Kill Your Friends (2015)

Kill Your Friends is a viciously funny, slickly shot plunge into the late-’90s Britpop boom, where the suits are as coked-up as the bands and everyone’s smiling while sharpening a knife. Nicholas Hoult is electric as Steven Stelfox, a charming monster whose voice and swagger pull you through a world of backstabbing meetings, ego, and chemical bravado with the momentum of a hit single. Owen Harris keeps the tone crackling—part crime-thriller, part poison-pen industry satire—so even the ugliness lands with a wicked sense of rhythm and style. Fair warning: the film’s decadence is the point and it doesn’t blink at extreme drugs, sex, and violence, but if you can stomach the grime, it’s an entertaining, brutally sharp ride that leaves a sting long after the music fades.

Kill Your Friends wants to be a nasty, neon-black satire of the late-’90s music biz, with Nicholas Hoult as a coked-up A&R shark narrating his way through greed, hype, and moral rot. The problem is the film’s tone keeps wobbling between thriller, farce, and edgelord comedy, so the violence and cruelty land more exhausting than sharp, and the characters are so aggressively unpleasant it’s hard to care what happens next. There is some slick style and period flavor, plus Hoult commits to the sleaze, but it can’t fully disguise a worldview that feels more juvenile than incisive. If you don’t enjoy unrelenting nihilism, heavy drug/sex/violence content, and a lead designed to repel you, this is likely a waste of your time rather than a guilty pleasure.