…doesn't try too hard, doesn't lean on or overexplain its spiritual underpinnings and doesn't push for tears. As a result, it turns out to be pretty effective in drawing them.
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70A fascinating hybrid. A Hollywood fantasy at its most fantastic, the film is equal parts true innocence and shameless calculation. Deciding whether the glass is half empty or half full depends on which part you are willing to embrace.
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70Only near the end does the mix of melodrama, mush and message get out of hand.
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60For all the "touched by an angel" sentimentality, the movie's eerie, slightly menacing vision of black-clad angels lurking in the shadowy corners of unsuspecting lives is genuinely haunting.
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50Many will welcome the movie's interest in spirituality, but some may wonder why it's couched in a celebration of sensual pleasures ranging from sex to cigarette smoking.
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50City of Angels will probably work better for some people than it did for a crusty fellow like me. I feel guilty that I don't like this movie more. I think the devil got the better of me.
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50This is the sort of movie in which everyone on screen is swathed in gauzy benevolence. You practically have time to say a prayer in the dead spaces between lines.
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The movie is physically beautiful, but the ideas are kitsch -- it’s a New Age love story, the latest version of the doomed romances of 50 years ago.
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50At least Dennis Franz, as a former angel, livens up his scenes, and Ryan is less intolerable than usual. Meanwhile, the always-interesting Cage does a good job pretending he's in a better movie. But he's not.
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50One of this movie's implications--and it's a common enough one these days--is that sensitivity is a quality impossible to find in straight guys. [20 April 1998]
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Angels, according to this movie's nonexistent logic, travel at the speed of thought and are invisible except to other angels, children, and the dying.
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40Even if you accept this plot contrivance, the consummation of this union of souls isn't very emotionally involving -- it lacks that transcendence you associate with stories in which love knows no bounds.
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40The movie aspires toward a solemnity that Dana Stevens's prosaic psychobabbling screenplay cannot support. The movie is so busy being seriously romantic that it forgets the poetry, the whimsy, the airy mystery, the dreamy what-if of angelic contemplation.
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40If you've never seen the lovely Wenders film, maybe you'll be charmed by this low-grade variation, all of whose best qualities--such as the airy crane shots poised over city vistas and freeways--can be traced back to the original; otherwise you might run screaming from the theater.
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30Needless to say, in the age of inferior remakes, this would-be homage -- a sort of Wim Wenders Lite -- is a mawkish debasement of its source material.
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