City of Angels is an exercise in rapt, soapy quietude — a hymn to sappiness.

| Original Score: C | Sep 7, 2011

Glossy romance as an angel falls for a surgeon.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 22, 2010

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 18, 2008

Strains to achieve the enchantingly sublime, but ends up sinking to the depressingly ridiculous.

| Apr 27, 2007

As a remake it's not as poetic as Wenders' masterpiece Wings of Desire, but it's supremely mounted (by ace lenser John Seale) and contains touching performances from Nicolas Cage and Meg Ryan deviating from their respective screen images.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 1, 2006

Funnier than Wenders' version, and it also succeeds in visualising LA as a magical city while dealing intelligently with the themes of mortality, sacrifice, free will, and the mixed blessings of the human condition.

| Feb 9, 2006

My face had been locked in that goofy, awestruck expression you experience only in Spielberg movies. City of Angels demonstrates the best kind of emotionally manipulative filmmaking.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 18, 2002

A lovely oddity.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 12, 2002

It manages to leave a pleasant afterglow for those in the mood for its kind of loving.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 14, 2001

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 1, 2000

A little too heavy on the melodrama to really succeed as a great love story, this still has good performances from both stars and some heavenly moments.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 1, 2000

The movie has its affecting moments, but the drearily inevitable has come true -- an original and rather haunting poetic conception has been turned into a literal-minded love story.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 1, 2000

The movie has some good issues to raise about choices and destiny and intimacy and the importance of smelling the roses.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 1, 2000

Although City of Angels sometimes dances perilously close to the line between romance and schmaltz, it never crosses it, a nifty maneuver when you consider that the story deals with both love and spirituality, two areas land-mined with cant.

| Jan 1, 2000

Awash in angelic choruses and panoramic scenery, the movie aspires toward a solemnity that Dana Stevens's prosaic psychobabbling screenplay cannot support.

| Original Score: 1.5/5 | Jan 1, 2000

As angel movies go, this is one of the better ones, not least because Meg Ryan is so sunny and persuasive as a heart surgeon who falls in love with an angel.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 1, 2000

An old-fashioned, big-hearted movie.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

The emphasis in City of Angels is more on simple romance than lofty questions of eternity.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 1, 2000