Kill Your Darlings

"Is there anything more dull than watching a writer tapping furiously on a typewriter, even if he’s on amazing drugs? Okay, with the notable exception of all-work-and-no-play-makes-Jack-a-dull-boy of course. Fortunately Kill Your Darlings is about more than the emergence of a literary group that would hold future English 101 classes in raptures. The boys who seeded the Beat Generation broke the rules of their professors, but more interestingly lived on the edge and a brutal crime lurks in its origins."

"Directed with an assured sense of style that pushes against the narrow confines of its admittedly fascinating story."

"Sex, drugs, murder, radical verse and Radcliffe make persuasive bedfellows in Krokidas' live-wire lit-pic."

"Daniel Radcliffe is back in a pair of nerdy specs as Allen Ginsberg in this sincere, heartfelt film about how the gay beat poet found his voice"

"[Director] Krokidas deftly shows how the ambition to write is entangled with other impulses. The emergence of Allen's poetic vocation is almost a subplot in a story about guilt, lust, friendship and murder."

"Though it begins as a murder-mystery, may be best described as an intellectual moral maze, a story perfectly of its time and yet one that still resonates today."

"Doesn’t know what to do with Radcliffe and DeHaan, good as they are; there’s little sense of how they fit into a larger framework, or what bearing, if any, it might have on its more famous subjects’ later output."

"There’s a limber, freewheeling aspect to the storytelling that echoes the rule-breaking literary form of the Beat writers."

"A vibrant, insightful film about writers and writing, featuring Daniel Radcliffe's best post-Potter performance."