It’s not a stretch to say that director Kimberly Peirce’s 1999 Academy Award-winning debut Boys Don’t Cry helped save my life.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Nov 29, 2024

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 18, 2002

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 19, 2002

Swank is impressive in the lead role.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

With its constant juxtaposition of blazing nighttime highwayscapes and the flat Nebraska skyline, Boys Don't Cry manages to perfectly evoke both a life spent in aimless forward motion and the stifling boredom Brandon was so desperate to escape.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

Stunning.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jan 1, 2000

If hers is not a star-making performance, it's a wake-up call to anybody who thought the last time Swank would kick ass was in The Next Karate Kid.

| Jan 1, 2000

| Original Score: 5.5/5 | Jan 1, 2000

Lyrical and galvanizing.

| Original Score: A | Jan 1, 2000

Director Pierce and Bienen and the expert cast engage us in the actuality of these rootless, hopeless, stoned-out lives without sentimentalizing or romanticizing them.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 1, 2000

Boys Don't Cry not only revisits the crime, but convinces us we're being taken inside it.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 1, 2000

The first time I saw the movie, I was completely absorbed by the characters... Only later did I fully realize what a great film it is, a worthy companion to those other masterpieces of death on the prairie, Badlands and In Cold Blood.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 1, 2000

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 1, 2000

What either of these movies has to do with real events probably remains difficult to determine for anyone but a specialist, but as mythologies they both have plenty of staying power.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Flawless acting by the ensemble.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

[Hilary Swank] has come out of nowhere to deliver one of the year's finest pieces of acting.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

The movie lets down the material. It's too cool: all attitude, no sizzle--horror under glass.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

The film is framed, too unquestioningly, as a transgender Rebel Without a Cause, with Brandon the martyred innocent who dies for her infatuations.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000

Peirce seems to have researched her subject with grad-school-thesis intensity.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 1, 2000

Powerful and unpretentious.

Full Review | Jan 1, 2000