Film

Angels & Demons

Name: Angels & Demons
Genre: Thriller, Mystery
Released: 2009
Cast: Tom Hanks, Ewan McGregor, Ayelet Zurer, Stellan Skarsgård, Pierfrancesco Favino

Tom Hanks's symbologist races the clock across Rome, decoding Bernini sculptures and church architecture to stop an antimatter bomb from levelling the Vatican mid-conclave. It's globe-trotting, gadget-lit history-as-puzzle cinema — glossy, over-plotted, and entirely uninterested in subtlety. Good for a night when you want momentum and trivia rather than nuance; less good if you want your thriller logic to survive daylight.

TMDb rating

6.7

If you liked this

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National Treasure2004

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

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Hitchcock built this exact machine decades earlier: an ordinary man mistaken for someone dangerous, chased across iconic landmarks by people who want him dead, solving the puzzle just ahead of the audience.

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A lighter, funnier riff on the same decode-ancient-clues-to-find-the-thing engine, with Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum visibly having a great time.

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Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade poster

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Conclave2024no page yet

Set during the exact ritual Angels & Demons fictionalizes — a papal election — this plays the Vatican intrigue completely straight, and it's riveting without a single explosion.

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The Bourne Identity2002

Trade symbols for spycraft: same propulsive momentum, European city-hopping, and a hero always three steps ahead of the people trying to kill him.

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National Treasure: Book of Secrets2007no page yet

More of the same formula if the first one worked for you — bigger stunts, sillier history, the comfort of a franchise fully leaning into its own absurdity.

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The Ninth Gate1999

Same premise stripped of the tourist-brochure gloss: secret societies, coded clues, ancient texts, a race to a ritual deadline. Where Angels & Demons treats the conspiracy as thriller plumbing, this treats it as genuinely dreadful.

Johnny Depp's rare-book dealer chases a satanic manuscript, hunted by a secret society after the same object, decoding hidden symbols in ancient texts along the way — same puzzle-plot, dialed into full occult horror.

But Slower and moodier, and Polanski plays it disturbingly straight — no wisecracks, no relief valve.