Critic Reviews

• Ted Fry, Seattle Times

  Moral dilemmas faced by immature teens is fine fare for young-adult fiction, but a movie that wants them to be taken as something bigger needs better management than Nearing Grace can provide.

• Stephen Whitty, Newark Star-Ledger

  The story here is as dog-eared as an old beach book, and about as deep.

• Jack Mathews, New York Daily News

  The performances by Smith, Brewster and veteran David Morse, as a morbidly depressed widower, elevate Nearing Grace to something near grace.

• Luke Y. Thompson, Village Voice

  ...cinematic youth has rarely seemed so convincingly uncertain, and Brewster could definitely drive a young guy crazy.

• Michael Ordoña, Los Angeles Times

  Smart, funny and, thanks in no small part to David Geddes' cinematography, it occasionally approaches the poetic.

• Laura Kern, New York Times

  Bursting with hormones, angst, humor and heartbreak, Rick Rosenthal's Nearing Grace, set during the late 1970's in suburban New Jersey, follows a teenager's efforts to survive both the recent loss of his mother and his senior year of high school.

• Mike McGranaghan, Aisle Seat

  It feels like perhaps the screenplay was intensely personal and/or autobiographical, yet it's suspiciously lacking in any dramatic tension.

• Wade Major, Boxoffice Magazine

  It's so exceptionally well done, so exceedingly well-cast that it makes one realize how few such films actually succeed at all.

• Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, Spirituality and Practice

  A fine coming-of-age drama about a sexually eager young man who discovers that anything is possible with a friend who is loving and trustworthy after years of giving and forgiving.

• Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide's Movie Guide

  The story is small, but their performances give it depth and weight.

• Pam Grady, Reel.com

  It's also refreshingly low-key and more intelligent than 90% of the movies aimed at the teen crowd. That by itself is a fine achievement.

• Marc Mohan, Oregonian

  [It] makes you feel like a heel for not liking it: Independently made and heartfelt, it also happens to have been shot in Portland. Nonetheless, the accumulation of cliches big and small manage to erase whatever goodwill its other features have engendered

• Bob Strauss, Los Angeles Daily News

  The tone is psychological realism, as opposed to, say, American Pie-style burlesque. But the main emphasis is on sex and drugs anyway. In any case, it's not very illuminating.

• Chris Hewitt (St. Paul), St. Paul Pioneer Press

  Nearing Grace means to be a gritty look at what it was like to come of age in the late '70s, but its reality is hampered by the unreal pretentiousness of every word the characters utter.

• Bill White, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  The dialogue is full of fortune cookie aphorisms and stilted literary phrases that were never meant to be spoken aloud.

• Scott Foundas, L.A. Weekly

  If we've seen it all before, Nearing Grace's mix of nostalgia and contempt for the follies of youth is a potent one.

• Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine

  Sucks to be Nearing Grace on the same week that Zerophilia also opens.

Read all 17 critic reviews