Nickel Boys

Nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, Nickel Boys is the most radical big budget movie this side of Megalopolis. Making his dramatic feature debut, director RaMell Ross (Hale County, This Morning, This Evening) opts for a subjective camera throughout, although when Elwood arrives at the Nickel Academy reform school and meets his fellow inmate and future ally Turner, Ross does something unprecedented, allowing the same scene to play out twice from different points of view. Thereafter we see the narrative unfold from alternate perspectives, as Turner and as Elwood experience the ritual racist humiliations of the school, and, eventually, plot their escape.

Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer winning novel, itself inspired by a notorious Florida reform school, the Dozier School for Boys, the movie makes a somber companion piece to another Academy Award nominee, the documentary about BC residential school survivors, Sugarcane. Both films are unflinching in their condemnation of institutional racism, and their compassion for the traumatized survivors.

Nickel Boys is a life, made up of pieces; some of them lovely, some devastating. It’s a mesmerizing, uniquely told story — of memory, of injustice, of friendship, of survival.

Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times

The approach takes some getting used to, but the effect is astonishing. It calls on us to empathize in a radical new way with these two young men, their fleeting hopes and their crushing sense of entrapment.

Justin Chang, NPR

As major and memorable an achievement as any American film this decade.

David Ehrlich, Indiewire