Nickel Boys is the best movie of 2024 by a country mile, and easily one of the best of the century.
The level of audacity director RaMell Ross had to do what he does artistically with this movie is jaw-dropping, given he’s adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and this is only Ross’s second feature, and his first fiction film. But Ross executes his approach perfectly—perfectly—and at this degree of difficulty, you can’t help but be awestruck. I’m reluctant to describe what he does here, you can find that in most other places, but as the movie began and I realized how Ross was going to tell this story, my heart started racing with excitement, as I thought, “are we really going to do this?” And I’d hate to deny that experience to anyone else. Suffice it to say, what Ross does immerses us in the lives, feelings, memories, and thoughts of the two boys at the center of the story, as they navigate their way through their time at the fictional Nickel Academy in Florida, which is based on a real-life reform school that was found to be obscenely abusive, even containing dozens of unmarked graves. Ross is very interested in how the boys experience their lives, both at the academy and as Black children growing in the 1960s, and the cinematography by Jomo Fray, which is also the best of the year, captures fragments of perception and memory in small, powerful ways—the buttons on a shirt, the lines on a face, a magnet slowly sliding down a refrigerator door.
A handful of other films have tried the basic approach RaMell Ross uses in Nickel Boys, but here it’s not a gimmick or even an experiment—the way he shows us the film is integral to how we understand what we’re seeing, and the few times Ross steps outside of this device are just as crucial. Nickel Boys is a stunning work, and truly unlike anything you’ve ever seen.
Nickel Boys is in theaters.
