A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints: Critic Reviews

The gods of cool appear to have kissed Dito Montiel's fingertips.

Dito Montiel's autobiographical tale is so full of life and feeling that the screen can hardly contain it.

Over-indulgent but often interesting and ambitious in its attempt to recreate the free-wheeling, jazz-improvisational feel of classic independent 70s cinema.

Pulses with the honesty and spontaneity of early films by Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee.

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.

Blessed enough to have drawn Gautier and Downey away from better-paying gigs, the kid hasn't likely failed to recognize his saints.

'Stick to the book' isn't always the best advice for a screenwriter adapting a best- seller, but when it's his own memoir, it would lend a more certain authenticity.

Though A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is not a great movie, I prefer its street-grit version of adolescent desperation to the arch, mannered tone of Running With Scissors.

Montiel's debut packs a visceral punch that most coming-of-age tales do not.

The memoirist turned screenwriter turned director has hit it out of the park with his first feature, crafting an unflinching, often brutal retrospective of his formative years in Astoria, Queens.

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.

The fractured narrative, with its era shifts, its talking-head soliloquies, and screenplay-style subtitles, gives an edgy, artsy pulse to what is essentially a well-honed exercise in nostalgia.

Montiel brings enough of his own emotional confusion and life experience to the party to make the cuts feel real, to make one more tale of mistakes and mangled youth worth following.

Like an O'Neill play, its virtues are not in well-constructed ideas but in the emotional catharses it wrings out of its audience.

The effect is one of a fabulous acting showcase more than a wholly finished work.

This is a gifted director who actually has something to say and knows how to say it. We'll be hearing from him again.

It takes a while to recognize these saints, but the effort is worth it.

The movie never answers the question of why, exactly, the audience should care about these characters.

The praise heaped upon A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is way too much, way too soon.

Saints is so personal and site-specific a work that it's hard to imagine what Dito Montiel will pull out of his hat for an encore. But even if this is the only movie he has in him, the Queens kid hasn't done so badly for himself after all.

A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints illustrates that it's still possible to do something interesting with a familiar premise.

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.

Guide is rich in nostalgia but it goes nowhere.

There's a quality of daring in Montiel's approach, trusting that the intensity of his feeling for his characters can become contagious.

Dito Montiel adapts his autobiographical 2001 novel into a vivid slice-of-life drama from the Jim Carroll school of disaffected coming-of-age New York journalism.