Entertainment Weekly by Owen Gleiberman

By the end of Nowhere Boy, you'll feel you know John Lennon better than you ever did.

Arizona Republic by Bill Goodykoontz

It's a measure of how good a film Nowhere Boy is that it would be compelling even if it were the story of the formative years of a boy named Joe Brown.

New York Post by Kyle Smith

It's strange enough to be raised by your aunt. For young John Lennon, things get stranger still when he finds himself dating his mother.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

We learn that the emotional roller coaster of his formative years probably contributed to the complexity of his lyrics.

USA Today by Claudia Puig

It paints a complex picture of strained familial relations and a poignant look at the wounds inflicted on a sensitive soul by an unreliable parent.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch by Joe Williams

Nowhere Boy is too astutely written and directed to go to predictably melodramatic extremes.

Los Angeles Times by Betsy Sharkey

There are so many ways in which Nowhere Boy, an emotionally raw and yet raucous, rockin' riff on John Lennon's turbulent teenage years, is such an entertaining piece of nostalgia.

Chicago Reader by J.R. Jones

The maternal triangle is pretty well handled too, giving a good sense of where Lennon came by all that exuberance and melancholy.

Salon by Andrew O'Hehir

Scott Thomas' delicate, ferocious performance captures a woman quietly at war with herself, who begins to realize that her vision of respectability may not fit the remarkable young man in her care.

Rolling Stone by Peter Travers

Johnson doesn't resemble, much less embody, Lennon, but he does catch his distinctive glint of mischief tinged with pain. Duff and Scott Thomas are both exceptional, revealing how John's relationship with these two clashing sisters marked his character.

Movieline by Michelle Orange

Although this is a film about the influential women in Lennon's life, it succeeds equally in its evocation of the family Lennon built among his boyhood mates.

Boxoffice Magazine by Amy Nicholson

Like Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There"-which never once came out and said the name "Bob Dylan"-Nowhere Boy bites its tongue and refuses to say "The Beatles."

The A.V. Club by Keith Phipps

It's a tender, but sometimes untended, portrait of the artist as a young man-and occasionally as a young asshole-that's handsome, dutiful, and finally, a little dull.

Empire

Anchored by a strong central turn, Nowhere Boy crafts entertaining, small-scale drama out of Lennon's huge-sized legend. It just lacks the spark and ambition of its subject.

Time Out by Joshua Rothkopf

If only the script had been content to stick with its let's-start-a-band verve. Like many a musical biopic, Nowhere Boy wants to explain away the man (as if a song like "In My Life" weren't explanation enough).

Village Voice

Lacking the song's raw emotive power, Taylor-Wood's debut feature is a rote coming-of-age tableau that churns through stations of anger, inspiration, reconciliation, McCartney, and Harrison.

Variety by Leslie Felperin

A respectable but surprisingly conventional feature-debut effort from Brit artist-turned-helmer Sam Taylor-Wood.

The Hollywood Reporter by Ray Bennett

Strong performances by Kristin Scott Thomas as the stern Aunt Mimi, who raised the future Beatle from the age of 5, and Anne-Marie Duff as his troubled mother heighten the dramatic appeal of what otherwise is quite a dull film.