Boyhood

Released: July 11, 2014

Studio: IFC Films

Genre: coming-of-age drama

Box Office (numbers in millions):

Domestic: 25.38 Worldwide: 48.17

Adjusted for Inflation:

Domestic: -- Worldwide: --

Directing: Richard Linklater

Screenwriting: Richard Linklater

Starring: Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, Lorelei Linklater

Review:

Boyhood was an ambitious coming-of-age film built on an idea that could easily have derailed. Director and writer Richard Linklater follows the life of Mason Evans, Jr. (Coltrane) from age six to eighteen. The story also follows his divorced parents (Arquette, Hawke) and his sister (Linklater). The challenge was that Linklater used the same actors throughout the more-than-decade long project, filming from 2002 through 2013.

Because of the nature of the project, Linklater had only vague script ideas to guide the project and from year to year would incorporate changes into the script based on each actor. Along the journey, the family – and Mason in particular – is confronted with divorce, alcoholism, abuse, drug use, adolescence, and relationships.

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called Boyhood “one of the great films of the decade.” ^GN He goes to far as to say that the movie “is so ambitious and passionate that I can’t imagine anyone cranking out another conventional ‘coming-of-age’ picture. That genre now looks to be obsolete.” ^GN

“Boyhood ins touch with a simple, urgent truth: life is terrifying short. While our childhood in progress seems like an aeon, to our parents it flashes past in a dreamlike instant.” ^GN “The movie invites us to see Mason from an estranged-dad’s-eye-view…But the point is that all parents are estranged, continually and suddenly waking up to how their children are growing, progressively assuming the separateness and privacy of adulthood.” ^GN