It feels like perhaps the screenplay was intensely personal and/or autobiographical, yet it's suspiciously lacking in any dramatic tension.
Comment
11/10/07
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Nearing Grace (2006)
45 %
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted: 22
Fresh: 10
Rotten:12
Average Rating: 5.3/10
Consensus: This coming-of-age story doesn't dig deep enough to offer anything fresh to the genre.
Runtime: 1 hr 45 mins
Genre: Dramas
Theatrical Release: Oct 13, 2006 Limited
Synopsis: A coming-of-age independent feature film set in late 1970s, NEARING GRACE follows high school senior Henry Nearing (Gregory Smith). Nearing has to cope with the death of his mother, and is also forced to come to terms with evolving from a... [More]
Starring: Gregory Smith, Jordana Brewster, David Morse, Ashley Johnson
Director: Rick Rosenthal
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Reviews for Nearing Grace
It’s so exceptionally well done, so exceedingly well-cast that it makes one realize how few such films actually succeed at all.
10/15/06
A fine coming-of-age drama about a sexually eager young man who discovers that anything is possible with a friend who is loving and trustworthy after years of giving and forgiving.
10/13/06
Moral dilemmas faced by immature teens is fine fare for young-adult fiction, but a movie that wants them to be taken as something bigger needs better management than Nearing Grace can provide.
10/13/06
It's also refreshingly low-key and more intelligent than 90% of the movies aimed at the teen crowd. That by itself is a fine achievement.
10/13/06
[It] makes you feel like a heel for not liking it: Independently made and heartfelt, it also happens to have been shot in Portland. Nonetheless, the accumulation of cliches big and small manage to erase whatever goodwill its other features have engendered
10/13/06
The story here is as dog-eared as an old beach book, and about as deep.
10/13/06
Top Critic The performances by Smith, Brewster and veteran David Morse, as a morbidly depressed widower, elevate Nearing Grace to something near grace.
10/13/06
Top Critic The tone is psychological realism, as opposed to, say, American Pie-style burlesque. But the main emphasis is on sex and drugs anyway. In any case, it's not very illuminating.
10/13/06
...cinematic youth has rarely seemed so convincingly uncertain, and Brewster could definitely drive a young guy crazy.
10/13/06
Top Critic Smart, funny and, thanks in no small part to David Geddes' cinematography, it occasionally approaches the poetic.
10/12/06
Top Critic Bursting with hormones, angst, humor and heartbreak, Rick Rosenthal's Nearing Grace, set during the late 1970's in suburban New Jersey, follows a teenager's efforts to survive both the recent loss of his mother and his senior year of high school.
10/12/06
Top Critic Nearing Grace means to be a gritty look at what it was like to come of age in the late '70s, but its reality is hampered by the unreal pretentiousness of every word the characters utter.
10/12/06
The dialogue is full of fortune cookie aphorisms and stilted literary phrases that were never meant to be spoken aloud.
10/12/06
The characters are stereotypes, their situations are familiar and the outcome is predictable. But the whole thing is viewed from such a feel-good perspective that we're willing to overlook much of that.
10/12/06
Top Critic An unsympathetic lead, a story that's been told a million times (the Scarlett-Ashley/star-crossed lovers story), relationships that don't make sense and an unfamiliarity with basic physics.
10/12/06
Top Critic If we've seen it all before, Nearing Grace's mix of nostalgia and contempt for the follies of youth is a potent one.
10/12/06
Some Kind of Wonderful? No, some kind of earnest, stranded adaptation of Nearing Grace, Scott Sommer's late-1970s coming-of-age novel.
10/11/06
Top Critic Sucks to be Nearing Grace on the same week that Zerophilia also opens.
09/22/06
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