Who payed the critics

Just so...so bad

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

We loved this movie. A real pleasure to watch. Before seeing this movie we had no idea about the background of any of the Beatles. This was educational as well as entertaining. As children of that era it brought back so many memories. Overall the acting was pretty good from all the characters and the production took us back to that time. We will be watching this movie over and over again.

It was very interesting to see a biopic focusing on icon John Lennon's early life, or shall we say teenage years, rather than his climb to fame with The Beatles. While not one of the best biopics out there, 'Nowhere Boy' luckily is the opposite of the film's title.'Nowhere Boy' has its flaws. The exposition in the final act is rather clunky, and some of the drama gets over-sentimental and melodramatic, also somewhat over-heated. While Sam Taylor-Wood doesn't do a bad job directing there is a little too much of a measured approach when it could have been tighter. That it is very inaccurate wasn't as big a problem for me, biopics are not exactly known for their accuracy and many have done far worse jobs.However, the period is very evocatively rendered and done justice by photography that has style and grit. The music is great.There are some thoughtful moments in the script, and there is a nice balance of moments of poignant drama and pop history. The story is often engrossing and is pretty illuminating, not really making the mistake of saying little new that we don't know already.Aaron Johnson is highly credible as Lennon and more than holds his own against the more experienced actresses Kristin Scott Thomas and Anne-Marie Duff. Scott Thomas in particular is marvellous and Duff is a fine contrast.Overall, pretty good and interesting. 7/10 Bethany Cox

This is a gorgeous film, a loving tribute with a lot of heart and soul. It tones down the hoopla and just tells the story of Lennon and his mother, without any gratuitous references to the future Beatles -- I half expected them to show the tomb of Eleanor Rigby in the graveyard scene, or a Penny Lane road sign, or a sign for Strawberry Fields. Having grown up reading all about the Beatles, and even having read biographies by Lennon's sisters and by his wife Cynthia, this film still taught me some new things about Lennon. His mother Julia, played beautifully by Anne-Marie Duff, comes across as such a free spirit, almost manic depressive but with an infectious joie de vivre. In the short time she knew John, she made such an impression, teaching him to play banjo and educating him about the blues. She also was openly loving and affectionate. What a tragedy she died when she was so young and just getting to know John. Playing his Aunt Mimi is Kristin Scott-Thomas, and it's to her credit (and the scriptwriters') that she isn't made out to be too severe. While strict and precise, she is also loving, and tries to do the right thing in adopting John when Julia can't look after him. When she's detailing Julia's history of having children to different men, she's extremely judgemental, but it would have been in keeping with the era she came from. The lead actor Aaron Johnson, while not looking identical to Lennon, does a great job, in portraying a multi-faceted teenager, at alternate times tough, artistic, vulnerable, witty and crude. The actor playing Paul McCartney bore hardly any resemblance to the real McCartney, although he did bring passion to the role, and you can see the good influence McCartney had on Lennon, in teaching him songs, and just being such a great friend after they'd both lost their mothers. When the two of them sit close by with their guitars, you can see that McCartney's way of playing his guitar wrong way around was ideal in teaching Lennon chords, because it was a mirror.

Aaron Johnson stars as the young John Lennon who is always causing trouble for riding on the roof of a bus, getting into brawls with bullies, or flashing girls in school, or missing class and never paying attention in class whenever he decided to attend class (it sounds a lot like me, actually LOL) and lives with his Aunt Mimi (the wonderful Kristin Scott Thomas in a superb supportive role here). Little did I know about his troubled childhood and I was taken aback when I saw what unraveled during Nowhere Boy: John didn't actually know his mother and grew up thinking that she was somewhere far, far away along with his father and was left to Aunt Mimi's devices to raise this rebellious yet lovable character. I love how the film star never tries to imitate or glorify John Lennon in any way, there are some acts that John does to his Aunt Mimi, his friends and even his mother during this film that made my jaw drop.Speaking of his mother Julia, in his search for her it's a friend of him (or was he his cousin, I can't quite remember) that tells John where she is, his cousin shows him that Julia is actually at walking distance from where he's always lived, a few blocks from Aunt Mimi's home. The first meeting John ever had with Julia was awkward: a sixteen year old confident boy suddenly becomes very sheepish and vulnerable in front of your very eyes, it was touching watching John melt in the sight of his real mother whom he had given up on, the thought of seeing her was beyond belief and was more than a dream come true, it was as if the boy had hit the jackpot and was suddenly in the presence of his other half, a part of him that had been ripped from him when she was out of his life for 12 years or so and suddenly he felt the urge to catch up with Julia.Julia, as it turns out, had remarried and had 2 daughters and lived her life as if she had never had a son before. Upon seeing John at her door you could tell that a dark episode in her life had returned to haunt her yet she didn't let it show to John and they began a strange and wonderful bond where they would go on dates to the movies or buying records or out and about. She also introduced him to music and her love to play music. It was Julia that awoke a part of John that was always there yet he never knew it until he met Julia.The real drama begins on John's 17th birthday when Julia decided to throw a party in his honor. The drunken teenagers playing rock'n'roll music while John was being his bad self in spite of his mother, he started to resent the fact that she pretty much abandoned him without a trace and the fact that they had lived so close all this time and never had bothered to be part of his life when he needed his mother the most. Aaron Johnson does a great job in containing all that anger and rage inside John for as long as he could in order to explode in front of the camera when he finally confronts Julia in her front yard and demands that she tells him what was the reason she abandoned him with his Aunt Mimi and never looked back.And that is probably the most heart breaking moment when, upon coming back home with his Aunt Mimi along with Julia, that he learns the awful truth that he was seeking all his life: when John was a little boy, around 5 or 6 years old, he'd watched his parents get in a huge argument that turned a bit violent and John was given a choice: You want to go with mommy or daddy? Just thinking of the scene bring chills down my spine, how can you have a young boy make such a horrible choice? What kind of parent would ever do that to their child? Having come from a broken home myself, I had to make that same hard decision but it was my own decision to go with my mother. Nobody had sat down and explained what was wrong with my family but I wasn't five years old trying to make an adult decision. To think that John had to make this hard decision at such a tender age was just too much to bear. Then we get to see how Aunt Mimi came to John's rescue when she witnessed Julia and her husband get into a heated argument and took it upon herself to get this innocent boy out of harm's way and hid him in her own home where she would raise this kid as her own. It's the ultimate sacrifice that a woman can ever make, a sacrifice of love for a young boy who has no knowledge of what's happening in front of his very eyes. John's father apparently took off to Germany to never return again while Julia came to see John at Mimi's house. That was the haunting image of Julia knocking on their door, the image that will forever be stuck in John's memory and one that will keep coming back as if it were a horrible nightmare, a troubling dream that John can never quite put together until this very moment. It's a scene so emotionally charged and performed quite well that I needed a few moment to contain my own tears, it's certainly the best scene in NOWHERE BOY.