Boyhood

Boyhood follows Mason, a boy growing up in Texas, over roughly twelve years. His mother, Olivia, raises him and his older sister Samantha after separating from their father, and the family moves repeatedly as she pursues an education and later a career, while the children keep a bond with their father, Mason Sr., who drifts in and out of their lives. The film is made up of ordinary episodes rather than a single plot: schools and friendships, camping trips with their father, a first beer and a first joint, early romances, and Olivia's marriages, which repeatedly unsettle the household. The account runs from Mason's first year of school to the day he leaves for college.

Richard Linklater directed and wrote the film, producing it with John Sloss and Jonathan Sehring. It is the fourteenth of the twenty-two features he has directed, arriving between Before Midnight and Everybody Wants Some!!. Ellar Coltrane plays Mason, Patricia Arquette plays Olivia, Ethan Hawke plays Mason Sr., and Lorelei Linklater plays Samantha; eighty-one cast members and forty-one crew members are credited.

Released in 2014, Boyhood cost about four million dollars and took roughly forty-eight million worldwide. It is rated 7.9 on IMDb from some 381,000 votes and 7.5 on TMDB from a few thousand. A critics' rating of 9.3 from 331 reviews places it noticeably above the audience scores.