A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
Dito Montiel, a successful author, receives a call from his long-suffering mother, asking him to return home and visit his ailing father. There he finds redemption by facing the 'saints' who have influenced his life.
4 December 1965, Jersey City, New Jersey, USA
26 April 1980, Cullman, Alabama, USA
24 September 1934
9 May 1979, New York City, New York, USA
4 April 1965, Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA
23 March 1982, Brooklyn, Kings County, New York, USA
18 April 1956, Biloxi, Mississippi, USA
15 February 1956, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
11 August 1983, Brooklyn, New York, USA
28 January 1967, USA
29 April 1964, Naples, Campania, Italy
21 April 1940, New Haven, Connecticut, USA
14 August 1971, Missoula, Montana, USA
7 July 1978, Pennsylvania, USA
28 March 1948, Kansas City, Missouri, USA
11 June 1986, Los Angeles, California, USA
15 February 1984
10 April 1963, New York City, New York, USA
February 28, 2008
It is its very autobiographical roots that make Saints an emotional wallop, a raw, authentic work that is, at its defiant core, violently and unrestrainedly alive.
February 28, 2007
The plot itself might not break much new ground, but the telling, by both cast and crew, makes this a memoir to remember.
October 26, 2006
Like an O'Neill play, its virtues are not in well-constructed ideas but in the emotional catharses it wrings out of its audience.
February 27, 2008
Superb performances and a gripping retrospective plotline make this tough cookie an entertaining one, even if its adult story strand is weighed down with vagaries.
November 07, 2012
Montiel's honey coated Queens of the mid-'80s is rich with the violence and carnality of teenagers, and the performances of LaBeouf (as the young Dito) and Channing Tatum (as his Stanley Kowalski-like grunt friend, Antonio) are raw pleasures.
February 27, 2008
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.
November 17, 2006
It takes a while to recognize these saints, but the effort is worth it.
April 24, 2009
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.
July 31, 2007
It positively crackles with energy, featuring startlingly raw performances from a cast that also includes Shia LaBeouf as the young Dito. And if it looks ragged around the edges, that's as it should be.
October 27, 2006
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.
September 06, 2007
I love the scenes with young people in the middle of a hot New York summer, talking to one another like panthers circling.
November 17, 2006
The movie never answers the question of why, exactly, the audience should care about these characters.
