Boyhood - 8/10
I was really apprehensive when I decided to go and see Boyhood. Because it's nearly 3 hours long, it's been praised everywhere and I was expecting a lot, with the big risk of being disappointed… I think I was mainly worried that the only interesting thing about the film was the fact that Richard Linklater filmed the same actors for 12 years.
Except that. I didn't see the time go by, and I would have signed up for a few more minutes (hours?) of it. There's no plot to speak of; we follow Mason and his family, his father, his mother, his stepfathers and his sister. We watch them grow up, mature and change, and become attached to them, and the fact that the same actors remain contributes to the sense of immersion.
The tone is just right, and it's rare to see a film that captures so well the transition from childhood to adolescence, with all the difficulties that entails. It's really intelligently written, it's modest when it needs to be, there's no great pathos, and the characters' lives stand on their own. It reminded me a bit of Tomboy or Mud in the way it showed childhood in a nuanced, intelligent way.
I recognised myself in a lot of things, sometimes in the details, the attitudes, the cultural references (which for once didn't seem to be thrown in there for fan service), I found the film sincere if that adjective can be applied to a work of fiction.
I left the cinema in a little bubble of happiness.
