Boyhood Reviews

'Boyhood' has a very unique and intriguing concept, in fact there has not been a concept like it (with taking 12 years to make and being encompassed over 12 years as well). But that is not the only selling point of the film, despite what the detractors have unfairly said.

Granted, 'Boyhood' is not for all tastes, although it was almost unanimously praised by critics the IMDb reviews are much more divisive. This reviewer totally understands why people dislike, even flat out hate it, and shares some of their criticisms, and generally hates the incredibly condescending way they have been expressed, nobody who legitimately liked 'Boyhood' for perfectly valid reasons wants to feel that it is a criminal offence to like it, let alone love it.

Does this reviewer think it is quite as good as the hype and critics say? Not quite. Does she think it is a very good, conceptually daring and in some ways misunderstood film, and towards the better end of the films released in 2014? Yes. It does have its problems, it is a case of two inconsistent halves with a great emotion-filled, honest, nostalgic and richly developed first half and a second half where the pace slackens, the story meanders and there are moments of awkwardness.

Ellar Coltrane's performance is also uneven, he is excellent in the first half with a real sense of honesty and integrity, where the protagonist is much more interesting and likable, but rather stilted and not as involved in the second half. The editing is also choppy in places and although a vast majority of the performances are fantastic Lorelei Linklater is somewhat dull as Samantha and would never pass for Mason's sister.

However, aside from the editing 'Boyhood' looks very accomplished with evocative production values and is beautifully filmed. Richard Linklater directs with a real generosity and lightness of touch. The script honest, poignant, thought-provoking and sometimes harrowing, and while not everything about the story works it has a real sense of nostalgia and richly rewarding in its emotional content. Really do not agree that nothing happens, it has a long running time and is deliberate in pacing but this reviewer really loved 'Boyhood's' understatedness, sincerity and subtlety as well as its spontaneity.

Characters are interesting and developed, especially Ethan Hawke's and Patricia Arquette's. Hawke and Arquette are also the standouts in the cast, and deservedly garnered Oscar nominations which Arquette won. Arquette is particularly outstanding, with a genuine fullness of emotion and authority with no sense of over-acting or self-indulgence. Hawke also gives a compelling real performance.

In conclusion, a very intriguing and very good film. Not quite as good as it's hyped to be but it has many more merits than the detractors lead you to believe.

While the criticisms are understandable, this reviewer is having a hard time believing that there are those who cite 'Boyhood' as the worst film they've ever seen, or one of them. There are far worse out there, that are amateurishly made, ineptly directed, terribly acted and written even worse, distinctions that regardless of whether you hate it 'Boyhood belongs nowhere near in any of them. 8/10 Bethany Cox

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Presumably a lot of people will have heard of 'Boyhood' shortly before they started filming it in 2002. Since then, they started shooting it up until 2013. Richard Linklater had a goal to create a film about growing up, and here he achieved it brilliantly! Mason Evans Jr. goes from age 6 to age 18 and (due to the film being shot over 11 years) is always played by Ellar Coltrane, who gives a brilliant performance!

'Boyhood' is a brilliant drama that discusses growing up! It doesn't really have much of a plot, but really just shows Mason experience puberty, and experience new things in life. Richard Linklater directs it intelligently, his script is serious and brilliantly written! The supporting cast including Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke are all fantastic! The film is frequently intense and features some intense realism of ageing! A brilliant film!

An incredibly ambitious film about the most simplistic of things: growing up. Twelve long years in the making, Boyhood contains many scenes of universal truth, and while it’s not perfect, it is something special.

Boyhood’s major problem is one of too many stories going on at once, a trimming of the fat would have tightened up some of the narrative flab. Namely a completely needless subplot involving a Mexican gardener who returns later on in the film to thank his white lady savior. It’s an awkward moment, and I’m not sure what it’s supposed to inspire in the audience aside from making me cringe.

But I found this to be Boyhood’s lone major stumbling block. What is so attractive about Boyhood is how it finds the meaningful and sublime moments in the mire of the everydayness. Growing up is something everyone does, and everyone does it a little differently, but there’s certain universal truths to be found here. First love, divorce, trying to form your own identity, gaining more observance of the outside world – we’ve all been there, and Boyhood documents these transitions.

The most poetic moments, and the ones I felt the most emotional attachment towards, were the ones involving the mother, played with honesty and soulful integrity by Patricia Arquette. Many of these quiet scenes between a single mother and her young son reminded me of my own childhood. Arquette is an actress I’ve never really warmed up towards much in the past, but here she absolutely knocked me flat on my feet. Her deep reservoirs of inner strength run dry in a scene late in the film in which she wonders what will come next for her now that her children are grown and on their own. She doesn’t get the splashy parental role like Ethan Hawke’s amiable slack father, but she is the film’s consistently beating heart, the sturdy rock around which her kids mature and develop.

Yes, Boyhood is a series of vignettes without a central narrative, and the closest the film comes to conventional narrative is when an alcoholic step-father is introduced. Besides this midsection, the film peaks in at random moments between 2002 to 2013. The other family members play more major roles in the earlier sequences, but as our boy grows up and gets more agency, they fall into the background. So in real life, so it goes in the cinema. It’s a strange experiment, and I suppose I could see why some would respond negatively towards it, but it touched me very deeply and I got a lot out of the experience.

As of recently I have been noticing a change in my movie watching. It's becoming harder and harder to impress me or have me engaged with something enough. I have a hard time turning off my critical brain, often correctly predicting plot points and character moments well in advance. I've watched too many movies, seen behind the curtains and know too much for it to be wholly magical anymore. I don't think I'm alone on this feeling either. To me, this summer's lineup of effects-heavy event pictures seem to talk down and cater to the lowest common denominator of moviegoers. Grown-Inducing, overlong, ear-ringing schlock that fails to leave as big of an impression in the viewer's mind as the studios wish them to be. The budgets are inflated to such and extent in order to create these big "eye-popping cinematic moments" in order to simply get asses in seat that the filmmakers forget the two most important elements in movies: story and character.

Anyone well-informed in the realm of film criticism will no doubt remember Siskel & Ebert, the first of its kind movie review show hosted by the late pair Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. Upon seeing this movie I was reminded of a quote said by Gene Siskel on the show while reviewing the Tony Danza dud "She's Out of Control" where he stated that seeing the film was "so depressing I actually considered quitting my job as a film critic. Fortunately, I would see the film 'Say Anything' in the same day and all is right with the world". I had a similar experience when I saw the movie "Transformers: Age of Extinction". I sat there in the theatre, on my birthday no less, with the depressing knowledge that this is what the public wants. This is apparently filmmaking: a gargantuan mess of a movie with a storyline thinner than a hair's split end and a runtime that rivals "The Dark Knight Rises", but uses none of that time as effectively as that film did. Audiences are extremely hesitant of anything "new" or "original" it seems. "Edge of Tomorrow" had a very well constructed screenplay, good performances, and a great amount of action sequences that actually were both entertaining and moved the plot forward, and yet that movie fell by the wayside to make way for louder, dumber, CGI-infested movies with a recognizable something or other to boost ticket sales. Watching Michael Bay's latest outing in the franchise drove that point home for me and it was indeed depressing.

Richard Linklater's "Boyhood", on the other hand, quietly crept into cinemas and reinvigorated my sense of romanticism of movies in a way thought long dead. While I understand it is unfair and ridiculous to compare these very different films to one another, it sticks out in my mind how if even a quarter of the ticket sales for "Transformers" went to movies original like this one then cinema as an art form would not be in as much intellectual jeopardy as it is today. Nonetheless, this cynical movie lover was won over and let loose onboard an emotional ride untouched by any other movie I've seen this year.

"Boyhood" is an audacious experiment of a film that chronicles the everyday life experiences of a young boy named Mason, played by newcomer Ellar Coltrane, as he lives out his childhood hitting on universal moments that each person can relate to no matter what the age is. Mason is the kind of young boy you get to know over the course of the film who bears strong similarities to a friend you might have had in school, or perhaps even one's own self at certain points. I saw both in my experience. He lives a very ordinary life with his mother, played wonderfully by Patricia Arquette who merits an Oscar nomination. She shines brighter on screen than she ever has before, including "True Romance". Along for the ride as well is the divorced dad played very well by Linklater regular Ethan Hawke, whose character's goofy charm is always endearing and fun to watch as he brings a lot of humour to many of his scenes. Every performance is stellar because the story is so intimately told which brings out the level of authenticity and realism that most films lack. So real it has a sort of documentary feeling to it.

This is a truly groundbreaking movie literally spanning 12 years of of a story that flows at its own pace, free from contrivances in the plot or cliche characters. It feels closer to real life than most movies on the subject of growing up. Nowadays, I feel like audience attention span is so limited that filmmakers feel that have to play to that ineptitude by removing any time to take it all in and experience the atmosphere, world, and circumstances our characters inhabit. In this movie, not a whole lot really "happens", if that makes sense. There's no villain's evil scheme, there's no ticking-clock scenario, no pointless shenanigans, no three-act structure, and especially no dumbing down of the material. This isn't that kind of movie. It's truly about those little moments no one talks about to much between the big moments that build up the human experience and how they all amount to what life is like in a way. By shooting little chunks of movie with the same cast and crew over a 12-year period Richard Linklater and company were able to take the quiet normality and blandness of everyday life and turn out an extraordinary cinematic achievement.

The movie also caters to people of my own generation as it uses specific things like songs, videos, events, items, etc that trigger a very real emotional response because the feelings this movie is about is universal. But, because of when it took place it hit me in places I didn't expect it to. I had countless flashbacks to my own youth that were shockingly very similar at times to the movie. Along with that, it is also edited very effectively and creatively. The timeline covers 12 years of this family's life and at no point were there any uses of title cards, no shots of a calendar, no nothing. The progression of time is expressed visually through very noticeable elements that appear in every scene. For example hair cuts or style changes, weight gain and loss, a song from that particular year, a conversation about a then current event, video games, movies, and even a scene at a Harry Potter book release are all successful in pinpointing where and when in the real-world type story we are. This all makes for a much better method of cinematic storytelling and does not talk down to its audience. It embraces the "show don't tell" rule filmmakers forget about quite often.

Although deliberate in its pacing and runtime, I was never bored and I was always emotionally connected to every moment of this family's life. This is the very best movie I've seen this year and may possibly be the best film of Richard Linklater's career. I say that even though I have a very soft spot in my heart for "Dazed and Confused". This one though feels like his most accomplished masterpiece of filmmaking with no rival to speak of in his history. "Boyhood" is a true demonstration of quality, classic filmmaking at its finest, proving that the simple stories are often the most wonderful. Best film of 2014.

Once again, we have seen a great film with the filmclub. In fact, we pretty much all agreed that it was one of the best movies we have seen together so far. I actually already heard about this movie 6 or 8 before it was released and, of course, I was really intrigued by this concept but, to be honest, I didn’t expect it to be so amazing. I mean, sure, it is a very nice gimmick (shooting a movie over a period of 12 years starting with a boy at 6 years old until he reaches 18 years old) but a gimmick remains a gimmick unless you manage to do something great with it and Richard Linklater certainly did something quite amazing here. Indeed, a traditional movie would give you a nice story, a great story if you’re lucky, but here they gave us a genuine slice of life. Of course, you could argue that they could have shot a documentary and you would have ended up with the same results but I highly doubt it. Indeed, for almost 3 hours, you spend more than a decade with these characters and even though nothing hugely dramatic happens, the whole thing was just spellbinding to behold. To conclude, I really loved this flick and it is definitely worth a look, especially if you want to see something really different.

The concept of this is extremely interesting. Most of the time a film about someone growing up usually has several actors playing the part or sometimes even throws in some CGI. It is a very original and creative story. It's fun to watch as the years go by and we see our actors literally age on-screen with no effects. Not only do our characters age, but you can tell visually the cinematography improves as well. When it starts it looks like something that belonged in 2002 (when it first started filming) and when it's near to the end it visually belongs in the now. I find it cool that they throw in a lot of pop culture and world events that pertain to each year that this takes place in. This is one example of being able to see someone's acting skill improve with experience. It's interesting to see that kind of thing happen in one film. I think even though some things are missing the reasons behind it don't really matter. It's about watching Mason grow up and dealing with father figures, friendships, life, and love. It gets it's message across and that's what matters. The ending wrapped it up nicely. I greatly enjoyed this. It's good that the cast stuck with it through the years. It's a must see literal coming of age story.