Beautiful Boy Reviews
Q Network Film Desk
There are no answers, only more questions, and the film beats you down, which is probably the point and the closest we can ever get to truly empathizing with parents whose children go mad.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Jam! Movies
It is a mood dampener of the first degree, but it's a rarely told story at a time when this type of tragedy is becoming tragically ordinary.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Top CriticIn Beautiful Boy, the themes are vast but the picture is small, and the ensuing emptiness is what the characters are meant to feel -- not us.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Boston Herald
Beautiful Boy remains removed and distant.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
NOW Toronto
It's primarily an actor's showcase, with Bello once again displaying her incredible range as she copes with the waves of grief, denial and rage.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
An excruciating drama about a couple caught in the aftermath of a pivotal moment involving their college-age son.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
San Francisco Examiner
'Boy,' for all its exploitation of the sensational, is a tense affair that challenges us with questions we may never have thought to ask.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
DustinPutman.com
The film's depiction of a married couple in emotional peril rings true rather than maudlin, sustained at a riveting pitch through the consummately raw, sympathetic performances of its two leads.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
At a certain point lofty objectivity is just a refusal to engage, and no raw camera work can disguise it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
Most of "Beautiful Boy" is unrelentingly bleak and depressing, but there are smatterings of understatement and grace.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
This feels like a movie that won a high school current-events contest: Take a tragedy, make a movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Ku focuses on the effects the aftermath has on those intimately involved, and they are grim.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Ku gives us the shooter's parents' view of the tragedy and it is just as devastating as anything we can imagine among victims' families.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The most daring aspect of the film, fully realized in Bello's grave performance, may be the notion that a parent can invest endless love in a child and one day find him unfathomable.
eFilmCritic.com
Unlike the rather basic idea of Rabbit Hole being spun into other areas of forgiveness and catharsis, Ku's film exists in a bubble that just keeps floating.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Boxoffice Magazine
Successfully contextualizes its tragedy with urgency and emotional rawness without crumbling into maudlin melodrama.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
If the key performances in "Beautiful Boy" were any less honest, the film's half-formed suppositions would undo it utterly.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Beautiful Boy is not an entertainment but an experience. And a kind of cinematic sensitivity training.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
A film like this can end honestly in only one way, and Ku is true to it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
