Nickel Boys (2025)

Audience Score

PG-13 2 hr 20 minFeb 11th, 2025Drama

Elwood Curtis’s college dream shatters alongside a two-lane Florida highway. Bearing the brunt of an innocent misstep, he’s sentenced to the netherworld of Nickel Academy, a brutal reformatory sunk deep in the Jim Crow South. He encounters another ward, the seen-it-all Turner. The two Black teens strike up an alliance: Turner dispensing fundamental tips for survival, Elwood, clinging to his optimistic worldview. Backdropped by the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, Elwood and Turner’s existence appear worlds away from Rev. Martin Luther King’s burnished oratory. Despite Nickel’s brutality, Elwood strives to hold onto his humanity, awakening a new vision for Turner.

StarringEthan HerisseBrandon WilsonAunjanue Ellis-Taylor

DirectorRaMell Ross

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Nickel Boys Review

‘Nickel Boys’ Tells a Searing Story in a New, Not Always Successful Way. Formally experimental, ‘Nickel Boys’ strives and sometimes succeeds at being immersive, but can also feel removed from its powerful subject matter. Opening in theaters in limited release on December 20th is ‘Nickel Boys,’ directed by RaMell Ross and starring Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Hamish Linklater, and Fred Hechinger.

There’s no question that writer-director RaMell Ross’ ‘Nickel Boys,’ which Ross adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel ‘The Nickel Boys’ by Colson Whitehead, is a boldly ambitious piece of filmmaking. Ross chooses an experimental way in which to tell the story of two young Black boys who become friends at a horrifying reform school in the Deep South in the 1960s, and like all experiments in narrative and storytelling, it may take the viewer some time to get their bearings.