'Boyhood' Has 99% On Rotten Tomatoes. It Is Almost The Perfect Movie
It's no surprise that Richard Linklater's movie Boyhood was this week installed as the favorite to win Best Picture at the Oscars next year. Filmed over 12 years with the same cast, the movie is ground-breaking cinema and the critics are absolutely unanimous in their praise.
![Co-stars Ellar Coltrane [L] and Lorelei Linklater [R] in 'Boyhood'](http://images.contactmusic.com/images/feature-images/boyhood-ellar-colltrane-lorelei-linklater-636-380.jpg)
Boyhood stars Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette as the parents of Mason, a child played by the stellar Ellar Coltrane, who grows up before our eyes. It's a stunning time-capsule of a movie that charts the rocky terrain of childhood through road trips, family dinners, birthdays and graduation.
"Any film that takes twelve years to shoot should be commended for its stamina alone; yet no sense of grind, still less of fatigue, attends this Richard Linklater project" said the New York Times.
More: Ellar Coltrane's journey in Richard Linklater's 'Boyhood'
More: 'Boyhood' - the tremendous risk that came good at the box-office
More: 'Boyhood' - luck, innovation and bundles of talent equals cinematic history
"Few filmmakers ever make a great movie. Fewer still ever make a movie that expands what movies can express. Richard Linklater does both with Boyhood," said Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle.
"As a film that dares to honor small moments and the life they add up to, "Boyhood" isn't just a masterpiece. It's a miracle," said Anna Hornaday of the Washington Post.
_Next page: what if Ethan Hawke had been hit by a bus?
"Linklater's writing is typically warm and insightful, and the cast is uniformly excellent, including Ellar Coltrane as the quiet, down-to-earth hero," said J.R Jones of the Chicago Reader._
During a recent interview with Oregon Live, Linklater discussed the obvious: what would have happened in Ethan Hawke had been hit by a bus?
"That's kind of a thing that never spoke its name," he said, "You never even talked about stuff like that, just the way you don't in life, do you? We knew that statistically we were probably going to be okay there. And we were."
Boyhood is in cinemas now.
Your browser doesn't support HTML5 video.