Half Nelson: Critic Reviews

Half Nelson offers an opportunity to marvel, once again, at the dazzling talent of Ryan Gosling for playing young men as believable as they are psychologically trip-wired.

Half Nelson is that rarest of marvels: an American fiction film that wears its political heart on its sleeve.

Dunne [Gosling] is an enjoyable and impressive creation, justifiably recognised with an Oscar nomination for Gosling earlier this year.

A compelling drama that establishes Ryan Gosling as one of the finest actors of his generation.

Nearly every scene rings with its own ragged truth.

Gritty and terrifically human, Half Nelson is not your big brother's Hollywood high school movie.

Half Nelson drags the crowd-pleasing white-teacher-inspires-black-students movie onto the mat and pins the flabby genre in the first round.

Sardonic yet moving, Half Nelson deftly outlines the perils of youthful idealism without lapsing into knee-jerk cynicism.

Ryan Fleck's Half Nelson is one of the most compelling and idea-laden American indie films to come along in a while, and it features one of this year's finest performances from Ryan Gosling.

It'll be weeks before I shake off [Gosling's] performance -- or the shadows of this small, extraordinary narrative-feature debut from filmmaking partners Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden.

The tone is even and thorough, the performances restrained and believable, the implied future bleak yet somehow satisfying.

Downbeat as it is, Half Nelson is a genuinely inspirational film -- a terrifically compelling character study and a tricky exploration of the links (and busted links) between the personal and the political.

A wholly absorbing and delicately shaded portrait of an educator played by Ryan Gosling, a young man harboring an offstage secret.

One might also argue that a crack addict couldn't be responsible enough to be a good teacher, but he's the most believable protagonist in any American movie I've seen this year.

Gosling anchors the picture, and Epps ... has a kind of grace, presence and knowingness that far more experienced actors struggle vainly to find.

Ryan Gosling is electrifying in the role, delivering a performance that is sure to catapult him into the front ranks of stardom.

It's interested in how real people, not movie characters, might act in the situation. It is about all the gray areas, all the complexities, all the layers of meaning.

The key to the direction of all the performances is tactful restraint and nuanced modulation.

The scalding talents of the moody, introspective young actor Ryan Gosling are sharply focused in Half Nelson, elevating an otherwise slight and depressingly offbeat film high above the realm of the ordinary with blast-furnace force.

A terrific performance by Ryan GoslingRyan Gosling is the chief but hardly sole reason to embrace Half Nelson.

Mostly, we just watch the teacher get high, and his classroom talks about civil rights are nothing but filler.

The movie comes down to Gosling's spot-on performance and how we feel about it.

Beneath the familiar veneer is a film of profound depths and churning undercurrents, and the result is a stark portrait of a world where nothing comes easy but just giving up.

'Half Nelson': A Magnetic Ryan Gosling

Half Nelson gives the musty theme a full twist, and what emerges seems remarkably fresh. And yet mature too.