Critics reviews

While Clark's follow-up to Kids shares both that film's amorality and its raw, hand held 'realism', it mostly and mercifully eschews its duplicitous sociological posturing and, despite a few truly nasty violent scenes, its all too evident desire to shock. It's considerably more appealing than its predecessor, then, and surprisingly compelling.

This purposefully disturbing film, like Kids and Bully, is nihilistic and highlighted by Clark’s singularly gonzo sense of humor... Part kiddie porn, part heist flick, Another Day in Paradise is Clark’s bold, pessimistic, aimless, frequently stunning response to Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy.

Refreshingly... Clark here seems more interested in performances than look or style... With Woods on this sort of form, perhaps all a director needs to do is wind him up and point him in the right direction. But Clark deserves credit for extracting an equally striking performance from Melanie Griffith as Sid.

Another Day in Paradise has a shocking honesty that Larry Clark's previous feature film, the notorious Kids, quite lacks. It's never judgmental or glibly sociological.

If there are no new insights in “Another Day in Paradise,” at least there are old arias powerfully sung. James Woods and Melanie Griffith enjoy the possibilities of their characters–they enjoy the supercharged scenes of speed, fear, fantasy and crime... A movie like this reminds me of what movie stars are for.

Another Day in Paradise isn't perfect -- it tends to meander and ultimately the storyline is skimpier than Kate Moss' wardrobe -- but it is another nail in the coffin of Clark's critics who called his debut cheap exploitation fare (not that there would be anything wrong with that). Junkie flair, yes, but flair nonetheless.

"Another Day in Paradise" doesn't have the necessary expansiveness or the depth of theme to qualify as a great movie or even a near-great movie, but in its trashy, pessimistic way, it's just about perfect.

If "Another Day in Paradise" has none of the cautionary urgency that gave "Kids" its power, it does have a considerably more inviting gloss... Clark's main gift is for living furiously with his characters in the moment... His second, more benign film delivers what his first promised: bad times with a wicked way of looking good.

If, in the end, the film fails to achieve high-critical mass, it nevertheless succeeds as a conventional exercise in storytelling, as the strained theatrics of Clark’s first feature, Kids (1995), are mercifully absent. And Paradise is incredibly beautiful. Clark’s poetic images and spare compositions, which ennoble the subject without glorifying it, rescue his enterprise from the clutches of Hollywood cliché.

More conventional and arguably more satisfying than Clark’s provocative debut, “Kids,” [Another Day in Paradise is an] imperfect but compelling outlaw drama... Where the film does stumble marginally is in some of its climactic violence, which could have been better handled, but its finely pitched tone and generous, nonjudgmental treatment of characters ultimately make it work.