Kisses Movie Review (2010)

Review by The New York Times

The music of Bob Dylan winds through Lance Daly’s “Kisses” like the call of a twangy pied piper beckoning two preteen runaways deeper into the night as they wander through the streets of Dublin after dark at Christmastime. A small slice of Irish kitchen-sink realism embellished with fairy-tale fantasy, “Kisses” may strike you as either ingeniously magical or insufferably cute, depending on your taste. But more than the story, which circles back on itself, the natural performances of its young stars, Shane Curry and especially Kelly O’Neill, nonprofessional actors, lend the movie a core of integrity.

The asthmatic 11-year-old male half of the pair happens to be named Dylan. As played by Mr. Curry, who gives him a canny Dylanesque squint, he bears a striking resemblance to his scrawny, scruffy namesake as photographed on the covers of his early albums. Dylan and his fellow fugitive, willful, tomboyish Kylie (Ms. O’Neill), are next-door neighbors in the run-down houses known as kips on the outskirts of Dublin.

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Review by The Village Voice

Strictly speaking, the two scrappy Irish kids in Lance Daly’s Kisses aren’t homeless, but in every sense that matters, they have only each other for shelter. Kylie and Dylan (played by Kelly O’Neill and Shane Curry, both plucked from Dublin schools and oozing forlorn defiance) live next door to each other in a dreary housing project outside one of the world’s most picturesque cities. Home is a spiritual desert aptly filmed in black and white, where a Christmas greeting from Dad translates as “I’ll smash your fuckin’ face in,” and where all a mother with bruises of her own can do to protect her child is whisper, “Run.”

Run they do, armed with Christmas money and a resolve to find Dylan’s older brother, who went missing two years earlier. And as they run, this latter-day Hansel and Gretel—so foul-mouthed and heavily accented that they require subtitles—escape from Loachian neorealism into the junky beauty of an urban fairy tale, with a bold touch of Fellini. As the children hitch a ride on the canal from a kindly immigrant, Daly dribbles in color, his camera picking out a hopeful pink and yellow in Kylie and Dylan’s clothing.

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Review by Los Angeles Times

“Kisses” shows how much you can do with very little. Only 75 minutes long and made in Ireland for what had to be a micro budget, this sweet, savvy and heartfelt film will impact you more and stay around longer than many more elephantine productions.
The story of a Christmas Eve a pair of 11-year-old runaways spend in downtown Dublin, “Kisses” can sound familiar, but it really isn’t.

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