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Billy the Kid
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Metascore
75 out of 100

Generally favorable reviews - based on 9 Critics What's this?

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  • Summary: Billy the Kid is a sensitive and humorous vérité portrait of Billy, a 15-year-old outsider growing up in small-town Maine. Billy appears, in many ways, like other teenage boys. He's into heavy metal and martial arts, is desperate to find a girlfriend, and aspires to a career as an actor and rock star. Yet in other ways Billy is unique. A troubled past and ongoing behavioral issues have left him marked. But he is unapologetic about his personality and refuses to be victimized, creating his own techniques to help him survive in an environment of pain, conformity, and prejudice. Billy is funny, sharp, strangely wise for his age, and remarkably candid. We witness life from his perspective--from intimate conversations with his mother, to being bullied at school, to his fantasies of becoming a superhero. We also experience the exhilarating pangs of first love as Billy pursues Heather, a shy 16-year-old waitress. Will Billy get the girl? Will his community accept him on his own terms? Billy the Kid challenges viewers to imagine themselves beyond labels. (Elephant Eye Films)… Expand

Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 8 out of 9
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 9
  3. Negative: 0 out of 9
  1. TV Guide
    Reviewed by: Ken Fox
    100
    In the end, Bill emerges as someone truly unique and someone who we feel privileged to know.
  2. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Noel Murray
    83
    If the film has a significant flaw, it's that Venditti never explains in the film how she found Billy, or why she's interested in him. Billy The Kid often plays more like an extended home movie than something intentional and artful.
  3. Variety
    Reviewed by: John Anderson
    50
    One of the more irresponsible eruptions in the current rash of populist nonfiction cinema.

See all 9 Critic Reviews

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