Richard Linklater's Texas

Ellar Coltrane at age six in a scene from the film,"Boyhood."

Ethan Hawke, left, and director Richard Linklater arrive on the red carpet for a screening of their film "Boyhood" during the SXSW Film Festival on Sunday, March 9, 2014 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Jack Plunkett/Invision/AP) 12122014xNEWS

(L-r) Ellar Coltrane and Ethan Hawke in “Boyhood.” )

Richard Linklater gives Ethan Hawke direction from outside the window of Mason Sr.'s GTO in Richard Linklater's 'Boyhood.'

The pioneering, 165-minute coming-of-age tale, shot over the course of 12 years with the same cast and directed by Houston-born/Austin-based director Richard Linklater, is being re-released in theaters nationwide for its 12th anniversary on July 31.

Shot all over the state, including Houston, Austin, San Marcos and Big Bend Ranch State Park, the film stars Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette and follows the life of a boy named Mason (played by Ellar Coltrane) as he navigates life in a dysfunctional family. "Boyhood" was nominated for five Academy Awards, including best picture and best director, and Arquette took home the Oscar for best actress.

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The Austin Film Society is hosting a reunion screening, red carpet and live Q&A with Linklater, Hawke, Arquette and Coltrane in attendance on July 18 at the AFS Cinema.

Then, nearly two weeks later, "Boyhood" heads back onto the big screen in other cities where, according to IFC, the film's distributor, "participating theaters, including Alamo Drafthouse, will have access to the exclusive recorded reunion cast and filmmaker Q&A, allowing audiences across the country to take part in the celebration. The full reunion conversation will also be available for a future exclusive presentation attached to 'Boyhood,' on streaming service Sundance Now."

It has not yet been announced which Houston theaters will be showing "Boyhood" as there is no longer an Alamo Drafthouse in this market.

“ 'Boyhood' captures something deeply human about growing up and the passage of time in a way few films ever have," says IFC entertainment group head Scott Shooman in a release. "It’s an honor to be part of its continued life in theaters as we celebrate it again 12 years after its original release and invite audiences to experience it—old and new—on the big screen."

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In my review of the film from Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 2014 I noted that the film is remarkable for celebrating life's more mundane moments and making them compelling. "But there’s no big, epic event to push the plot forward. There’s no crisis to solve, no movie-of-the-week illness. Instead, there are haircuts and Harry Potter. Sure, the outside world — the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the presidential election of 2008 — intervenes occasionally, but "Boyhood" is less about the international, and more about the interstitial, those small moments between the big ones."

"I guess I'm somewhere between surprised, relieved, and gratified that the film works the way I wanted it to work," Linklater told Yahoo! News at the time. "This is an epic of the intimate. It's not like it's boring structurally; there's a narrative life flowing through this. But we've had trouble showing clips, because if you see a scene without any context, it looks really banal, like, "That's it? That's the whole movie?' It totally relies on the cumulative effect of people giving themselves over to [the movie], and finding the way into the reality of it."

The film has a 97 per-cent rating among critics on Rotten Tomatoes and an 80 per-cent among consumers on the same site. So, not everyone was on board the "Boyhood" train. Wrote Teo Bugbee in the Daily Beast, "It wasn't necessarily a surprise that 'Boyhood' left me cold -- universal praise can be its own warning sign -- but considering the rapturous praise it has received from seemingly all corners, it was still a disappointment."