In adapting Colson Whitehead’s heart-breaking, Pulitzer Prize-winning, seemingly unadaptable The Nickel Boys, lauded documentarian RaMell Ross, a previous Academy Award nominee for Hale County This Morning, This Evening, has taken a wonderfully unorthodox approach: shooting from a first-person point of view, he allows us to see through the eyes of his two leads, Elwood (the sensitive Ethan Herisse) and Turner (the magnetic Brandon Wilson), a pair of boys serving time at a brutal reform school in 1960s Florida. The result is simply ravishing. Ross’s deft, gorgeously observant direction should be celebrated, along with the lyrical script, skilful editing, achingly beautiful cinematography, and the brief but incredibly touching supporting turn from Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, a recent Oscar contender for King Richard, as Elwood’s warm and relentlessly hopeful grandmother.
The Brutalist
If the second half of Brady Corbet’s staggering historical saga—the more-than-three-and-a-half-hour-long (with a built-in 15 minute intermission, no less) portrait of a fictional Jewish-Hungarian architect (an excellent Adrien Brody) who flees the Holocaust and settles on the East Coast with his powerhouse of a wife (a razor-sharp Felicity Jones)—was as awe-inspiring as the first half, I’d hand it the best-picture Oscar now, no questions asked. In reality, though, this is an imperfect film—but, still, its sheer scale, scope, and unwavering ambition could see it go very far indeed. Look out for its leading man in the best-actor race (after all, he’s already won an Academy Award for a lesser performance in The Pianist), as well as Jones and Guy Pearce in the supporting-acting categories—the latter, in particular, is chilling as our hero’s influential benefactor and has, somehow, never been nominated for an Oscar, even though he was a fixture on screens in the ’90s and aughts in everything from L.A. Confidential to Memento. Nods should follow, too, for its virtuosic direction, taut original screenplay, breathless editing, stunning production design, spine-tingling score, and dazzling cinematography.
