About Boyhood
Richard Linklater filmed the same cast for a few weeks every year between 2002 and 2013, watching one Texas boy grow from six to eighteen in real time. The trick of the production is invisible to itself; what remains is the most ambitious low-key American film of its decade.
Released in 2014 and running a tight 2h 45m, Boyhood sits firmly in the drama tradition that American art-house cinemas have spent the last two decades quietly defending. The film is rated R and presented in English.
Director: Richard Linklater
Richard Linklater belongs to the cohort of directors whose work tends to land first at festivals — Sundance, Locarno, the New York Film Festival, SXSW — before opening on a small handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then rolling out, week by week, to the independent circuit elsewhere in the country. Boyhood is part of that pipeline. If you have responded to this film, the director's other available titles in our catalog are listed in the sidebar; Richard Linklater's filmography rewards sustained attention.
Cast
The principal cast — Ellar Coltrane, Patricia Arquette, Ethan Hawke, Lorelei Linklater — is the kind of ensemble that art-house audiences will recognize from adjacent festival titles. Independent casting tends to favor performers who can carry a long take, hold a quiet scene, and trust a director's control of pace; this film is no exception.
Where to watch Boyhood
Our seasonal catalog — an editorial sample of the circuit, not a live ticketing feed — places it at independent cinemas in 12 US cities. Coverage is deepest in:
- Los Angeles, CA — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- New York, NY — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Brooklyn, NY — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- San Francisco, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Fredonia, NY — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Sonoma, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Sioux Center, IA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Orem, UT — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Saint Paul, MN — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Lake Oswego, OR — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Saint Louis Park, MN — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Greenwood Village, CO — listed at 1 independent cinema.
If your city isn't on the list, the film may still surface on a future repertory week or festival weekend; check our full cinema directory.
Why it belongs on the indie circuit
The independent and art-house exhibition circuit exists to surface films like this one — work that doesn't fit the wide-release calendar, doesn't have the marketing budget of a studio tentpole, and depends instead on programmers, critics, and word-of-mouth to find an audience. Boyhood is a clean fit for that model: a 2h 45m drama work, made outside the studio system, that benefits from being seen on a real screen with a real audience rather than queued up on a streaming dashboard. The cinemas in the cities listed above are the venues doing that work for this title.
Cross-references
If you are building a viewing schedule around this film, our Drama genre hub indexes adjacent work in the same tradition.