It's hardly a film which trumpets its virtues but that's part of the pleasure to be had from it. It doesn't know how good it is.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 27, 2007

It's impressively adult, sure-footed filmmaking, and that Best Actor nod was definitely deserved.

| Apr 20, 2007

Dunne [Gosling] is an enjoyable and impressive creation, justifiably recognised with an Oscar nomination for Gosling earlier this year.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 20, 2007

It's the gritty script and sheer quality of the performances that distinguish this parable.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 20, 2007

An original work that is moving, not without humour, fly-on-the-wall realistic and uplifting.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 20, 2007

It takes a while to settle into the rhythm (feeling episodic at first), but Half Nelson soon takes hold with a vice-like grip.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 17, 2007

Gosling and Epps, an unusual but effective pairing, show real commitment in their performances.

| Oct 30, 2006

Gosling is indeed amazing as a bewildered, depressed New York schoolteacher who is slipping into dire drug addiction; it's exactly the kind of star turn in a smaller film that Academy voters could (and should) notice.

Full Review | Oct 7, 2006

Although the subject promises more than the film can deliver, there is compensation in Gosling's convincing, unromanticized portrayal of someone seeking escape from longing and loss that neither he nor the movie can really define.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 6, 2006

This movie... is concerned with an even greater achievement that is generally unacknowledged: how people -- flawed, miserable, frustrated people -- go to work every day and find a way to care about something beyond themselves, despite themselves.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 27, 2006

Half Nelson, with its bleakly hopeful view of humanity both damned and redeemed -- simultaneously -- is uncomfortably, almost exactly right.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 23, 2006

For a solid 107 minutes, Gosling shapes his character into a flesh-and-blood tone poem.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Sep 21, 2006

It'll be weeks before I shake off [Gosling's] performance -- or the shadows of this small, extraordinary narrative-feature debut from filmmaking partners Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 15, 2006

The tone is even and thorough, the performances restrained and believable, the implied future bleak yet somehow satisfying.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 15, 2006

One might also argue that a crack addict couldn't be responsible enough to be a good teacher, but he's the most believable protagonist in any American movie I've seen this year.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 15, 2006

A wholly absorbing and delicately shaded portrait of an educator played by Ryan Gosling, a young man harboring an offstage secret.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 14, 2006

In the endlessly surprising Half Nelson, all those upbeat, Hollywood clichés about well-meaning outsiders making a difference are turned on their heads.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 8, 2006

Gosling anchors the picture, and Epps ... has a kind of grace, presence and knowingness that far more experienced actors struggle vainly to find.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 8, 2006

Gritty and terrifically human, Half Nelson is not your big brother's Hollywood high school movie.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 8, 2006

It's interested in how real people, not movie characters, might act in the situation. It is about all the gray areas, all the complexities, all the layers of meaning.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 7, 2006