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| Released: |
1995 |
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| Genre: |
DRAMA
RITES-OF-PASSAGE
CONTROVERSIAL
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| Origin: |
US |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
90 |
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PRO Reviews
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| | | "I think when you see Kids that most of us - not all of us, but most of us - will say "Yeah, that's the way we were, that's the way kids are"." | | (Larry Clark) | | | "A great film. It should be seen by anyone practicing unsafe sex." | | (Madonna) | | | "A brilliant depiction of kids adrift without parental involvement." | | (Gene Siskel) | | | "A wake-up call to the world." | | (Janet Maslin, New York Times) | | | "A profoundly important and utterly compelling masterpiece." | | (Film Comment) | | | "The most IMPORTANT film to watch this year." | | (Dazed & Confused) | | | "It feels like a documentary; it knows what it's talking about... The film is intended as a wake-up call, and for some kids it may be a lifesaver... Sure, it has a "message," involving safe sex. But safe sex is not going to civilize these kids, make them into curious, capable citizens. What you realize, thinking about Telly, is that life has given him nothing that interests him, except for sex, drugs and skateboards. His life is a kind of hell, briefly interrupted by orgasms. Most kids are not like the kids in Kids , and never will be, I hope. But some are, and they represent a failure of home, school, church and society. They could have been raised in a zoo, educated only to the base instincts. You watch this movie, and you realize why everybody needs whatever mixture of art, education, religion, philosophy, politics and poetry works for them: Because without something to open our windows to the higher possibilities of life, we might all be Tellys." | | (Roger Ebert) | | | "The camera rests on the faces of Kids ' "real" teens, probing, revealing, betraying all that is beautiful, ugly. attractive, repulsive, alluring, and repugnant. That the gaze is adult, that it is male, that it is often unmistakably erotic/homoerotic makes it all the more disturbing. Despite the fact that many of the girls are more conventionally attractive, the camera remains fascinated by the boys and their homosocial bonding... Clark also subverts Hollywood melodrama by playing with one of its classic devices, the crosscutting of two narrative strands destined to meet in climax and resolution. Two narratives are indeed crosscut in Kids : Jennie attempts to find Telly after she learns that he has infected her with the AIDS virus and Telly heads towards the seduction of another virgin, Darcy (Yakira Peguero). We expect these two strands to intersect at a moment of ‘truth,’ providing us with a dramatic payoff; we wonder if Jennie will ‘save’ Darcy. But that's not what she's trying to do. The fact is, she doesn't know what to do. In a direct attack on the simplistic morality of melodrama, Clark uses his pseudo-documentary style to hollow out the audience's expectations." | | (Jesse Engdahl & Jim Hosney, Film Quarterly) | | | "Kids achieves a rare intensity of focus. Weaving frenetically through crowded locales, the mostly hand-held camera brings both vigor and dexterity to the film's turbulent encounters. The combination of speed, tight framing and dense compositions sucks up the viewer's gaze like a vacuum hose, riveting the eyes to the screen. Strong meat provokes strong reactions. Sure to upset the extreme right for its douche-bag dialogue, everyone else for its unprotected sex and its misogynist viewpoint, Kids is nevertheless a sobering must-see - not only for teenagers and their beleaguered parents but for other mortals as well." | | (Liza Bear, Art in America) | | | "Let prudes reel in dismay from exposure to Kids . They will, however, be missing the point... Should kids see an unpleasant picture that shapes up as a potent argument for condom use? Why not? Clark hammers home a deadly serious response to meaningless pleas for abstinence. Here is a movie that is as moralistic as Reefer Madness , that idiotic 1936 tale about the perils of marijuana. But the memorable Kids isn't kidding, and may also be a milestone." | | (Bruce Williamson, Playboy) | | | "For the most part, portrayals of teen culture have been carefully sanitized, skirting around the tough issues of crime, drug use and sexuality - or at best moralizing on the subjects. But in his controversial film debut, American director Larry Clark makes up for lost time. A gritty portrayal of randy delinquents in New York City, Kids pulls the rug out from under white-bread notions of what makes some teens tick - and exposes a world that is at once fascinating and deeply disturbing... Shot in a verite style that gives it the look of a documentary, Kids is not an easy film to watch. From start to finish, it is shockingly bleak - yet oddly compelling. Director Clark, who extracts truly amazing performances from his cast of nonprofessionals, has chosen to let his richly textured slice of life unfold in a matter-of-fact way, ultimately leaving it up to the viewer, as voyeur, to pass judgment." | | (Scott Steele, Maclean's) | | | "Such a sunny title for the darkest tale of teenage terror ever shot by an American moviemaker. With the ravenous eye of a naturalborn voyeur, fifty-two-year-old, first-time director Larry Clark zooms in on a band of amoral postpubescents as they skateboard, booze, drug, fornicate, and spread AIDS across the cluttered New York landscape... How comforting it would be to dismiss this study of adolescent pain and depravity as an artistic aberration, the product of an overheated imagination. But the naked light shone by Clark is too powerful to ignore. The army of missionless, souldead youths who parade through this harrowing masterpiece are familiar to us. In the numbed-out nineties, these are the Kids next door." | | (Guy Flatley, Cosmopolitan) | | | "Its real subject is the annihilation of empathy in American life... The adolescents in this movie think about sex as much as teenagers always have. The difference is that they scarcely bother to think about anything else... If Kids is simultaneously engrossing and detached, observant and just plain showy, that may be because the film is so caught up in trying to be a statement that it never develops its characters beyond their rowdy, bellicose facades. This, of course, is supposed to be the point: As individuals, these kids are sealed off from one another. Sex isn't just their favorite action - it's their only interaction." | | (Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly) | | |
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