Angel Heart

11/5/2023

"Harry Angel" (Mickey O'Rourke) lives a pretty hand-to-mouth existence as a New York PI when he is hired to track down a musician named "Johnny Favorite". Now this fella really doesn't want to be found, and after a while our street-smart investigator begins to contemplate that maybe this search isn't really all that his employer "Louis Cyphre" (a Rasputin-esque Robert De Niro) has in mind. As the search becomes more intricate, "Angel" finds himself having doors slammed in his face, or even worse before he is immersed in a world of voodoo in a distinctly unwelcoming New Orleans. Corpses are starting to pile up and "Angel" is starting to get cold feet. Can he stay the course and discover the whereabouts of his quarry? Can he also discover quite why the enigmatic "Cyphre" wanted him on the ca

8/25/2026

*Angel Heart* spends most of its running time pretending to be a detective story in which Harry Angel is following a trail into somebody else’s darkness. Its best trick is that the trail is his. Alan Parker shoots that investigation like a noir already half swallowed by something older. Rooms are all long shadows and backlight; New Orleans sometimes looks almost monochrome, until a little blue exhaust smoke gives the game away. The jazz and blues soundtrack keeps things grounded in gumshoe territory while religion, ritual, pentagrams, tarot and voodoo keep leaking in around the edges. Even Robert De Niro’s Louis Cyphre barely needs to do anything more threatening than peel an egg and maintain an increasingly magnificent set of fingernails. What makes the film particularly interesting