re: 100 Best Films of the 21st Century, BBC Culture

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But to me the point of the film wasn't to build a plot but to showcase how life is made up of the small moments you may not remember

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That's almost exactly what Linklater himself has said.

Boyhood is a meditation on time and the slow progress of life. It is vignettes that loosely hang together.

The problem is that drama is life at its most climactic. It is ordinary reacting to or causing the extraordinary. Otherwise it's boring. There is no secret to the scenes with the husbands the mother had where they get violent as being the most intriguing. Drama needs... Well drama... To be compelling. Too much of the movie is flat. Does there need to be a single strand of plot to tie it all together? Maybe not. Particularly with a good actor to anchor the scenes. And one could argue that it has the common thread with "the plot is he is growing up," but how compelling is that without more?

It was a less a movie than it was a film study, and that's a problem. It lacked real emotional ties, didn't have enough tension and ultimately fails as a story.

I admire the hell out of the movie and the thought behind it. I understand that it wasn't meant to be anything more than a contemplation on growing up and that, in fact, if it had been more plot driven, that contemplation would have been muddied. But it isn't a terribly interesting piece of art either, except for the novelty of it.