Critics reviews

The tour de force of its making is central to our experience, a cognitive-conceptual layer of engagement that plays against the gentle naturalism of the fictional scenes. It keeps us in mind of our own will to believe in narrative fictions: we're a part of this project too, contributing our own narrational energies to keep it sticking together despite the making-of documentary simultaneously playing in front of our faces.

I was entertained until the last hour or so, when I realized that Mason was going to [remain] fairly passive and sullen to the end. . . . Coltrane spends much of his time listening to what other actors say to him. His reactions are limited in range and usually involve a neutral expression. In fact, I began to think that his performance is the perfect illustration of Kuleshov’s most famous, though lost, experiment.

What makes the film uncanny is not the way in which its characters or even its plot mirrors the real, but rather how precise a metaphor it manages to be for realism itself. Its conceit, in which the passage of time isn't faked, is the engine that drives the car, but its chassis is the relative stagnation of its characters

For me, watching "Boyhood" incrementally on Blu-ray inspired a desire to cast off the story and experience the movie shot by shot, perhaps even in a random sequence, in the manner of Chris Ware's graphic-novel-in-a-box, "Building Stories." Were it possible to so program "Boyhood" on disc, narrative would melt away to leave a succession of exalted present moments, a composition in the avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren called "transfigured time.

Boyhood is charmingly imperfect, with hitches and snags and moments that simply don't work very well. I won't say these aren't flaws. But … rather than detract from the experience, these made the film feel riskier as an undertaking, and marked by fingerprints. It's unscrupulous though to note the movie's nostalgic strains without also looking to the horror not of aging per se, but of having to convince yourself that youthful dreams you've had are worth giving up … "for the best.

[Linklater has] steadily constructed one of the most formidable filmographies of our generation with one accomplished feature after another. The thing is, I don't quite consider Boyhood to be among the best of them... For all of its long range scope and ambition, I find it lacks the intimacy and the specificity of his greatest films. It feels too much like an all-purpose anthem for the coming-of-age experience, which may account for why it's so phenomenally popular.

The passage of time always gets me in movies – I recall sitting stone-faced and impatient through the recent True Grit remake, then totally losing it when grown-up Mattie showed up in the epilogue – so a film where the passage of time is the actual subject seemed a surefire emotional sledgehammer. In the event,Boyhood left me surprisingly unmoved – yet it's stuck in my mind in the days since, if only by virtue of uniqueness. Like I say, everyone should see this movie.

Intentionally or not, one of the finest US films of the 21st century to date reflects the receding primacy of movies in the young imagination.

The movie is an affirmation of, an insistence on, humanity; it is not that Mason "becomes" a man, but that each moment in his life becomes a part of his person. Where traditional coming-of-age films are forced to focus on how a single moment or series of moments changes a person, Boyhood, due to its scope, allows itself to amass a multitude of moments into the person who experiences them.

The movie is such a strong, intimate account of multiple aspects of the life and times of its protagonist, Mason, who's played by Ellar Coltrane with an exemplary mix of commitment and unaffectedness, that it's easy not only to see the movie as exclusively his story but to believe that "Boyhood" partakes entirely of his point of view.

I wish Linklater had the time to settle into these sequences longer, to bathe in the totality of moments a little more. It's an absurd wish, but I think it would be a greater film at five hours than three, to allow more weight to accrue to each image – to discover how they snuck off with that Victoria's Secret catalogue, to see the little adventures that feel so momentous as children.

Much is made of the fact that Boyhood was shot in real-time, a total of 39 days over 12 years, from 2002 to 2013. What transpires within these clear-cut chronological brackets, however, is much less straightforward. In fact, the cinematic medium here might be said to be _unreal time_, so elastic, and so weak in its power to eliminate that it seems to extend indefinitely in all directions, a horizontal field of possibility.