Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 17, 2011

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Sep 7, 2011

It makes us feel sympathy for the devil.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 12, 2008

Director John Crowley, a veteran Irish theater director now working in film, is deliberate with every last element of his film.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 5, 2008

Even its structurally weaker moments give Garfield an opportunity to expand on Jack's physical and mental dislocation. Given Boy A's final floating reel, it's an anchoring performance in every sense of the word.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 29, 2008

The movie is taut with suspense but culminates in wise resignation as the hero comes to understand he's running from a part of himself.

| Aug 12, 2008

Crowley gets a remarkable performance from Andrew Garfield: his Jack is a person who carries guilt with him even when he is trying to override it.

| Aug 11, 2008

Boy A is one of those rare movies that takes the idea of rehabilitation seriously. In the end, it may present a worst-case scenario, but it does so with unusual depth and conviction.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 8, 2008

In tandem, the director and screenwriter build up a palpable suspense. Boy A will rivet you while raising issues about forgiveness and just who deserves it.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 8, 2008

Along with Garfield and the splendid Scottish actor Mullan, Crowley brings great tact to this bruising saga of atonement and moral regeneration. Though a bad seed can bring forth good fruit, will others want to pick it?

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 8, 2008

There are some gaps in the movie's reality, and some O. Henry-like contrivances, but the masterful trick Boy A plays on viewers is to get them to care before giving them reasons not to.

| Original Score: B+ | Aug 8, 2008

We're introduced to more string-pulling symbolism than a movie this inherently sad ever needs. It's too much.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 8, 2008

Mullen and Garfield fit well together -- both have faces you like on first sight, both have charm, both have warmth.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 8, 2008

Although the screenplay tips our sympathies wholly in the young man's direction, it's cleverly structured to reveal the particulars of the long-ago crime, and what led up to it, in flashback.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 7, 2008

Bleak but expertly rendered.

Full Review | Jul 28, 2008

A small, huge film about the harsh realities of rehabilitation, and the shimmering possibility of redemption.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2008

If Hitchcock had done a coming-of-age drama, it might have resembled this haunting, nervous, sad movie.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 25, 2008

An absorbing, finely nuanced morality tale.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 25, 2008

An ingenuous 24-year-old man-child is at the center of John Crowley's wrenching melodrama Boy A.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 23, 2008

Well-acted but familiar.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Jul 23, 2008