Like the title character, the film is more about what’s left unsaid, incisively exploring the inconvenient truths beneath the surface without charting an easy path to catharsis.

| Feb 7, 2025

There is an exceptional theme at the heart of The New Boy that is certainly touched upon, in often profound ways, but it isn’t explored as deeply as it absolutely could have been.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 5, 2024

There is no right way to interpret this film, and maybe that is what makes it so wonderful. The New Boy will open your mind and your heart, as you’re taken on a spiritual journey of an orphan and a nun navigating their beliefs.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 22, 2024

Many movies with religious themes often turn inwards...The New Boy instead takes it outward, offering a subtle, though no less powerful, battle of wills between Sister Eileen's Christianity and the New Boy's Indigenous beliefs.

| Jul 12, 2024

The New Boy is an important and impactful conversation starter that is not one to miss.

| May 10, 2024

It's not the film you think it's going to be. It's far more transcendent than that.

| Mar 19, 2024

... Viewers may find themselves having to ponder long and hard to figure out The New Boy’s layers of meaning.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 19, 2024

Where this story goes is fascinating and provocative, continually challenging the audience to consider the underlying ideas swirling around within the narrative.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 19, 2024

Cate Blanchett gives her first boring performance in Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy...

| Original Score: 2/5 | Mar 18, 2024

The New Boy fits a lifetime of questions into a short time, meaning not everything is explored to its fullest extent. Nevertheless, it’s a captivating story of faith and morality.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 18, 2024

The pacing is languid to a fault and it all gets rather bogged down in allegory.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 17, 2024

Impressive newcomer Aswan Reid is fantastic as the unnamed Aboriginal boy in this beautifully mounted fantasy drama from Warwick Thornton.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 16, 2024

A gentle, odd little Australian fable. Warwick Thornton’s film has a lot of thoughts to process, and while they don’t always cohere, the performances from Blanchett and Reid keep it interesting.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 14, 2024

The New Boy has a fairly direct message to impart about the imposition of one culture on another, but conveys it with a teasing, often comical obliqueness that makes for an idiosyncratic energy.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 14, 2024

Thornton has an opening half that’s stocked with surprises, and there’s Blanchett, who creates a fascinating journey of faith and survival in this unusual picture.

| Original Score: B- | Feb 28, 2024

Warwick Thornton’s The New Boy puts on Cate Blanchett’s shoulders a story that wants to talk about so many things but ends up talking about none of them.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Dec 26, 2023

This muddle of conflicting emotions is right in Blanchett’s wheelhouse; we feel her torment, even if neither we nor she can exactly put a name on it, because her body twists and hunches to tell the story.

| Oct 31, 2023

The New Boy is a film of deep, mystical qualities, and I can’t wait to revisit it.

| Oct 18, 2023

[Thornton's] film is gorgeous throughout but loses a bit of its power in a back half that seems uncertain of the story it’s telling.

| Sep 15, 2023

A rich and majestic film that proves that Warwick Thornton engages profoundly with indigenous issues and the long stain of colonialism. The New Boy is a strange and hypnotic enchantment.

| Sep 6, 2023