"I Want To Remember Who These People Are And What They Meant To Me, What They Mean To Me. They're Real."

So I am about five minutes into A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints and I had to stop the movie. I started to search for reviews because I had only briefly heard of it. I found this from MiraJeff at Ain’t It Cool:

Greetings AICN, MiraJeff here with A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints, the impressive feature debut from writer-director Dito Montiel who gives his own memoir the big screen treatment. The film won Montiel the Best Director award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and as far as I’m concerned Sundance knows what it’s doing when anointing the next director to watch. Remember the previous year’s winner was Jeff Feurzeig who crafted the superb documentary The Devil and Daniel Johnston, which joins AGTRYS as one of the top ten films released so far this year.

So the lights went down, the screen lit up, and the camera slowly focused on Dianne Wiest, making an emotional phone call to her adult son, pleading with him to come home and take his stubborn father, Monty (Chazz Palmintieri), to the hospital. I swear to God, right then and there, I turned to my roommate and said “I am going to love this movie.” It literally took 30 seconds to hit me, 30 seconds to leave its mark on me forever. Honestly, it was the same knowing feeling I felt when I walked out of Crash last April.

I TOTALLY AGREE - something about Dianne Wiest and something even more about Robert Downey Jr. in the first five minutes of this movie just hits you.