It feels like perhaps the screenplay was intensely personal and/or autobiographical, yet it's suspiciously lacking in any dramatic tension.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Nov 10, 2007

It's so exceptionally well done, so exceedingly well-cast that it makes one realize how few such films actually succeed at all.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Oct 15, 2006

A fine coming-of-age drama about a sexually eager young man who discovers that anything is possible with a friend who is loving and trustworthy after years of giving and forgiving.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 13, 2006

The story is small, but their performances give it depth and weight.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 13, 2006

Moral dilemmas faced by immature teens is fine fare for young-adult fiction, but a movie that wants them to be taken as something bigger needs better management than Nearing Grace can provide.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Oct 13, 2006

It's also refreshingly low-key and more intelligent than 90% of the movies aimed at the teen crowd. That by itself is a fine achievement.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 13, 2006

[It] makes you feel like a heel for not liking it: Independently made and heartfelt, it also happens to have been shot in Portland. Nonetheless, the accumulation of cliches big and small manage to erase whatever goodwill its other features have engendered

| Original Score: C- | Oct 13, 2006

The performances by Smith, Brewster and veteran David Morse, as a morbidly depressed widower, elevate Nearing Grace to something near grace.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 13, 2006

The tone is psychological realism, as opposed to, say, American Pie-style burlesque. But the main emphasis is on sex and drugs anyway. In any case, it's not very illuminating.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 13, 2006

...cinematic youth has rarely seemed so convincingly uncertain, and Brewster could definitely drive a young guy crazy.

Full Review | Oct 13, 2006

Smart, funny and, thanks in no small part to David Geddes' cinematography, it occasionally approaches the poetic.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 12, 2006

Bursting with hormones, angst, humor and heartbreak, Rick Rosenthal's Nearing Grace, set during the late 1970's in suburban New Jersey, follows a teenager's efforts to survive both the recent loss of his mother and his senior year of high school.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 12, 2006

Nearing Grace means to be a gritty look at what it was like to come of age in the late '70s, but its reality is hampered by the unreal pretentiousness of every word the characters utter.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Oct 12, 2006

The dialogue is full of fortune cookie aphorisms and stilted literary phrases that were never meant to be spoken aloud.

| Original Score: C | Oct 12, 2006

The characters are stereotypes, their situations are familiar and the outcome is predictable. But the whole thing is viewed from such a feel-good perspective that we're willing to overlook much of that.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 12, 2006

An unsympathetic lead, a story that's been told a million times (the Scarlett-Ashley/star-crossed lovers story), relationships that don't make sense and an unfamiliarity with basic physics.

Full Review | Original Score: 1.5/4 | Oct 12, 2006

If we've seen it all before, Nearing Grace's mix of nostalgia and contempt for the follies of youth is a potent one.

| Oct 12, 2006

Some Kind of Wonderful? No, some kind of earnest, stranded adaptation of Nearing Grace, Scott Sommer's late-1970s coming-of-age novel.

| Original Score: C+ | Oct 11, 2006

Sucks to be Nearing Grace on the same week that Zerophilia also opens.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Sep 22, 2006

The teens this time resemble only those processed through 온라인카지노추천's feel-good filter.

Full Review | Aug 15, 2006