Filming twice a year while sculpting the details of the screenplay, Linklater somehow captured the fundamental grief of the parenting experience.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 27, 2025

...it’s hyperbolic in its minimalism and boring in spots and its overall narrative reach often exceeds its grasp. Even still, it’s one of the most important movies of the decade so far and you should experience it just to say you did.

| Sep 15, 2022

Like Michael Apted in his Seven Up! documentary series, Linklater makes you feel as if you're watching a photograph as it develops in the darkroom.

| Original Score: A | Oct 11, 2018

An audacious effort from a filmmaker whose ability to embed the audience in his stories is unmatched.

| Original Score: A+ | Sep 2, 2017

Calling it a sum of its parts can be a backhanded compliment, but it feels like especially worthy praise for Boyhood, considering how much went into making it feel whole.

| Sep 22, 2016

'Boyhood' reveals itself as something deeper, more noteworthy and ambitious than even its remarkable production would suggest, for Linklater has given us nothing less than a cinematic approximation of human memory.

| Jun 18, 2016

We can quibble with small stuff in Boyhood. Supporting performances are variable, the sister drops out as a dramatic character ... I could go on. But the cumulative power is tremendous.

| Jan 2, 2015

While everything about Boyhood is done with extraordinary care, the master stroke was clearly the casting, 13 years ago, of a little Texas boy named Ellar Coltrane.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 2, 2015

It's like a time-lapse photo of an expanding consciousness.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 2, 2015

As is Linklater's custom, Boyhood is profound in such a casual way that its weighty themes feel nonchalant, effortless. This movie might make you cry for reasons you can't quite articulate. You won't be alone in feeling that way.

| Original Score: 9.4/10 | Jan 2, 2015

Cinema has always been the best place for time travel, but rarely has it been so anchored in reality than in Richard Linklater's Boyhood.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 2, 2015

Linklater bridges the gap between these more art-oriented projects and contemporary narrative cinema. He offers us a new sense of knowing time by inviting us to be present as it unfurls.

| Jan 2, 2015

One of the loveliest things about Boyhood is how much of it makes those long-forgotten strings of childhood vibrate within you. It reminds you of what it was like to be a kid.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 2, 2015

A word about the film's epic length. Boyhood is 166 minutes long. Yet it is so affecting, so much a thing of wonder, that it could run forever and I would still keep watching.

| Jan 2, 2015

Linklater's casual hand at storytelling, dealing out reel after reel of naggingly forthright enlightenment, turns this simple tale of a mother trying to do her best into something worth every second of the time it took to produce.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 2, 2015

Richard Linklater's Boyhood is in most respects a traditional realist film -- plainly shot, devoid of plot gimmicks, aiming to approximate life as it is actually lived.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 2, 2015

Watching the film, I wasn't exactly as moved as I'd hoped I would be, and that was at first disappointing. But then I remembered that Richard Linklater doesn't really do big emotional indicating, that you have to listen a little closer.

| Jan 2, 2015

Boyhood is proof that a strange magic can still bloom amidst the tragedy that buffets human life.

| Jan 2, 2015

It's the casual ease of "Boyhood's" construction, its lack of a specifically lofty artistic objective, that makes it so effective.

| Original Score: A- | Jan 2, 2015

Boyhood is as immersive as it is observational, and at the same time inescapably self-reflective. In terms of manipulating the relationship between viewer and screen, there is nothing quite like it.

| Jan 2, 2015