A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints

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.

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.

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.

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

The plot itself might not break much new ground, but the telling, by both cast and crew, makes this a memoir to remember.

A decent enough calling-card picture that swaggers even as it stumbles.

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.

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.

I love the scenes with young people in the middle of a hot New York summer, talking to one another like panthers circling.

...ultimately undone by Montiel's relentlessly ostentatious visual sensibilities...