| Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) | Release Date: December 13, 2024 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
45
Mixed:
3
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
The Observer (UK)Jan 7, 2025
Dec 13, 2024
This is Ross’s first fiction feature and its power comes as no surprise to those familiar with his 2018 calling card of a documentary. Hale County, This Morning This Evening announced a gifted photographer driven by sensitivity to his subjects’ dignity. Accordingly, Nickel Boys miraculously goes against the grain of the story’s devastating trajectory by leading with the same loving eye.
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Dec 12, 2024
The threads do come together, but it requires a bit of patience and giving yourself over to the film, which is both formally and emotionally eye-opening. Adapting great literature can sometimes send filmmakers running towards the conventional; Thank goodness Ross charted his own path instead.
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Dec 12, 2024
Part of what makes Nickel Boys striking is how Ross stays true to the novel but with his own voice, his own narrative and visual style, and how he uses moments in time and freighted images — faces, hands, flashing police lights, an alligator in a class, a mule in a hall — to build the story.
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The Film StageOct 9, 2024
It feels alive like an open, bleeding heart. It’s a tragic story told with hope that doesn’t ring saccharine or overwrought. Sometimes it moves like water, flowing from ugliness to beauty. There are few American films that come close to what it accomplishes, as either film or adaptation. Nickel Boys suggests a miracle, with the makings of a classic.
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IndieWireSep 1, 2024
Pure sense and subjectivity in a way that evokes the same visual magic of Ross’ documentary work, Nickel Boys so viscerally and fundamentally centers the experience of its young Black characters that even the most racist brand of revisionist history could never hope to deny their truth.
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Sep 1, 2024
Ross, honoring the perspective shift that characterizes Whitehead’s novel, switches between Elwood and Turner’s points of view, remaining, at all times, in the subjective mode. The commitment to this way of storytelling imbues Nickel Boy with an overwhelming intimacy and becomes another way that Ross, as a filmmaker, stretches what it means to represent Black people.
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Jan 13, 2025
Anyone looking for an uplifting story in the mode of Spotlight or Erin Brockovich won’t find gratification in Ross’s sombre film. Nickel Boys, a film that impresses and occasionally perplexes, is not a story of delayed justice achieved, or the suffering of others appreciated from a safe historical distance.
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Dec 6, 2024
In a year of audaciously accomplished movies, “Nickel Boys” stands out as different in kind. Ross, who co-wrote the script with Joslyn Barnes, achieves an advance in narrative form, one that singularly befits the movie’s subject—not just dramatically but historically and morally, too.
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ColliderNov 26, 2024
Ross has found an overwhelmingly perfect way to bring Whitehead’s story to the screen, one that feels like a step forward for how cinematic stories can be told. It’s beautiful, heart-wrenching, and refreshing in equal measure. Now, Nickel Boys is a masterpiece in two different formats.
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Sep 27, 2024
Nickel Boys is perhaps a rebuke to the idea that violence must be plainly stated in order to be understood. Here, it is palpably present in every negative space. What Ross instead affords these young men is the dignity of a point of view, drawing the viewer into the bracing immediacy of mind and body.
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Sep 1, 2024
Ross’ formal dedication sometimes stands in the way of story and emotion, prioritizing visuals over earned moments of expressive, swelling feelings. And so this critic did wonder if Nickel Boys should have dialed up its narrative ambitions from time to time, stepping just a bit away from its creative non-fiction temperaments.
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