All Critics (152)
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Top Critics (36)
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Fresh (142)
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Rotten (15)
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DVD (13)
Ryan Gosling's self-destructive teacher is easily the year's most mesmerizing character study. And he's hardly the only reason to see this film. Shareeka Epps anchors her scenes as Drey with a self-possession way beyond her years.
'Half Nelson': A Magnetic Ryan Gosling
The movie comes down to Gosling's spot-on performance and how we feel about it.
Gosling is indeed amazing as a bewildered, depressed New York schoolteacher who is slipping into dire drug addiction; it's exactly the kind of star turn in a smaller film that Academy voters could (and should) notice.
Although the subject promises more than the film can deliver, there is compensation in Gosling's convincing, unromanticized portrayal of someone seeking escape from longing and loss that neither he nor the movie can really define.
For a solid 107 minutes, Gosling shapes his character into a flesh-and-blood tone poem.
Indie inner-city drama with drug-addict teacher.
"Half Nelson" elegantly tiptoe around its elephant in the room: Dan's most compelling instruction to not let Drey enter the drug trade is his own destruction. That point of panic turns into something approaching penance.
The filmmakers bask disingenuously in their tidy vision of border-busting healing
A sometimes subtle, sometimes bombastic (Gosling's performance ranges from brilliant to bug-eyed) parable about class, race, power, and the dialectics of family relationships.
The movie hits a stream of false notes when Dunne's students deliver oral reports on Civil Rights struggles that could only have been plagiarized. The film's ending isn't only meager, it's utterly listless.
Gosling is up for an Oscar (R) for his work in Half Nelson, and there's no question he earned the nomination.
Half Nelson trades melodrama for authenticity, cliche heroics for genuine heart, cheap cinematic parlor tricks for blessed restraint.
A half-hearted study in black and white which is well-acted but based on a script which never dares to take enough risks.
We've gotten so close to these characters (and they to each other) that we don't want to let them go.
It is, in fact, a fine piece of work: reticent, intelligent, wholly devoid of triumphalism or self-pity.
It's hardly a film which trumpets its virtues but that's part of the pleasure to be had from it. It doesn't know how good it is.
While the students first mock Marxist dialectics and notions of oppression applied to the everyday, they are eventually eagerly embracing the rebellious spirit of Attica and Allende in class presentations that provide euphoric momentum.
Looks to me like a self conscious film that thrives on its own negativity. Studied, anti-establishment, arthouse cinema that gloats over its moral superiority %u2013 which is rather ironic.
It's a thoughtful character study with Gosling simply tremendous as the functioning addict, who seems to use crack to anaesthetise him from his inability to form adult relationships.
A riveting study in dislocation and connection, hurt and healing, with Gosling revealed as potentially the most gifted actor of his generation.
It's impressively adult, sure-footed filmmaking, and that Best Actor nod was definitely deserved.
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