Nominated for 6 Oscars! Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor & Actress, Best Original Screenplay, Editing
Oscar Winner! Best Supporting Actress. “A unique work in American cinema, shot in 39 days over the course of 12 years, Boyhood is an epic about the ordinary: growing up, the banality of family life, and forging an identity. Everything here has been seen before, but perhaps never has the long arc of the journey from childhood to college been portrayed as cohesively and convincingly as Richard Linklater has done in a film that is something quite special in its entirety.
Joel Rubinoff, KW Record: "Boyhood is an anomaly of quality and story in our time" [1]
“Every single aspect of the subject here has been grist for dramatists through the ages - the bickering, small joys, misunderstandings, wedlock fissures, adolescent rebellions, first loves, the birth of artistic inclinations and emotional growth through pain and disappointment. Eschewing melodrama and farce, Linklater approaches all these subjects in the same straightforward manner, as parts of the grand fabric of life. What seem like huge issues for a moment can often be quickly forgotten, while tiny incidents can remain in the mind forever; it's the selective but cumulative use of seemingly arbitrary but significant experiences that gives Boyhood its distinctive character and impressive weight.
Linklater shot in short spurts periodically between 2002 and 2013, calling the name actors to Texas to join the locals playing the dozens of characters who come and go. The film moves along from one time period to another without warning or announcement, and watching the aging process of the performers is inevitably fascinating. The two major professionals in the cast, Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette, who play the divorced parents Mason Sr. and Olivia, thicken and mature gracefully over the course of the years. But where Linklater was really lucky was with Ellar Coltrane, a local kid who's cute as a little boy and sprouts into a cool, thoughtful, slim and quite attractive guy. To see this one young man inhabit all these stages of Mason's life is unique and quite astonishing to behold.
"There are many indelible passages in Boyhood and the feeling at the end is of a rich, greatly rewarding experience. Certainly, Linklater, with all the other projects he pursued over the course of these dozen years, must have had his fingers crossed much of the time that this ongoing enterprise would work out all right in the end. It turned out as well, or better, than anyone could have logically expected.
- Todd McCarthy , The Hollywood Reporter