December Boys Critic Reviews

A refreshingly gentle treatment of familiar themes such as the inevitability of change, the dashing of youthful illusions and mutability of family. Enhanced by an exotic locale, the movie overcomes a well-trodden narrative path and unflinchingly brandishes its sentimentality as it stakes out its crowd-pleasing territory.Read the full review

The film's dramatic moments are small but exquisitely rendered so that you feel the emotions experienced so many years ago. The film lingers afterward in your mind like a favorite vacation that triggered moments of sheer intensity.Read the full review

For much of its duration, December is poignantly bittersweet, but the closing sugar rush washes its pleasing ambiguities away.Read the full review

The filmmakers can't decide whether to trust the period innocence of the book (and play down their casting coup) or let the young man rip as a preteen-babe magnet... So December Boys splits the difference -- safely, dully.Read the full review

A problematic memory play, shot through with honey-colored nostalgia, that backs nervously into darker matters.Read the full review

Occasionally touching but rarely convincing coming-of-ager.Read the full review

There seem to be two movies going on here at the same time, and December Boys would have been better off going all the way with one of them.Read the full review

Oversaturated with sweetness and light.Read the full review

Radcliffe is good at showing vulnerability but without the skills to give it gradation. The magic doesn't work for him this time.Read the full review