Nickel Boys

Movie was somewhat Avant Garde in genre. Unusual camera angles. Sometimes blurry images were seen on screen rather than a traditional, clear view of the characters. Often you see things from the main characters perspective, but do not see the character. Movie includes flashbacks or flash forward which made it a challenge to follow the storyline at times. Some questions are left as to exactly what happened because of the storyline jumping around or not enough detail being shown.

Subject was hard to watch but a sad part of history I just was not comfortable with the metaphorical artistic direction which took a long time into the movie to understand speech was hard to understand as well I felt like I needed captions I really dont know how to rate this movie

I could go on and on and rave about this money. It's not for everyone and that's because you have to remove the barriers and accept the film for what it's worth. It's quite beautiful through it's immaculate cinematography and world building. I'm pleased watching this on a 35mm film projector because other projects would not have done it justice. I recommend everyone watches this movie at least one.

This is a stone cold masterpiece. Serious art sets out to affect and change the viewer, even if just a little bit. This film does that in spades.

Terrible a. Cinematic mess no plot thread no action forced emotion and very little if any . Phonics bad acting not great choppy . Director putter takes useless. Storyline hard to follow photo takes terrible looking at invisible people half the time . One of the worst movies about a serious subject eat ice cream home don’t see. Hollywood critics lost there mind poor all around . People walked out and that is what it deserved . Brad Pitt wasted his money on this catastrophe no way

The artfulness of the cinematography interfered with the story telling. It was very confusing and vague.

RaMell Ross' #NickelBoys is so artistically interesting in its depiction of Colson Whitehead's novel. But while definitely impressed, I'm mixed on the first-person approach which left me feeling both hauntingly captivated but also emotionally distant. A stellar watch nonetheless.

If I hadn't read the book, I would not have been able to follow the film. Too much crammed in without building up how the characters (particularly the hero) felt or why it was important. Characters not developed. Footage of moon shots and Martin Luther King were important in the book, but irrelevant in the film. I nearly walked out - one woman did - but thought it had to get better. It didn't.

It’s best to read/listen to the book first. I loved creativity and POV of this movie

Writer-director RaMell Ross has set himself a rather audacious challenge in adapting Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. By shooting the entire film subjectively from the point-of-view of its central character, Ethan Herisse's Elwood, and occasionally Brandon Wilson's Turner, not only does it create a fascinating but unsettling experience that's less passive and more immersive for its audience, but it also demands the filmmaker to re-calibrate technically how to make this film and still be able to communicate and does the story justice. Based on the real-life Dozier School scandal in which African-American attendees of the reform school were abused or killed during the Jim Crow era, this is a powerful and emotional story of two such boys who meet at the similar but fictional Nickel Academy and how that experience changed their lives forever. While the intentions are noble and worthy and the performances are across-the-board strong, the adoption of this subjective POV for the entire film is however made at the expense of narrative clarity and coherence. Audience are thrown into scenes often without context and this gets even more confusing when it begins to switch between Elwood's and Turner's perspectives, as it's sometimes unclear whose POV we're watching from. Scenes already feel patchy and truncated as a result of the film's unique form, but after Ross intercuts archival photographs, newsreel footages, arty close-ups and even clips from the 1958 film The Defiant Ones into his film, he has practically turned this into a 2h20m modern art video installation. The end result is an artistically crafted but frustrating experience that pulls me out of the film instead and when I had to look up online afterwards to figure out what the ending actually is, I can't help but wish Ross hadn't buried the story under his fanciful ways.