Streaming on Prime Video from 27 February - Rod Bishop recommends "the first great film of 2025" - NICKEL BOYS (RaMell Ross, USA, 2024)

 

This year, one of the films nominated for Best Picture might have you thinking a  filmmaker from the 1960s American avant-garde had resurrected and crashed the Oscars.

Some fifteen years ago, the Oscars increased the number of films nominated for Best Picture from five to nine, and later on to ten.

It allowed occasional low budget independent films with unknown casts to make the cut. Beasts of the Southern Wild (2013) for instance, with a $1.8 million budget; Moonlight (2017), with a budget of $1.5 million; and Sound of Metal in 2021 on a budget of $5.5 million.

This year it’s Nickel Boys, adapted from a novel by Colson Whitehead (author of The Underground Railway) with a $20 million budget and an unknown cast. At the time of writing, the film had been released in only two territories, the USA (grossing a paltry $2.3 million) and the UK (grossing $158,000). Prime Video will start streaming the film from 27 February.

It’s been a resounding critical triumph, however. See below for some of the 24 awards the film has gathered already.

A disjunction between box office and critical reviews is nothing new, but where Nickel Boys differs from other low budget independents nominated for Best Picture is in film language. 

For his first dramatic feature, the director and co-writer, and previous documentary maker, RaMell Ross (Hale County This Morning This Evening, 2018) has dispensed with most typical narrative devices.

Ethan Herisse as Elwood

Instead of the traditional third person, Ross chooses a first person point-of-view, narrating his story from inside his characters. We don’t see his central character Elwood (Ethan Herisse) for nearly 40 minutes and then only reflected in a clothes-iron, photo booths and in shop and bus windows. For 40 minutes, we only see events in the film from his gaze or from a point-of-view behind his head.

Then, we abruptly shift to the point-of-view of the second major character Turner (Brandon Wilson). Ross starts alternating between their two points-of-view, even when using two-shot reverses. In the entire 140 minutes, we only see Elwood and Turner together in one shot.

Often we are abruptly taken out of the point-of-view narrative by other devices and by intersecting footage – montages of time jumps, time exposures; brain scans, home movies, archival photographs of the victims of the real Nickel Academy (the Dozier School for Boys); and copious amounts of archival film, including space missions, Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights movement, and even Stanley Kramer’s The Defiant Ones.

Brandon Wilson as Turner

This is definitely not the film language of your common-or-garden Best Picture nominee.

Elwood is living with his grandmother (a superb Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), during the 1960s Civil Rights movement when he is falsely accused of car theft and thrown into a reform school, the Nickel Academy in Florida. With his friend Turner, he witnesses horrific racial degradation and hears of unmarked graves, yet resists and perseveres to retain his dignity and freedom.

For critic Carla Renata: “This may sound like another Black trauma porn motion picture sanctioned by Hollywood to exploit Black history for financial gain. Thankfully…Ross brings his unique cinematic sensibility, allowing audiences to experience this type of story from a sensory perspective.” 

Barry Jenkins (Moonlight): “This is a medium-defining work – aesthetically, spiritually – a rich and overwhelming cinema…RaMell has given us a new way of seeing. It is a thing to make one feel humbled…and filled with gratitude.”

The daring point-of-view direction means we see Elwood’s life between the 1960s and the early 2000s as a series of fractured pieces, to be sorted in the mind of the viewer and reassembled into a coherent narrative. It creates its own power; its own poetry; its own emotional intensity and heightens the immersive experience for the viewer.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian recently wrote a piece claiming Nickel Boys should be the Best Picture winner.

Punters have the film in excess of 100/1 to win the Oscar. Then again, what were the odds of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay 1080 Bruxelles becoming Sight and Sound’s Best Film Ever Made?

For me, Nickel Boys is the first great film of 2025.

 

New York Film Critics Circle Awards: Best Director, Best Cinematography

Los Angeles Critics Association Awards: Best Cinematography, Best Editing

Chicago Film Critics Association: Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Editing and Best Breakthrough Filmmaker

San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle:  Best Film, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay 

Toronto Film Critics Association: Best Film, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director, Best Cinematography

National Society of Film Critics: Best Picture, Best Cinematography

Black Reel Awards: Outstanding Film, Outstanding Director, Outstanding Screenplay, Outstanding Breakthrough Screen Writer, Outstanding Emerging Director, Outstanding Cinematography.