Kids [DVD] [1996]

Larry Clark's controversial Kids is a film about New York City adolescents walking the AIDS tightrope, but it's also an unblinking look at the dehumanising rituals of growing up. It really doesn't add up to more than the sum of its various shocks--virgin-busting, skinny-dipping, male callousness--overlayed with middle-class disapproval. Clark is hectoring us for cutting kids loose at a terrible time in modern American history, but so are a lot of other people who also offer alternatives and ideas. The film does nothing to push us toward new thoughts, new solutions, new dreams. It is more like a window onto our worst fantasies about what our children are doing out there on the streets. --Tom Keogh, Amazon.com