Critics reviews

The [film's] tone is relentlessly sordid, the view of these pubescent hedonists so hermetic, that the filmmakers' 'honesty' seems exploitative and sensational. The film may not say anything new, but the way it says it does, in the end, make it some sort of landmark.

The legacy of Kids is an extremely polarising one, with many audiences having formed a nostalgic attachment to the depiction of the urban coming-of-age experience when they first watched it... [The film] exists in that bubble of paranoia, hedonism and existential absurdity.

Unflinching in its quasi-vérité realism, [Kids offers] no thunderous moral reckoning, only observational detachment.

Revisiting Kids for the first time since its summer 1995 release, I felt the same profound unease mixed with queasy admiration for Clark's graphic depictions of adolescent lust and predatory smooth talkers as I did during my initial viewing. My appreciation for Clark's provocative project, however, only grew once I considered the ludicrously sanitized versions of teenage sexuality that have dominated big screens for the past two decades.

What I feel most, watching Kids in 2015, is that it is shallow. I mean this partly as praise. The shallowness is the key to the film's ability to transport us into the world of its characters, as if participating in their refusal to think of consequences, to look beyond the here and now.

[The] bullhorn salesmanship may have been a disservice, for the debut film from then 53-year-old photographer-turned-filmmaker Larry Clark also happened to be a work of art... The plot mechanics, crude but efficient, are of rather less import than the veracity of the blunted, slurred, off-the-cuff dialogue, city locations, and the actors themselves, nonprofessionals all.

Shocking is a somewhat feeble word to describe [Kids]... If you're disillusioned by the usual saccharine-ridden teen dramas from the US, then you'll find this a strong antidote that's worth getting on DVD.

While in one sense [Kids] can be taken as an apocalyptic warning about modern-day latchkey kids there is little doubt that ex-photographer Clark's lingering camerawork frequently suggests something more creepy altogether.

Kids is an emotional sucker punch, a raw, dirty, disturbing piece of cinéma vérité filmmaking that simultaneously hooks and repulses you from its opening scenes... Disturbing, harrowing, visceral, and even sporadically humorous, Kids is one of those rare films that begs the description “a must-see.”

The real-life drama of sex, drugs and violence [is] presented in all its pathetic beauty in a shockingly accomplished cinema verite style... “Kids” attempts to de-romanticize its subjects, yet the more it strips away dramatic conventions, the more we see how compelling and, yes, how attractive its subjects are.

[Kids] sees this culture in such flat, unblinking detail that it feels like a documentary; it knows what it's talking about... Clark's direction is discreet. He makes his points with character and action, not with speeches.

"Kids" is far too serious to be tarred as exploitation, and its extremism is both artful and devastatingly effective. Think of this not as cinema verite but as a new strain of post-apocalyptic science fiction, using hyperbole to magnify a kernel of terrible, undeniable truth.