Just dropped from Amazon Studios, Ramell Ross’ The Nickel Boys.
From Academy Award Nominee RaMell Ross comes “A New American Masterpiece”. Watch the trailer for #NickelBoys now and see the film only in theaters this fall.
Says Glenn Kenny at RogerEbert.com:
While at Nickel Academy, which is based on the diabolically historical Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Florida, Elwood forms a friendship with a Nickel veteran named Turner (Brandon Wilson). Ross uniquely and boldly frames this story exclusively through “point-of-view” shots, toggling back and forth between the eyes of Elwood and Turner. For the audience, the switch in perspectives sometimes takes us through the same scene from different viewpoints; repetition and variance deepen the audience’s attachment to and understanding of these characters. The two become dependent on one another, realizing that their only way out would be to make it together. This first-person perspective may seem formally limiting at first. But it refines the story in a way that allows archival footage and other symbolic imagery to enhance Ross’ vision for the film rather than serving as an arbitrary aesthetic choice.
Says David Ehrlich at Indiewire:
“Nickel Boys” is full of such revelatory fragments, many of them joyful and most of them as light and elusive as a memory. The sense of discovery they engender prevents the movie from growing numb to its own aesthetic (crucial to an episodic narrative that’s less sustained by action than it is by the momentum of its own searching curiosity). So too does the film’s persistent feeling of being simultaneously both lived and remembered. In its truth and its telling alike, this story is past and present at the same, a dynamic that Ross hammers home with a smattering of flash-forwards — filmed entirely from behind Daveed Diggs’ head — that add a heartbreaking new dimension to the camera’s POV-based mandate. To some filmmakers, the final pages of Whitehead’s novel might have made the whole book unadaptable. To Ross, they seem to have been the reason why the book had to be adapted.
