Beautiful Boy Is An Imperfect Drama With Two Great Lead Performances

Drug addiction, as well as addiction in general, is, like many epidemics that affect actual human beings, something that crops up in American cinema frequently as just a cheap ploy to drum up shock value drama. The people actually suffering from the illness of addiction don't get their plight or just their own separate personalities humanized. Writer/director Felix Van Groeningen seeks to rectify this with his new movie (which marks his first foray into English-language American cinema) Beautiful Boy, which is based on two separate non-fiction books chronicling the life of Nic Sheff (here portrayed by Timothee Chalamet) who has struggled with his addiction to numerous different kinds of substances for years.

Last Flag Flying Is The Newest Thoughtful & Heartfelt Accomplishment From Director Richard Linklater

Some of the most famous movies made by director Richard Linklater tend to center on youthful protagonists, like the High Schoolers in Dazed and Confused, the college-aged fraternity boys of Everybody Wants Some!!! or the lead character who inhabits numerous stages of youth in Boyhood. Linklater has a knack for writing both realistic and dramatically involving younger characters, but Last Flag Flying shows he doesn't lose his talents as a screenwriter when he's dealing with older individuals (fellow entries in Linklater's dynamite 2010's run Before Midnight and Bernie are similar showcases for this), on the contrary, he seems to thrive when given the opportunity to explore more life-experienced human beings.