Boyhood

As his Before... trilogy perfectly illustrated, Richard Linklater is a film-maker obsessed with time - both its passing and the difficulty of ever truly capturing it on film. With the extraordinary Boyhood, the story of a young American every-boy (Ellar Coltrane), shot at intervals over 12 years with the same cast, the director comes closer than ever to achieving the impossible. Tracking Coltrane up to the age of 18, the film is told not through births, marriages and deaths but the moments in between, casually punctuated by cultural milestones like midnight Harry Potter book launches, the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the wave of optimism that swept Obama to his historic first presidential term. Elevated by fantastic performances all round - especially from Patricia Arquette as the boy's quietly heroic single mother - and told with Linklater's trademark generosity and lightness of touch, Boyhood is an epic of the everyday, as uplifting as it is universal.