“NICKEL BOYS” (2024, 140 min., directed by RaMell Ross)
If you had a nickel for every movie you’ve seen like “Nickel Boys,” you’d have exactly one nickel.
The film, adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is about two boys, Elwood and Turner, imprisoned in a Florida reform school amid the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement.
“Nickel Boys” stars a sturdy, heartbreaking Ethan Herisse as Elwood, Oscar and Emmy-nominated actress Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as his grandmother and Brandon Wilson, a living lightning bolt of charisma, as Turner. The cast is rounded out by “Gladiator II” star Fred Hechinger, “Midnight Mass” lead Hamish Linklater and “Hamilton” alum Daveed Diggs as Adult Elwood.
Read our review of “Gladiator II” and “Wicked” here.
On paper, that’s all a tried-and-true formula: the movie is based on a bestselling book, infused with political commentary of the present moment and features revered character actors supporting two fresh faced leads.
In practice, “Nickel Boys” pushes the boundaries of cinema forward.
Almost the entire film is shot through the eyes of its main characters. Not in a metaphoric sense, either: the camera is positioned at the exact eye level of either Turner or Elwood and follows their gaze. It’s so natural it’s as though director RaMell Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray aren’t guiding the lens at all. If Elwood is embarrassed and staring at the floor, the camera follows. If Turner is fixated on a detail in the work he’s doing, so is the camera. There often isn’t an indication of which boy a scene’s perspective follows other than the personality of the camera’s vision.
It’s incredible. By using the technique, Ross puts the audience into the heads of the young men in a way a traditional close-up or wide-shot cannot.
Read our review of Best Animated Feature Nominee “Flow” here.
Spectacular as it is, the rewards of Ross’s innovation come with devastating emotional consequences. The reform school, called the Nickel Academy in the film, is based on the real-life story of the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, where hundreds of predominantly Black “students” were beaten, tortured, assaulted and murdered until the school was closed for good in 2011.
It’s nice to be inside someone’s head when they’re bonding with a new friend or marching for freedom or enjoying the satisfaction of painting wood blue.
It’s much nastier when the audience is dragged into a torture room too.
Ross has not crafted an exploitation film. While the sequences centered around violence are difficult to watch, they are never overlong and hardly graphic. Ross trusts his audience to understand what happens to these young men without extorting their pain. It’s one of many ways “Nickel Boys” uses subtlety to convey weightiness.
Read our reviews of new movies “The Last Showgirl” and “Better Man” here.
Ross is a documentary filmmaker by trade. “Nickel Boys,” his first narrative feature, is filled with trademarks of documentary, from interstitial archival footage to the way the film turns its characters into documentarians of their own lives. Perhaps his background led to the difficult way the film is presented: the story is nonlinear, split up with decades of flash-forwards to Diggs, and often scenes are more impressionistic than narrativized. Rather than explain the purpose of a scene with dialogue or plot, Ross opts for the feeling a montage of images creates.
“Nickel Boys” is about pain left unspoken and internalized, and the unfathomable difficulty of an outsider understanding it.
A skeleton key for better understanding the film, meanwhile, is to read the book. The film accomplishes the old impossible challenge of perfectly adapting its core text while cutting down on the book’s subplots.
Read our list of the best movies of 2024 here.
The first part of the novel is about Elwood growing up in Tallahassee, learning about the Civil Rights Movement and aspiring to college as his grandmother raises him. The first part of the film covers this ground in flashes, with archival footage and small details, leaving it up to the viewer to understand the early life Elwood led until Nickel.
Viewers who want more, Ross offers, can explore the novel – at only 224 pages, it’s a quick read. The film and the novel are essential viewing.
If the Best Picture nominees this year were a pocketful of change, “Nickel Boys” stands out like a $100 bill.
Rating: 5/5
For more reviews of Best Picture nominees at this year’s Oscars, read our roundup here.
“PRESENCE” (2025, 85 min., directed by Steven Soderbergh)
Where “Nickel Boys” puts you behind the eyes of the living, “Presence” is told from that of the dead.
Steven Soderbergh’s brisk, heart-pounding haunted house story is told entirely from the first-person perspective of a ghost.
Despite that, “Presence” isn’t scary, per se. There are traditional horror elements to the story: the camera becomes the spectral entity, hovering close to its house’s family, pushing over books and causing vibrations in the air. Yet this spirit is never malevolent.
The ghost takes a special interest in the daughter of its house’s new family, Chloe, played by a terrific Callina Liang.
Read our review of Oscar nominated horror film “Nosferatu” here.
Chloe has recently suffered the tragic loss of her best friend, Nadia, from a drug overdose and another acquaintance from the same a month prior. Grief, a hired medium in the film tells the family, has made Chloe more sensitive to the spiritual realm than most people. Unfortunately, believing you have a ghost when your family is convinced grief has made you unstable is an unhelpful combination.
The ghost is not only interested in Chloe, however. The camera moves in long, unbroken takes to witness the sins and secrets of every member of the family: Lucy Liu as cold, workaholic matriarch Rebecca, Chris Sullivan as warm, worried father Chris and Eddy Maday as jocular, bullying older brother Tyler. The ghost even makes a visit at the beginning of the film to flustered and fibbing real estate agent Cece, played by Julia Fox.
It is these themes the film is interested in exploring. The horrors of a modern upper class American family are not ghosts, but they’re just as invisible. “Presence” is about fentanyl overdoses, the ephemerality of pictures shared online, date rape drugs in drinks, problems in a marriage, financial fraud and the invisible scars of grief.
All of these are much scarier than a voyeuristic ghost. But unlike a spirit in a haunted house, the presence of these things in American life is undeniable.
Rating: 4/5
