VividSimon Simply Perfect

Lucybespro It is a performances centric movie

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

SpunkySelfTwitter It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

Filipe Neto This is one of those movies that I can only understand and evaluate after researching about it. It all begins when Allen Ginsberg joins the prestigious and ultra-conservative Columbia University during World War II. There, he will meet a group of unconventional friends, with pleasure in breaking rules and confronting authorities. From this embryo, as I came to discover, would be born the "Beat Generation" (I had never even heard of it before watching). The script, however, seems indecisive. I've never been able to figure out whether the movie is about the "Beat Generation" or simply about Allen Ginsberg, the way he met his friends and the homicide related to them. This indefinition made the film tedious, with many dead moments that would have been cut off if there was some certainty on the subject. John Krokidas was unable to direct the film toward a clear and definite goal. He just went shooting.Another problem of this film are the characters. Everything revolves around Ginsberg, the only truly well-built character. All the others are sketches and drafts, and the way the actors worked did not help mitigate that. Dane DeHaan is a stranger to me, has managed to show psychological depth and showed some talent, but his character is too iconoclastic and unpleasant for me to care about it and the same can be said of all other characters and actors. Daniel Radcliffe, who was left with the main role, has a lot of talent and is the best actor here, but his character is quite unpleasant. Another problem here was the feeling that the film makes a kind of apology to homosexuality, something that I definitely don't approve. I know the mainstream thinking of our society tends to accept it as a different form of love, but I have the right to disagree and think otherwise without anyone being able to criticize me for it. We shouldn't live in mental dictatorships, in which mainstream dictates thoughts and opinions that we all must accept. Unfortunately, this happens and these apologies end up appearing very much like subliminal fascist or communist propaganda, used by authoritarian regimes that most people condemn. To what extent, using the cover of our democracy and mass media, does society force us to accept opinions or keep quiet if we disagree with them? It's a rhetorical question, but pertinent.By way of conclusion, I say that I expected something else from this film. A more focused, goal-oriented script would have been more interesting. A more neutral and natural approach to the characters' sexuality would have removed the apologetic and propagandistic burden I've mentioned. More elaborate characters, capable of building empathy with public, would have resulted in greater public involvement and increased our interest in what's happening. It's a boring, tiring movie that only those who enjoy counterculture or the Beat movement will appreciate. About the crime the film portrays, I was left with the feeling that it is a mere detail of the plot.

soerenbruns The overall solid, but ultimately mediocre "Kill Your Darlings" reveals its key problem at the very beginning. We see a dead body held by a character suggesting that some sort of murder will play a central role in the film. Hence, we will end up watching a crime drama. The problem is that the moment the story turns in that direction, the film loses its focus. But first we are introduced to the very young Allen Ginsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) who enrols in college where he meets the very young Lucien Carr (Dane DeHaan), William Burroughs (Ben Foster) and eventually Jack Kerouac (Jack Huston). The first half of the film revolves around their frustrations with the conventions of poetry and literature they are taught at Columbia. The professors insist on strict rules one has to apply so that "creation equals imitation" . They are disgusted by the fetishisation of rhyme and metre. Inspired by poets as Yates and Whitman, they decide to write a manifesto propagating free expression of the self without any boundaries as writing's highest virtue, resulting in acts of disobedience like replacing several "high works" in the library for example the original version of Beowulf with works of personal role models like Melville. For that part of the film, "Kill Your Darlings" is a fairly engaging if all too standard period piece that checks every box with vivid jazz music, smoking in bars,emphasis on old-fashion dressing styles and technology as record players and scratchy radio sound while it is at the same time a depiction of a group of idealistic artists with the expected scenes of alcohol and drug abuse, hectic writing on a typewriter and the rebellion against authority figures like the professors. This is fine, even though one cannot help but feel that a depiction of these artists in their prime would maybe make the more interesting film. But if we perceive them as the literary Avengers, than this has to be considered their origin story. As already mentioned, the turning point where the film really loses momentum is marked by the murder of David Kammerer (David C. Hall) a dubious mentor-like figure for Lucien Carr. Here the standard period piece with interesting central characters becomes an even more standard crime story/court drama, where the characters' appeal dissolves in the genre's basic themes of rage, revenge and guilt. From that point on, it does not really matter that we are dealing with literary geniuses. Sure, this story is part of their life. But if you decide to make a movie about Allan Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, do you really need to focus on a gloomy murder story that we have seen so many times before with the only difference being that these characters incidentally have changed the literary landscape of the second half of the twentieth century? For what it's worth, you could place those characters in a bar having them smoking, drinking and discussing art for two hours and you could end up with an engaging piece of film that truly explores the workings of these characters' minds. It definitely would be more ingenious than what we witness here. Many have pointed out the film's central contradiction of depicting people that think in a very unconventional manner with quite conventional means. At least, the actors try their best to bring the artists' unique approach not only to literature but to life in general to the screen. Daniel Radcliffe does a good job at playing the very introvert Ginsberg at the start of his studies who eventually breaks more and more out of his shell and seems to experience what it means to be alive for the first time. It is unfortunate that Ginsberg had a thing for those round spectacles which are quite iconic but also unmistakably reminiscent of a certain young wizard. All the more surprising then, how strikingly Radcliffe shakes this notion off and manages to portray Ginsberg in a convincing manner. The same is true for the central performances of DeHaan, Foster and Huston who individually bring the antics of their quite eccentric characters to life without overdoing it (especially Foster balances on a tightrope here) and collectively have a vivid chemistry between them. They are surrounded by a decent supporting cast with David Cross, the always welcome Elizabeth Olsen and a small but noticeable part by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Given that everything about this movie is fairly run-of-the-mill, the at times odd choice of music seems like a slightly desperate attempt to appear unorthodox. Apart from the aforementioned use of Jazz as a time marker we hear some anachronistic pieces of post-punk that kind of fit the scenery, but also one song in particular that completely kills the mood which is the (normally delightful) "Don't Look Back Into the Sun" by the Libertines. It plays over the end credits. Soundaestethically it completely counters everything we have just seen and heard before, which is somewhat reminiscent of the infamous "Goodfellas" end credits which I also have never been a big fan of, but whose moment of surprise I can acknowledge. This is just trying too hard. Where "Marie Antoinette" fails to follow up the snotty "Natural's Not in It" of the opening credits, "Kill Your Darlings" ends on a very rousing note while both movies deliver a very tame rendition of their real characters' astonishing lives. In both cases the choice of music may reveal that the films are not even closely as courageous and offbeat as they think they are. Just as the title is not nearly as clever as it thinks it is. I mean, come on. Really?Incidentally the fact that it does carry a double meaning - since an actual murder is part of the story - is the first hint at why this movie cannot live up to the expectations a film about the Beat poets evokes in the first place.

Sarah Kenny I can't begin to answer this question. Kill Your Darlings is somewhat a coming-of-age film about Alan, a wannabe poet, entering the world of university and encountering a dark-humoured, romantic boy-with-a-past, Lucien. This part is pretty predictable, and what comes immediately after is also somewhat to the book. However, KYD will most likely touch you in some deep place if, like me, you enjoy black comedy, rebellion, and wannabe revolutionaries. There is everything to enjoy about this movie, and, what's more, it's based on a true story, so the story doesn't end once the credits start rolling. Don't you just love a film where you can do a little research? I do! Cinematography is wonderful, dialogue is beautiful, and Dane DeHaan is fantastic as always. I was close to giving it ten stars, but since I've literally just finished watching it, I thought I'd let my starry-eyed-ness die down a little before reaching a concrete verdict. Eight stars it is.

Alex Deleon image2.jpegViewed at Jameson Cinefest in Miskolc Hungary, September 2013, a modest festival in a secondary city that has now become the most important film festival in the country and growing steadily with unusual heads up programming. KYD, the debut feature by 29 year old director John Krokidas, is a dope fueled coming of age story of soon-to-be literary celebrities before they became notoriously well known which then turns into a more than routine crime thriller. The murder of a homosexual older man in 1944 draws together the great poets of the beat generation: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs during their college campus years at Columbia. With Dan Radcliffe as Ginsberg, Dane DeHaan as Lucien Carr, and English actor Jack Huston as Jack Kerouac, and a cameo by Jennifer Jason Leigh (49) as Ginsberg's mentally ill Jewish mother. The ingredients for a fascinating film are all there but "Kill your Darlings" Is the kind of dismemorable title that can kill a picture before it starts. The packed auditorium where I saw it indicated a strong advance curiosity quotient reflecting the high level of literary awareness of Hungarian filmgoers, but it left me cold. While these were the literary icons of my own college days (I even met Ginsberg in person several times) and this is a period of high personal interest for me, I felt no sense of authenticity or real resonance with Theophrastus L WW II period. Above all the central Ginsberg portrayal was way off in my view and not at all true to life -- true, perhaps, to current screen life since the main actor, Daniel Radcliffe, (as Ginsberg) is an international celebrity because of his lead roles in the Harry Potter films,but painfully miscast hero. A little too canny for its own good this respectable first effort will only get a limited release because it is far more neo-intellectual than mainstream, and will probably disappear from view quickly. For the record the story deals with Ginsberg's short stay at Columbia University in 1944 where he meets his first important gay lover, the oh-so-hip Lucien Carr. Carr introduces him to his buddies future Beat Generation celebrities Jack Kerouac and William Boroughs, neither very believably portrayed, and then accidentally kills one of his other lovers, the middle aged David Kammerer, while trying to ward off undesired sexual advances. (Sample dialog: Carr: "I was a kid, and you dragged me into your perverted mess. Kammerer: "How can you say that? You know that's not true. I will never give up on us. Carr: "You're pathetic! ~ and stabs him with a pocket knife) Whike there are some references to the early writing of Ginsberg and Kerouac this picture deals mostly with the involvement of the future literary icons in this little known fait divers, which was briefly big news at the time, but was never referred to in their later writings. Nice try, better luck next time.😜