Metacritic reviews

Cast and crew's investment in the story's tragedy and its ensuing moral debates is evident in every frame, but the film isn't fully successful in generating the same depth of feeling in viewers.

Luxuriantly-lashed Dekker leads the most attractive cast of small-towners this side of "Twin Peaks" but, though the setting is nearly as artificial as Lynch's, the melodrama is played quite straightforwardly here, even as the dialogue frequently borders on parody.

Angels Crest has weaknesses that are tough to overcome. It relies too much on two particularly played-out indie clichés: a spare, plunky soundtrack, and a narrative structure that teases out characters' backstory far longer than necessary.

Although the movie captures the solidarity and the beauty and peril of a rustic mountain town whose residents are necessarily interdependent, its individual subplots don't connect. Despite several solid performances, the characters are too hazily sketched and too loosely linked to form a meaningful chain.

Director Gaby Dellal gets respectable performances all around, especially from Dekker as the hapless, grief-stricken father, but they can't elevate Angels Crest, beyond its one obvious and depressing note: It is very sad when a small child dies.

Another in the procession of dead children movies that followed Atom Egoyan's magisterial "The Sweet Hereafter," helmer Gaby Dellal's sophomore effort unfolds in a similarly snow-blanketed small town filled with grieving adults, the community divided in apportioning blame. In contrast with Egoyan's labyrinthine structure and complex storylines, Crest cobbles together bits of plot and a motley assortment of half-formed characters.

No matter how sensitive the orchestral-string score gets, the film can't locate the bone-deep sense of tragedy of Leslie Schwartz's novel - it just keeps belching out empty, grief-stricken histrionics devoid of insight.

It's the same movie town we've seen many times before, with dingy mechanic's shops, barren parking lots and a greasy-spoon diner where all the clichés come together.

Depressing and airless.

Angels Crest opens with the laughter of children at play, but that's the only hint of happiness you'll find in this unflinchingly manipulative and pointless morality play.