Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross, 2024, USA)

Nickel Boys is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead. The film is told from the first-person perspective, allowing the audience to closely follow the protagonist Ellwood's inner thoughts and experience. Ellwood is a young Black man from Tallahassee who is about to head off to college in Civil Rights-era Florida. On his way to college, Elwood hitches a ride with a man who, unbeknownst to him, has stolen the car. Implicated in the theft, Elwood is sent to a reformatory school.

At the reformatory school, there is a bombshell revelation of systemic abuse - including physical violence and murder. This coincides with the development of Elwood's friendship with Turner - another boy at the reformatory. Only in Turner's eyes do we see the first-person perspective flip back to Elwood. The film incorporates magical realism (including a recurring alligator that appears throughout the film), mixed-media (the director intersperses period photographs, for example), as well as time-lapse effects.

A key question arises - does the film offer anything new or enlightening beyond its formal experimentation? There is a meandering, elliptical quality to the film that ultimately neuters its urgency. The film runs out of narrative steam by the second hour, losing its momentum and feeling less cohesive. The end result feels unsatisfying. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Nickel Boys is the least seen Best Picture 2025 nominee, if box office receipts are to be believed. While box office receipts are no judge of a film's quality, in this case it is easy to see why. Nickel Boys offers some interesting formal elements, but as a whole it is somehow underwhelming. Those familiar with the film's themes will likely find better representations of them in other films set during this era in America, with more thoughtful and moving portrayals. Nickel Boys is something of mixed bag.

5/10