Best movie of this year hands down!

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

I liked this movie. Imagine a teenager, named John, the typical guy who goes to the last year of high school and doesn't quite know what to do with his life. Then, one day, he finds a beautiful woman lying on the floor in a field who, apparently, is on the run for something she did and takes her to his room. It's a boarding school, he might get kicked out, but he doesn't care; he just wants to help her. The look on his face when the woman first wakes up and the teenager walks towards her, is the first sign of a magical performance by Lukas Hass; it's a look that combines the excitement of having this woman in his bed and the curiosity of wanting to know what she might have done.The woman is called Patty Vare, played by the wonderful Winona Ryder in the kind of role she knows by heart but never forgets to add new elements to. Here, besides appearing to be somewhere other than the real world (she fell off a horse before John found her and doesn't remember much), she masters the 'look'; that seductive look only she can achieve and makes anyone go crazy to the point that they would do anything for her. Well, at least that's the effect it had on John in the movie…And on me, of course.But don't get things wrong. I personally don't think "Boys" is a romantic movie, even if it was writer/director Stacy Cochran's intention. I would call it some kind of an 'age analysis'. Yes, there are romance related moments that make you smile because Winona is an expert on the subject, but this time her character Patty is an expert too: on men. So the study the film tries to make is what can happen when a woman of Patty's experience meets a kid like John in an extreme situation.That's why Cochran shows us flashbacks of what happened to Patty before meeting John; they're necessary for us to know the kind of woman she is. On the other hand, we don't know anything about John but the fact that he has a bad relationship with his father (a respectable Chris Cooper). But we don't need to know, because we realize when he is with Patty; when we hear what he says and see what he does.There's a scene in the town fair, where Patty and John are together in the merry-go-round. The final moment of that scene explains why I liked this movie, and those are the scenes in the movie that work. Not the police sub-plot (led by a convincing John C. Reilly), not John's relationship with his friends at school (although some scenes are good to watch more of Hass' perfect work), not even the conflict with his father.There's another scene really worth paying attention too: a chat in a table where a beautiful light from the window makes Patty seem so vulnerable. Luckily for us, this is a movie where we have the final world; about whether we believe the characters or not and about the inconclusive and far-fetched ending. Yes, it may not honor reality itself, but "Boys" honors its title; and I liked that. I liked this movie.

Look, you don't watch every movie because it's a good movie. "Boys" – the title has wandered in from some gay porno flick shopping list -- is for all intents and purposes a bad movie and even nice film critics have been mean to it. But if this is a failure, this is not your average failure. Oh, no. It has moments, and an interesting, borderline cultish, cast. Skeet Ulrich is almost forgotten, but in his fleeting appearances he has a dysfunctional neediness, luminous sex appeal, a scary attraction – you see that also in "As Good As It Gets," where he robs and beats up Greg Kinnear. There's something dangerous – and expendable – about Skeet. We may think of John C. Reilly in PT Anderson's "Magnolia," and see that same homely touching appeal on idle here in his Maryland State Police role. This was probably the only time the mercurial, offbeat Lucas Haas was conventionally cute enough to match up with a pretty -- at times quite beautiful -- girl like Winona. And her dazed, out-of-it quality – she's clearly a young lady who makes nothing but wrong choices in men -- contributes to the curiously touching moments the two have in the amusement park when the high school boy briefly but intensely falls for the 25-year-old and proposes marriage and eternal loyalty and they kiss sweetly and the rest of the world disappears. That's the high point. Now, there's nothing more tedious than the boys in the opening segment nattering at each other, threatening to rat on each other, but curious to get in on any trouble that's going to come down—but the way they behave and look in this movie is completely natural and believable. Like most real schoolboys they're likely to bore each other to death before they'll ever enter into some sort of Lord of the Flies adventure. Chris Cooper – what is he doing here? He's playing an archetypal father, the one we don't see in "Dead Poets Society," the flipside of his twisted military dad in "American Beauty." James LeGros and Catherine Keener complete the surprising cast. Using a classic college campus – St. Johns, Annapolis -- for a fancy prep school works and heightens the posh effect. The movie doesn't altogether work otherwise. It's energy is sluggish; it has no drive.. But you come back to it looking for something that didn't come together, but might have, because some choice ingredients were there. And won't come this way again.. Check out Haas in "Johns", dated the same year, with David Arquette for another good offbeat role, a wilder, quirkier one that also seems to fit him like a soft old glove. He's never had the role he deserves, but what an actor. James Salter, whose story this is based on, is a very fine writer. The music isn't inappropriate; it's just obtrusively loud, the way schoolboys would play it, if they weren't being properly supervised.

This films attempts to be three things: a mystery (wherein it wastes actor Skeet Ulrich), a "first love" story, and a portrait of boys at a boarding school. Since a few of the young actors are decent, the movie almost succeeds at the portrait. But if fails at the other to stories. Ryder sleep walks through an enigmatic and poorly conceived role, and there really is not very much tension or mystery. This could have been a noirish hoot, but it ends up being uncooked scrambled eggs.

This film is really strange. I think that the part that deals with the relationships between the college boys is over simplified and stereotypical, while John's relationship with Patty is well done. I think this film could have been much better with little effort.Winona Ryder is as always beautiful but remains once again enclosed in the same character she has been doing time after time.