GurlyIamBeach Instant Favorite.

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

SnoopyStyle Howl is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg (James Franco) in 1955 and published as part of his 1956 collection of poetry titled Howl and Other Poems. In 1957 San Francisco, Allen faced charges in the obscenity trial.This is simply not my cup of tea. It may be yours if you like jazz, poetry and most importantly, have James Franco read you poetry. I don't like the non-linear telling of the story. I don't think Franco is a particularly good reader. There should be real intensity in the story but Franco's restraint performance contradicts it. For fans, I would suggest wearing a beret, lighting a smoke, turning on the jazz and snapping your fingers. You would get into the right mood which I never achieved.

l_rawjalaurence Inspired by the Allan Ginsberg poem of the same name, HOWL shows the eponymous hero (James Franco) reading the work out lout to a group of fellow-poets in San Francisco. The work obviously inspired extreme passions: the audience listen in rapt attention to a work that depicts the poet's feelings through an earthy yet compelling idiom. In an attempt to show how the poem might work, directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman introduce a series of animated sequences; none of them try to 'explain' the work, but rather show how Ginsberg's language works associatively, inspiring moods rather than following any logical sequence. When the work was first published in the mid-Fifities, it was the subject of a famous obscenity trial: Epstein and Friedman restage that trial, showing how the poem was criticized for its apparent earthiness of language, and then cleared on the grounds that Ginsberg was only following the principle of free speech. HOWL is an enthralling piece, encouraging viewers not to 'understand' the significance of the poem in terms of meaning, but to see it as symptomatic of a particular moment in American history, when old taboos and/or standards of moral or civilized behavior were subject to intense scrutiny. The conservatism of the early Fifties had been superseded by a new spirit of adventure, encapsulated in Ginsberg's work, that looked forward to the spirit of the Sixties. James Franco offers a convincing characterization of Ginsberg, supported by memorable cameos from David Strathairn, Jon Hamm, and Bob Balaban as the main protagonists in the court case.

MisterWhiplash Howl might be a one-of-a-kind film experience if not for Chicago 10, another film that blended documentary, dramatization and animation together into a blender of personal history. But what sets this film apart from that and all others is that poetry becomes interwoven into a courtroom trial procedural - all, apparently, taken from the actual court transcripts of what the prosecution/defense asked of the people on the stand - so that it becomes about free speech. At the same time it's a quasi-biopic on Allen Ginsberg, who was a real free spirit, but also a shy Jewish kid from New York city who lost his mother as a child and worried about writing poems that might irk the ire of his father (he even considered not publishing Howl for that reason).It's a beautifully surreal little treat of a film that treats its subject seriously while also giving life to the epic poem that stays timeless, as with Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (which also gets name- dropped here). The filmmakers bring together the poetic readings - done by James Franco, one of his real 'embodiment' performances like Saul in Pineapple Express that is basically stunning - from in front of a live audience (where one sees how Ginsberg at first has an audience patient and waiting and then is full of life and looking forward to every next thing he says) and in animation. The poem becomes alive through the low-budget drawings, and depending on the stanza it can be at least acceptable and at most mind-blowing. You almost want the poem to go longer to sink in deeper to those Ginsberg stanzas that flow out with what appears to be stream of consciousness, but really has a structure to it.Acting is fantastic - David Straithairn, Jon Hamm and in a one-scene keeper Jeff Daniels - Franco keeps things moving so well with his performance, and the poem is given it's best context in personal and social history. All of a sudden, thanks to a film like this, the material becomes alive again, like a student picking it up and sinking into it for the first time.

TheGovernatorOSU One of the main arguments in Ginsberg's defense during his trial was that dissecting "Howl" line-by-line with the intent of extracting exact prose and literal meaning is a perversion of its existence and the method of which it was written. My question is; wasn't the decision to use illustrations, which quite literally attempted to depict his poems word-by-word displaying corresponding visuals, a contradiction to that very argument? These illustrative clips seemed more of a medium to keep the viewer visually stimulated and maintain interest during his narrations, rather than an endeavor to create a platform in which we can truly envision Ginsberg's true intent behind his powerful words while maintaining one of the most fundamental points of the movie, that narrow and literal interpretations of such work should be discouraged, rather, that we should be invited to dream our own envisionment of a poems content through personal interpretation and wild imagination. I was perfectly content picturing the "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night" on my own, enhanced by the spirited performance and narration of James Franco; in the crease in his brow, his subtle confidence and strain in his voice. The illustrations, albeit expertly rendered, took away from what I thought the film was all about.