Reseñas de la crítica

The reason [Angel Heart] is a classic, and why it still resonates, is the performances. Robert De Niro is a camp delight as the mysterious satanic patron Louis Cyphre, while Mickey Rourke is extraordinarily sympathetic as the clueless private eye Harry Angel. His tear-stained closing scene, staring in the mirror and crying, “I know who I am!” is one of the greatest.

A cult film in every sense of the word, Angel Heart manages to take many of the well-worn tropes of film noir and imbue them with the concentric horror of Dante’s Inferno. It seemed implausible in 1987, and perhaps even more so now, that such a genre mash-up could be so grimly spellbinding.

Performed by three amazing and dedicated actors, [the film] amounts to a brilliant fragment of late ’80s trash cinema, the horrific, unapologetic cinema of pulp. For great films, 1987 was not exactly the rough, but even among precious stones, Angel Heart is a diamond of the highest order.

A first-person Faustian detective novel presents quite a problem to the screenwriter, and Parker's alterations to William Hjortsberg's Falling Angel slacken the cunning weave of strands.

What drags this film to hell isn’t the mis-mixing of genres, but the insistence on hammer-to-the-anvil suspense buffoonery... It would all be laughable if the evil deeds and premature deaths and withered witch doctor hands led us to more than the protagonist’s unnecessarily messy self-discovery. As it is, it’s mostly just gratingly pointless.

While there is a bit of weakness in certain parts of the story, this film is most important due to its powerful, shocking denouement, a stylistic precursor to The Sixth Sense and Se7en.

An overwrought but memorable noir-horror nonsense... [Angel Heart] looks and feels unwell... [Parker, in adapting William Hjortsberg's novel,] was, obviously, more tickled by the visual opportunities than any great strengths of the story. Yet, he has cast well.

[Angel Heart's is] not the universal, you-are-there, clutching terror of “Blue Velvet,” which somehow bypassed the brain and went straight to the soul, but a precisely manufactured sense of doom that escalates as its intricate story unwinds... What keeps us glued to the screen is Parker’s voluptuous visual sense. In its more overwrought manifestations, this style has overpowered some of his past films, but it has certainly found its match here.

[Angel Heart] has the unsettled logic of a nightmare, in which nothing fits and everything seems inevitable and there are a lot of arrows in the air and they are all flying straight at you... This is one of those movies where you leave the theater and re-run the plot in your head, re-intrepreting the early scenes in terms of the final shocking revelations. "Angel Heart" is a thriller and a horror movie, but most of all it's an exuberant exercise in style, in which Parker and his actors have fun taking it to the limit.