The movie is a delicate creation, with no big punch line or payoff. Watching it, I was in the moment: It was about these people wandering lost through their lives. Afterward, I felt good about them – good because they were likable people, but good, too, because the writer and director took care to give them dialogue that suited their needs. Of all the handicaps in life, the worst must be the inability to express how you feel.

Roger Ebert’s review -> https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/smoke-1995

The very last shot in “Boys on the Side” is of an empty room. As the camera pans around it, we remember who was in it, and how much we grew to care about them. We may be a little surprised by how that happened, because the movie starts out seeming contrived and routine, and only gradually gathers power until, by the end, it is completely involving.

Ebert’s review of Boys on the Side -> https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/boys-on-the-side-1995

Larry Clark’s “Kids” is a movie about their world. It follows a group of teenage boys and girls through one day and night during which they travel Manhattan on skateboards and subway trains, have sex, drink, use drugs, talk, party, and crash in a familiar stupor, before starting all over again the next day. The movie sees this culture in such flat, unblinking detail that it feels like a documentary; it knows what it’s talking about.

Roger Ebert’s Kids review -> https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/kids-1995