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

| Mar 19, 2024

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

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

The real drama is in Thornton’s style, always lyrical but never fluidly so: smoothness in this context would be impossible, since we’re never comfortably aligned with any one character.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 14, 2023

Driven by a desire for symbolic heft, The New Boy becomes a cryptic and borderline impenetrable noodle-scratcher stuffed full of heavy religious imagery.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 5, 2023

The New Boy, written, directed and filmed by Indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton, is a masterpiece.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 3, 2023

There’s a kinetic strength to star-in-the-making Aswan Reid’s screen presence as we first glimpse his unnamed ‘new boy’... A scrapper with a mess of sun-bleached hair, he seems to channel the vast majesty of the mountainous desert.

| Jun 8, 2023

Thornton conjures the otherworldly power of Australia’s scorched red earth and its strange, vivid sunsets; in this story of spiritual resilience and communion with the divine, the landscape is an abiding, almighty presence.

| May 31, 2023

Polished in its ultra-considered shot-making, but ultimately unmoving, this is hardly the first film to... prop itself up with a lulling score that manages to be at once beautifully orchestrated and a borderline sleep hazard.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 23, 2023

There is needless repetition, however, in the scenes and in the messaging... And though Thornton’s previous films, Samson and Delilah and Sweet Country, were taut directorial masterclasses, he seems to be too structurally relaxed here, too organic.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 23, 2023

Memorable for its superbly expressive central turn by Aswan Reid.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 21, 2023

What Thornton is striving toward, an embrace of generosity, of humanity being able to change what faith and religion even mean, is often moving.

| Original Score: B+ | May 20, 2023

What sets it apart is Thornton’s deep spirituality, examined here as the titular ‘The New Boy’ encounters – and explores – Christianity.

| May 19, 2023

Engrossing, even when the story strays from its path.

| May 19, 2023

It’s watchable, and Blanchett fans will want to see it – but for me this doesn’t have the weight and force of Thornton’s other films.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 19, 2023

Meandering but never uninvolving, the film benefits, like its predecessors, from its writer-director-cinematographer’s extraordinary eye for light and locale, which goes beyond dewy pictorialism to reclaim a landscape from its imposing occupiers.

| May 19, 2023