Nickel Boys
Year: 2024
Rating: PG-13
Length: 140 minutes / 2.33 hours
Every once in a while, a movie comes along that does something so creatively that you wonder why it hadn’t been done that way before. For me, Nickel Boys (2024) was way more immersive than anything that 3D cinema had done in decades, simply because the filmmakers shot it from a first-person perspective. In making the movie this way, I felt more connected to the characters, which made their plight that much more impactful. After all, you can talk about racism and you can see the effects of racism, but until you experience it, it’s just not the same.
The neat thing about this first-person perspective is that it didn’t feel too much like a gimmick (like Hardcore Henry (2015) did). Sure, maybe they could have filmed it in such a way that people with virtual reality headsets could experience these things in an even more visceral format. But the humanity of seeing things through another person’s eyes in this way is as close as we will get to being able to truly understand what anyone goes through. I hope it doesn’t remain the only film that does heartfelt things with the first-person perspective.
With movies like Green Book (2018) and Moonlight (2016) winning Best Picture recently, it’s a shame that Nickel Boys did not earn this distinction. Not only was this movie artistic in everything that it did, but the way it handled the subject matter was done so well that I would almost make this required watching for anyone who doesn’t understand what those black boys went through in the deep south during the 1960s. I wanted its innovation to be rewarded, but sometimes a movie is just too far ahead of its time.
A truly artistic innovation with deeply moving subject matter, I give Nickel Boys 5.0 stars out of 5.
