Kidskycom It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

Brainsbell The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

Roman Sampson One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Haven Kaycee It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

Film-Slave I was an unlucky kid and grew up in the 1960s in a small town where several boys fell prey to a pedophile.This film shows how easy it is for pedophiles to pick up naïve boys. I think this film should be shown to every school-age boy as self-defense training.One member of NAMBLA casually mentions how easy it is to pick up boys and the camera follows him into a mall where he leads boys out to the parking lot, aborting his plans just as the boys are about to climb into his van. Chilling!In 1994 I attended a Queer Symposium held during Gay Games in New York. The rules for the crowd were that anyone who identified as "queer" was invited to participate. When representatives from NAMBLA arrived, organizers of the symposium had to quiet the crowd from the stage and moderate the heated audience Q&A.When I went to see this film, I noticed that most of the sparse audience was sunk down in their chairs, wearing hats; it was easy to spot who was there out of morbid curiosity and who came out of livid interest."Chicken Hawk" is aptly titled and wickedly unabashed. Child molesters and pedophiles are complex in their desires, and if one can get past the initial repulsion, these are just men who have justified their aberrant behavior. They don't question it, they embrace it and have found a support system. That is scary.

jim-burton Superficially at least, this film is as value-neutral a portrayal of its subject matter - homosexual ephebophile men who divert their interests into political lobbying, as you are going to get. Absent are the imposing, moralising commentary, off-target references to pedophiles and highly biased samples present in most treatments of pederasty. The producers present as interested parties who are willing to absorb a range of viewpoints without forcing any clear agenda, be it of the right-religious or femino-victimological persuasion. What we discover is a group of political outcasts who are now seen as increasingly out of favour, even among a gay movement that originally had written into its stonewall declaration - the abolition of all age of consent laws. As an organisation, NAMbLA is a political hot-potato, a historical and cultural curiosity and a whole load of baggage, already well past its effective lifespan when the film was made.Nevertheless, the documentary fails to go beyond interviewing those-who-shout-the-loudest in a way that - as already pointed out, involves somewhat editorially suspect subtleties. The use of music to infer emotional states, the exclusion of all but two or so contrarian anecdotes of man-boy sex (the bread and butter of most literature on gay youth and older men) and the bizarre over-focus on Leland Stevenson and his suicidally contrived romanticising of anal sex and intergenerational "flirtation" all pay testimony to that. Understandably, most organisations as severely ostracised and fringe in nature as NAMbLA attract their fair share of loose-screws. Maybe this was why "Chicken Hawk" left at least one battle-scarred queer and long-time mentor of gay-youth with a strong impression that the whole story had not quite been told. A closer focus on the group's more pragmatic members would have been at least a small improvement to a documentary that even left one reviewer under the illusion that - as demonstrated by the comments here on IMDb, a decidedly milquetoast teenboy-lover such as Renato was out "molesting" the local game.Nevertheless, don't let these rather personal complaints distract you from viewing this fascinating portrayal of politics and pederasty in the modern world - available, as I write, on YouTube.com. Things have moved on considerably since "Chicken Hawk" was shot, but the sheer rarity of the information on show makes it a must-watch for all appreciators of sexual politics and philosophy.

As_Cold_As_Ice This is a really strange documentary that is literally about men who love boys, one of their major groups in NAMBLA, and it gives the men a chance to explain their side of the issue somewhat.This movie is in no way, shape or form anything other then neutral. We get experiences and defenses from the boy lovers, people who were molested by men as youngsters, psychologists, and members of the gay and lesbian community. If anything, the boy lovers get the most screen time, which allows them to convey their feelings, and also to show what disturbing people they are.Three scenes stand out; the first was one of the boy lovers talking with a young boy outside a shop, his eyes studying him, checking to see if he had a chance to bed him. The next was NAMBLA trying to march in a gay/lesbian parade, with other marchers telling them to get lost, and the last was of a boy lover receiving obscene messages on his phone, and a congregation of people outside his apartment shouting anti-NAMBLA slogans. The last scene mentioned almost makes you feel a little sorry for him, except on his walls are hand-painted pictures of boys with long penises, and the fact that he screws boys.Overall, I thought this was a well done documentary, who showed us for the first time what kind of filth these people are.8/10

utahfilmmaker This movie will unfortunately never get the attention it deserves due to the unsettling subject matter, and the potential confusion some people may have between portraying child molesters and supporting them. This movie portrays several of the members of a group called NAMBLA, whose members promote child molestation as a viable and healthy activity and as even go so far as to claim that it is beneficial to the molested children. It resists the temptation to condemn them, and instead gives them enough rope to hang themselves, which they do. I say this movie is an absolute for any aspiring documentarian because it's very educational on the issue of objectivity. Although there is no voice-over condemning the pedophiles, the audience will leave with the message that these people are perverts and predators. Why? Simply because they *are* perverts and predators, and any objective portrayal of the subject cannot avoid making that clear. It seems almost as if the filmmakers go out on a limb to "show both sides" (witness the negative behavior of the KKK-like anti-nambla group that the filmmakers show), the pedophiles still end up the bad guys of the film, simply because they are the bad guys in real life and any footage of them shows it (I won't list a spoiler, but look at the last shot in the film for a great example of this). This is also an excellent psychological study of how some people, pedophiles in particular, will lie to themselves in order to remain happy. For example, see how the character Leland constantly talks about how it's the children who really go out of their way to "seduce" him, but then when we actually see footage of him interacting with a child outside a store, it becomes clear that he is the predator in the situation and that the child wants to leave, but in the interview after that scene, Leland STILL describes it in terms of the child "flirting" with him. The film makes clear that these people can only live with themselves by constructing an elaborate fantasy world.