Critics reviews

The film uses a powerful linear narrative full of cross-country jaunts between countryscapes and cityscapes to follow an outlaw family as they live their bleak, cyclical feast-or-famine lifestyle and explore the emotional depths between them.

Identity here – be it national or personal – is an amorphous entity, and typically for Oshima he refuses any pat answers or glib summaries. The unnamed boy in Boyremains just that: a question mark; a provocation; an invocation and an invitation. Our responses to this will tell us as much about ourselves as it will about this director and his film.

...When the boy finally does break down, attacking a snowman or letting tears roll down his cheeks during a train ride to a beach, the impact feels seismic. "Is this the end of Japan?" someone asks; the movie has already answered the question, albeit in an entirely different way. Oshima is the one who sets up Boy as a social case study and an exercise in using emotional distance as a tool for commentary. Abe is the boy who makes this masterpiece devastating.

Ôshima often situates his characters at the edges of a rigorously composed widescreen frame that emphasizes the oppressive architecture of a rapidly modernizing nation. He also employs visual distortions like monochrome tinting and image squeezing to suggest the skewed perspective of his corrupted young lead... Ôshima never sentimentalizes [Toshio's] existence nor lets him off the hook for his crimes. But still we feel, deeply and profoundly, for this lost soul.

Borrowing a sentimental trope from classic Japanese films—two young boys in mild conflict with their parents—the director Nagisa Oshima offers a quietly bilious vision of mercenary corruption and postwar trauma, from 1969.

Tabloid headlines dictate the structure, Nagisa Oshima fills it with mordant societal prisms and desolate, subtly extraterrestrial colors... Can something this acrid really be Oshima's most "straightforward" and "humanistic" work?

Boy is [Oshima's] alien movie, his Red Desert, his Solaris, Western History, in which society looks like a tinny tin construct of grids and flickering lights laid over some blank canvas of fog and snow and sky. About Oshima's most subdued film, it's audacious as anything, a vision of people and cars passing through and probably going nowhere.

Placed within the context of the crying Boy pacing the edge of the excavated sidewalk that opens the film - where the ground has literally been removed from under his feet - the introductory image of the confused, alienated, defeated young hero serves as an allusive, reinforcing national sentiment of profound rootlessness and bewilderment over the upended, disposable values of an alien, intraversable modern world of commodified humanity.

With characteristic tender roughness, Oshima develops this extraordinary story into an open-ended question about the truth of appearances, centering on the boy's own fantasies about his sci-fi hero. A key film in the struggle for a modern, political cinema.