RaMell Ross’s film based on Colson Whitehead’s novel is out in UK cinemas on the 3rd January 2025.
The Guardian: ***** “There are outstanding performances here from Ellis-Taylor, Herisse and Wilson, and Jomo Fray’s cinematography and Nora Mendis’s production design are exceptional too. This is a survivor’s coming of age: tough, disillusioned, brilliant.”
Little White Lies.com: “Nickel Boys remains a dizzyingly accomplished, dense, and searing diatribe on the dissociation inflicted upon the oppressed by institutional violence, the ways American society dehumanises and anonymises black men as disposable martyrs.”
Vulture.com: “Nickel Boys is the kind of story that probably could have been adapted in more conventional fashion. It could have jerked easy tears from us — earned tears, to be sure, prompted by our horror at what we’d be seeing onscreen and everything it implied. But there’s something truer and more unshakable about what Ross has given us. In refusing a conventional, objective (and objectified) approach to suffering, he resists easy attempts at pathos. What he achieves here is more powerful and complex. “
Roger Ebert.com: ” a clear masterpiece held together by visual splendor and idiosyncratic performances, the challenge is worth the reward.”
Variety: “It’s conceivable that Ross could have found a way to make his adaptation every bit as powerful. Instead, “Nickel Boys” unravels as its multiple perspectives and timelines blur, getting lost in digressions — from archival footage of NASA missions to forensic excavations at Nickel Academy. You could read the boys’ fate as tragedy, though the film intends it as transference. Seems the students learned something there after all.”
BFI.org.uk: “Ross’s choice to lock the audience into his characters’ literal point of view is a risky intervention, with a radical payoff. Instead of using voiceover narration to tell the audience how Elwood and Turner are feeling, Ross simply shows how each boy sees the world, drawing attention to where their gaze drifts. He prioritises their individual humanity, by illustrating their inner lives. The film intimates that feeling as them, rather than for them, might be a step towards solidarity.”
The Hollywood Reporter: “Comparisons to Moonlight, Barry Jenkins’ own exploration of Black boyhood and masculinity, might be inevitable, especially as Nickel Boys gains a wider audience, but Ross is eking out his own cinematic territory. The difference is all in the details.”
Deadline.com: “Props to Ross for taking artistic leaps and big risks, even if, for me at least, they don’t completely pay off. It will provoke conversation at a time when racism has reared its ugly head again, this time with some at the highest levels of government. At the very least it has inspired me to go out and get Whitehead’s book, and maybe even take another look at The Defiant Ones.”