I have experience with Angular and Backbone. Backbone will definitely give you more control, but you have to make more choices. Angular is definitely generating more buzz, but Backbone has a sizable community too, and is more mature and battle-tested. That's a big deal in the Javascript framework space, where the scenery can change drastically month to month. If you're doing something small, or you have a little extra time, it's worth getting familiar with React, Angular, and Ember too. TodoMVC is a nice way to get a sneak peak at the various idioms of each framework without investing a huge amount of time.