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The 2025 Oscar nominations are finally here, and this year’s Best Picture nominees form an eclectic group of titles. That’s fitting for a year that offered as many diverse surprises and delights at the theater and on streaming as 2024 did. 2025’s Best Picture nominees are also noteworthy because none of them are shorter than 2 hours long. That means that, regardless of whether you still need to check off all of this year’s nominees or just a few, you’ll have to invest quite a bit of time if you want to watch all of them before the Oscars airs on Sunday, March 2.

To help you prepare for your Oscar viewing needs, here’s exactly how long every Best Picture nominee is this year, listed from shortest to longest.

“Conclave” (Focus Features) “Conclave”

“Conclave’s” Best Picture nomination may not have come as a shock to many, but it...

On Thursday, documentary filmmaker RaMell Ross scored his first feature film nomination—Ross was previously nominated in 2018 for his documentary film Hale County This Morning, This Evening—for Nickel Boys in Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture. The historical drama, based on Colson Whitehead’s book of the same name, chronicles the deep friendship between two teenagers (Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson) who have to overcome the shocking brutality and horrific discriminatory regulations of a Florida reform school in the Jim Crow South.

Below, Deadline talks to Ross about his nomination and the making of the film.

Deadline: Where were you when you found out that you received your nominations?

Ramell Ross: You know, people say [it’s just] me, but there are a lot of people who helped with this film. We have a huge team that has been out there hitting the pavement for Nickel Boys. However, I was on...

How do the 2025 Oscars Best Picture nominees stack up on Rotten Tomatoes? And does the film with the highest freshness rating have a better shot at winning the big prize?

While critics’ scores don’t determine the Best Picture lineup (there are thousands of highly rated movies each year), once the lineup is selected by the Motion Picture Academy, there are at least a few tea leaves worth reading. For instance, the only film to win Best Picture in the last 10 years with a freshness rating lower than 90 percent is Green Book, which has a Tomatometer score of just 77 percent.

Last year’s winner, Oppenheimer, holds a formidable 93 percent, but it didn’t rank first among it’s competitors. That distinction went to The Holdovers, which has a rating of 97 percent. So, a movie doesn’t have to have the highest score to win Best Picture, but it certainly helps its chances.

Now that the Golden Globes are over, the official Oscar race is set to begin! On January 23rd the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce this year’s nominees, with the 97th Oscars Ceremony scheduled to happen on March 2nd. So before the committee announces their list for the Best Picture category, let’s predict 5 films on the list.

A screengrab of the Oscars thumbnail | image: YouTube/Clanhold Cinema

While The Brutalist, The Substance, Anora, A Complete Unknown, Dune: Part Two, Wicked, and Emilia Pérez are already believed to be the Oscar front-runner for the Best Picture category, we’ve 5 films that took people by surprise with their potential to win an Oscar nod. So let’s check out the list below and wait to see if the films ultimately qualify as nominees.

5. Conclave

Director: Edward Berger

Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini

Streaming: Peacock,...

A bunch of celebs stepped out for the Louis Vuitton menswear fashion show during Paris Fashion Week!

Bradley Cooper, Idris Elba and his wife Sabrina, and Adrien Brody were among the stars who attended the fashion event on Tuesday afternoon (January 21) in Paris, France.

Callum Turner, Travis Scott, Shaboozey, and Squid Game‘s Gong Yoo were among some of the other celebs who attended the event.

Louis Vuitton creative director Pharrell Williams presented his new collection, which was a collaboration with Kenzo designer Nigo.

“I never dreamt when I first met Nigo that this is what we would be doing together,” said Pharrell told Wwd. “I wake up every day and I know that I got a brother, and I know that I got somebody that’s just taught me so much and continues to just be there for me, and we’re there for each other.”

Nigo said, “This...

There’s no obvious 2025 Oscars frontrunner like last year’s “Oppenheimer” (Universal). This year, that studio’s blockbuster stage-to-screen musical “Wicked” will be one of 10 lauded frontrunners duking it out for Best Picture.

Another musical, the Spanish-language French Oscar entry “Emilia Pérez” (Netflix), is poised to dominate the delayed Oscar nominations announcement on January 23 with 12 nods, by my estimation, followed by papal thriller “Conclave” (Focus Features) with 10, and “The Brutalist” (A24), a post-World War II drama about an émigré architect (Adrien Brody) produced for under $10 million, with nine. All display the scale, scope, and ambition of a potential Oscar winner.

Based on the hit stage musical, “Wicked” should nab eight nominations and boasts more stateside support and a SAG Ensemble nod, as does “Emilia Pérez,” which also won five European Film Awards (including Best Film) and four Golden Globes including Best Comedy/Musical, and scored 11 BAFTA nominations to “Wicked’s” seven.

Even if you haven’t seen “Nickel Boys,” the film adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel, you’ve likely heard how it was shot from first-person perspective of its two protagonists. Director RaMell Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray filmed scenes in uninterrupted shots as if the audience is moving (the camera sometimes physically attached to the actor), listening, and watching through the perspective of Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson). The ground-breaking approach to filming, which Ross dubbed “sentient Pov,” meant an equally radical approach to editing. No longer was the audience in its familiar seat of omniscient spectator, denying the editor the ability to crosscut and seamlessly switch perspectives across the action. “Nickel Boys” editor Nicholas Monsour told IndieWire he had to “unlearn” years of what had become second nature when editing traditional scripted narrative projects, most notably for Jordan Peele.

“It was letting go of stuff I...

Brandon Wilson stars as Turner in director RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys, from Orion Pictures. Photo credit: Courtesy of Orion Pictures. © 2024 Amazon Content Services LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Artist-turned-director RaMell Ross’ beautiful, innovative, and moving adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Nickel Boys is an immersive, emotional experience that uses a Pov camera to put you into the first-person experience of two young Black boys, Elwood and Turner, and the bonds of friendship that grow between them after they meet at a Jim Crow-era reform school in Florida, a brutal place known as the Nickel Academy.

Although this is RaMell Ross’ first film, the artist’s directorial debut is strong, showing an unexpected mastery of cinematic art. Nickel Boys is a remarkable film, a moving human drama about childhood friendship in the Jim Crow South between two very different Black boys who nonetheless form a powerful bond. Scenes have a painterly beauty,...

Behind every great man, as the old, outdated expression goes, there’s a great woman — and there’s a pretty decent chance she’s been played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.

The 55-year-old actress has built a long, inspiring career out of portraying characters who linger just off center stage: the long-suffering wife of Cuba Gooding Jr.’s Navy Seal in 2000’s Men of Honor; Ray Charles’ mistress in Jamie Foxx’s 2004 biopic Ray; Yusef Salaam’s mother in 2019’s When They See Us (her first Emmy nomination); and Venus and Serena Williams’ mom in the 2021 Will Smith film about their dad, King Richard (her first Oscar nom).

“If we only know the figurehead and we don’t know the women who were doing the groundwork, it’s not the full truth,” she tells THR. “We’d be telling a half story.”

She fills in the other half once again in the just-released Nickel Boys,...

RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys” unearths the haunting realities of two boys, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), as they navigate a brutal reform school, blending visceral storytelling with an experimental approach.

In adapting Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, production designer Nora Mendis explains Ross’ vision came from a conceptual place. She says, “It was more about looking at contemporary artists, photos, content and what the justice system means throughout history.” Mendis adds, “Our conversations were based in a higher space of art, and he would trust us to go and do what we would do.”

Throughout the film, which is now in theaters, Ross uses archival footage to juxtapose Elwood and Turner’s abusive experience at Nickel Academy with the social and technological advances of the ‘60s, like the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race.

He tells the story though, through a first-person point of view. “’Point-of-view’ was a term we dropped.

Nickel Boys is the film of 2024. It’s expansive yet accessible. It’s violent yet pierced with seconds of warmth. It’s an adaptation that expands Colson Whitehead’s novel, a visual experience that hedges on the audience’s openness, on a person’s willingness to see the world in another form. In director RaMell Ross’s own words, “It’s not intimate. It’s close.”

Shot with a first-person perspective, Ross’ first narrative feature––following his Oscar-nominated debut documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening––follows two Black teenagers as they survive the Nickel Academy, an abusive reform school in Florida. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson) provide the eyes for this film, which often feels like a collection of moments in one’s life, from an orange rolling out of reach to the trees swaying above, from a hug from your grandmother to the first glimpse of...

Talk about a surprise. When Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (who has been acting professionally since her debut as Ariel in 1995’s Broadway revival of “The Tempest” opposite Patrick Stewart) arrived on the Louisiana set of “Nickel Boys” (Amazon/MGM/Orion), her documentarian-turned-feature-director RaMell Ross told her to do something she had never done before: Look straight into the lens, without a reverse angle on her co-star. She couldn’t see her fellow actors because their faces were obscured by the camera, just as their faces were hidden from the audience.

Watching the lauded critical hit “Nickel Boys” requires an adjustment to a strict point-of-view aesthetic. But Taylor-Ellis had to make it work on the ground, on the fly. The tightly scheduled period feature (budgeted at $20 million) left little time to figure it out.

Reactions range widely to this avant-garde Colson Whitehead adaptation about a brutal southern school for boys, but among the “Nickel Boys” ensemble,...

Back in November, we here at JoBlo received a pretty intriguing invitation. We were invited to Los Angeles to get an early look at Nickel Boys, a film based on the novel by Colson Whitehead. Directed by RaMell Ross, the movie’s gotten a ton of Oscar buzz, both for its director and the movie’s stars, Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. In it, Herisse and Wilson play Elwood and Turner, two young men sentenced to a reformatory in the Jim Crow-era South. Once there, they realize there’s a good chance they won’t live through their respective sentences, with the punishment inflicted on them far outweighing the petty crimes they’re supposed to have committed.

It’s undoubtedly one of the boldest movies of the year, with it shot entirely in a first-person point of view, where the camera literally takes the place of Herisse and...

The Nickel Boys breakout star is finding light in the darkest stories.

Acting wasn’t the first career choice for Ethan Herisse, the 24-year-old star of powerful historical drama Nickel Boys. In fact, when he was growing up in Massachusetts, he imagined a future on a court shooting hoops. “I was going to be a basketball player,” he recalls, but there was one problem. “I was not good.” When his younger sister, then participating in pageants, was approached to take part in acting workshops, Herisse tagged along and quickly discovered his real passion.

At age 11, his parents asked him if he wanted to pursue acting seriously. The answer was a no-brainer. “For them to hear that from an 11-year-old, and have enough faith in me that young to completely uproot their lives because I said that that was my dream...” he trails off in disbelief. His family moved to Los Angeles,...

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the scripts behind awards season’s buzziest film continues with Nickel Boys, the feature directing debut of Oscar-nominated Hale County This Morning, This Evening filmmaker RaMell Ross, who with longtime collaborator Joslyn Barnes adapted Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-wining 2019 novel.

Orion Pictures and Amazon MGM Studios debuted the film at the Telluride Film Festival at the end of summer and its has been racking up awards recognition ever since, including Best Picture nominations from the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, Independent Spirit Awards and the Gotham Awards, where Ross won Best Director and co-star Brandon Wilson won Breakthrough Performer.

Ross and Barnes’ adapted screenplay has also been nominated for several honors especially among critics groups this season, as has Jomo Fray’s cinematography, which has drawn raves for its use of an unconventional Pov that, according to Ross, is designed to make the viewer a character.

Chicago – America’s “Jim Crow” era … the systemic period of white supremacy by legal means against black Americans … continues to yield horror stories of institutional inhumanity. One such story is in a new film, based on a popular novel, entitled “Nickel Boys, which is co-adapted and directed by RaMell Ross.

‘Nickel Boys,’ Directed by RaMell Ross (inset)

Photo credit: Amazon MGM Studios

Rating: 3.5/5.0

Based on the novel by Colson Whitehead, “Nickel Boys” takes place in 1962 during Jim Crow in Florida, as a teenage black male named Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is falsely accused by authorities as being an accomplice to stealing a car. He is sent to a segregated reform school called Nickel Academy … a fictionalized version of the real Florida Dozier School for Boys. While there, he forms a close friendship with a boy named Turner (Brandon Wilson) as they try to survive the abuse by the school and its corrupt administrators.

RaMell Ross has something to say. With his latest film, “Nickel Boys,” the co-writer and director solidifies his reputation as one of contemporary cinema’s most daring storytellers. Adapted from Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the film unearths the haunting realities of a fictionalized reform school, blending visceral storytelling with an experimental approach that has captured the attention of cinephiles.

Known for his Academy Award-nominated documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” Ross’ unique lens, challenges the conventions of how stories about Black lives are told — and received. In a candid conversation on the Variety Awards Circuit Podcast, Ross reflects on the symbolism in “Nickel Boys,” the film industry’s treatment of Black stories, his dream collaborators, and the surprising possibility of working on a Marvel movie.

Listen below:

Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, “Nickel Boys” (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Courtesy Everett Collection)

Ross describes “Nickel Boys,” which had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival,...

Nickel Boys

Enjoying nominations in almost every major set of awards this season, RaMell Ross’ bold and experimental adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Nickel Boys is one of those rare works that really tries to do something different with cinema. It opened last year’s New York Film Festival and on 3 January it will be on cinema screens all across the UK.

Inspired by real events, the film follows the story of two African American boys, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who meet in a brutal reform school. I recently had the privilege of attending a Q&a session in which RaMell – also known for 2018’s remarkable Hale County This Morning, This Evening – spoke about the film, his approach to his craft, and influences such as the legendary photojournalist Gordon Parks.

“I love Gordon Parks,” he said. “What an influence he's had on culture at large! He popularised [the.

With a role in the Oscar-tipped reform school drama, the actor continues to pick parts that align with her activism. She recalls how the resilience of her grandmother – and the racism faced by her grandfather – has shaped her

There is a scene in Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s new film in which she gives a hug unlike any other hug you’ll see on screen. The film is Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel based on the real-life horror of Florida’s Dozier School for Boys, with Ellis-Taylor playing Hattie, the grandmother of Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a boy incarcerated there. In the scene, she is prevented from visiting her much-missed grandson, but encounters a friend of his (Brandon Wilson), who becomes a kind of emotional proxy.

What makes this hug so special, though, is not just the intensity of the human moment, but the way it exemplifies the power of the first-person perspective,...

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor doesn’t watch herself on screen unless she has to. She has not seen many of her celebrated performances. You could share with her that her latest endeavor, RaMell Ross’ “The Nickel Boys,” is one of the best-reviewed films of the year, and she’d laugh and respond, “I don’t believe nothing.” Following numerous year-end accolades, we hope she believes now.

Read More: “Nickel Boys”: RaMell Ross on the challenge of the first person perspective

Adapted from Colson Witehead‘s novel, “Nickel Boys” finds Ellis-Taylor portraying Hattie, a single mother doing her best to raise her grandson, Elwood (Ethan Herisse), in the waning days of the Jim Crow era South.

Continue reading Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor On A “New Game” With ‘Nickel Boys’ & Not Believing The Critical Hype at The Playlist.

2024 saw its fair share of ups and downs in cinema with several gems surfacing over the year. As the year winds down it is time to look back and reflect on 2024’s best movies and former US President Barack Obama is doing just that. Obama recently took to social media and shared a list of his favorite movies of the year.

Barack Obama recently named his favorite 2024 movies (Credit: CBS News).

Obama singled out the opulent Dune 2, a major commercial success, and the Cannes Grand Prix winner All We Imagine as Light as some of the best cinema the year had to offer. However, the former President missed out on some absolute masterpieces that impressed fans. Here are five 2024 films that you must also check out.

5. A Real Pain Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain is a masterful comedy (Credit: Searchlight Pictures).

A Real Pain is a buddy-comedy movie...

Jomo Fray can pinpoint the day when the bold idea of “first-person perspective” truly clicked.

The Brooklyn-based cinematographer and his director, RaMell Ross, had spent months discussing, studying, and experimenting for the filming of “Nickel Boys.” Based on Colson Whitehead’s novel, the movie is shot almost entirely through the eyes of its main characters, Elwood and Turner (played by Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson), two young Black men at an inhumane reform school in Florida.

The eureka moment came during a scene when Elwood’s grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) visits the school to deliver bad news to her grandson. “I was the camera operator for that scene,” said Fray. “And as she was building up the courage to tell Elwood something devastating, I looked away. I find it very difficult to look a person in the eyes when I know they’re telling me something that’s difficult for them.

There might not be anything else like RaMell Ross’ Nickel Boys. Adapting the 2019 novel by Colson Whitehead, Ross finds an unorthodox approach here: extrapolating the book’s third-person narrative into a first-person point-of-view, the camera almost entirely presenting the action as through the eyes of its protagonists. Think Peep Show, but as a serious and urgent drama.

It follows Elwood (Ethan Herisse), a young idealist living in Jim Crow-era Florida. Under false accusations, he’s sent to the Nickel Academy for Boys, a “correction school” — in reality a prison by any other name, complete with the exploitation of its inmates as free labour. While there, Elwood befriends another young man named Turner (Brandon Wilson), who has a much more cynical outlook on freedom for African-Americans or any potential of escaping the school itself.

The camerawork becomes a way of illustrating a character’s thoughts without narration, and with an immediacy that feels unprecedented.

When actors Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson were getting ready to film “Nickel Boys,” they had no hesitation getting onboard with director RaMell Ross’s vision of telling the story through their characters’ literal point of view, the only slight concern in the back of their minds was “I hope my friends and family don’t hear this and are like, ‘Oh, wait, so you’re not in the movie?’,” said Herisse over breakfast in the corner of a restaurant within a West Hollywood hotel.

Wilson’s mother’s reaction was more explicitly concerned, with the actor having done a found footage film not too long before “Nickel Boys” where “I was very much the cameraman for a lot of it,” he said. His response to his mom: “I’m not sure, but it’s probably going to be good, though.”

Needless to say, the Orion Pictures release, now in select theaters nationwide,...

“Nickel Boys” leads the nominations at the 25th annual Black Reel Awards, a ceremony exclusively dedicated to recognizing African American contributions to cinema.

The Amazon MGM Studios film garnered 13 nominations, followed closely by Netflix’s “The Piano Lesson” with 12; both films were nominated for outstanding film and outstanding director, plus their stars earned individual nods.

Rounding out the best film nominees are “Challengers,” “Exhibiting Forgiveness” and “Sing Sing” and joining Ross and Washington in the outstanding director category are Titus Kaphar (“Exhibiting Forgiveness”), Zoë Kravitz (“Blink Twice”) and Steve McQueen (“Blitz”). Other top-performing films include “Exhibiting Forgiveness” (nine nominations), “Blink Twice” (seven nominations) and “Sing Sing” (six nominations).

Key individual nominees include Zendaya, who earned dual recognition as an actor and producer of “Challengers,” as well as Ellis-Taylor, who got two nominations in the outstanding supporting performance category for “Nickel Boys” and “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” and Brian Tyree Henry, nominated in...

Nickel Boys is set in Jim Crow-era Florida and follows two Black teens, Elwood Curtis and Turner, who must endure the brutal and heartbreaking conditions of Nickel Academy. Despite all of the horrors around them, Elwood seems to always believe justice will prevail, while Turner teaches survival through cynicism. Their friendship makes this movie exceptionally powerful.

Newcomers Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson Elwood and Turner in Nickel Boys, which also stars Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Daveed Diggs. Director RaMell Ross opted to tell this story in a unique way that makes the audience truly feel as if they are experiencing things right alongside the young boys. His decision to film the movie in point-of-view style makes it one of the standouts of the year. Nickel Boys is based on a book, which was inspired by a true story. It is now playing in New York theaters and opens in Los Angeles...

Nickel Boys is set in Jim Crow-era Florida. It follows two Black teens, Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who are forced to endure the brutal conditions of Nickel Academy, which is a reformatory for boys. While Turner teaches survival through cynicism, Elwood clings to his belief in justice, despite the horrors around them. Their friendship offers a glimmer of hope amidst a backdrop of systemic racism and violence.

The performances by Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson bring something special to the table. Without their chemistry, Nickel Boys does not work as well as it does. This is the first major feature film role for both Herisse and Wilson, but it certainly will not be the last. Nickel Boys is now playing in New York theaters and opens in Los Angeles on December 20. The movie also stars Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Daveed Diggs.

Related 10 Of The Best Movies Based On Books,...

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is using her fashion to make a statement!

The Oscar-nominated actress, best known for her work in King Richard and Origin, attended the premiere of her new movie Nickel Boys on Monday night (December 16) at the DGA Theater Complex in Los Angeles.

Aunjanue was joined at the event by co-stars Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Daveed Diggs, Fred Hechinger, Hamish Linklater (with wife Lily Rabe), and Jimmie Fails, as well as writer and director RaMell Ross.

On the red carpet, Aunjanue told the AP how she uses fashion to challenge the ideas of femininity.

Keep reading to find out more…

“[My outfit] is Balenciaga and all of these red carpets and all these appearances that I’ve done, I’ve wanted to do something that honored my queerness, my wanting to do something that didn’t live up the expectation of femininity in these red carpet situations. I’ve wanted to push against that,...

The making of “Nickel Boys” — a film that follows two young Black boys, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson), as they navigate a brutal reform school — presented a unique set of circumstances for cinematographer Jomo Fray. While Fray always wants his camerawork to feel vulnerable, director RaMell Ross’ vision of shooting the film with the camera’s first-person point of view blurred the usual roles on set, meaning that Fray would directly interact with the actors.

“It wasn’t just shooting Aunjanue [Ellis-Taylor] playing Hattie,” Fray told Variety at the film’s Los Angeles premiere on Monday night. “When the camera needed to imbue Elwood’s consciousness, if I was operating, it was about taking that in and seeing the image, not as Jomo, but as Elwood … Having that physical intimacy fundamentally changes the way you make images.”

Before making the film, Ellis-Taylor, whose character Hattie is Elwood’s grandmother,...

In cinema, films based on true stories are often considered “safe,” but that couldn’t be further from the case for Los Frikis. Produced by Phil Lord and Chris Miller (the Spider-Verse movies), Los Frikis takes its challenging subject matter and infuses it with genuine heart, making it an irresistible crowd-pleaser despite all the odds stacked against it.

Los Frikis Review

Los Frikis tells the story of a group of impoverished punk rockers living in Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union who decide to inject themselves with HIV to allow them to live at a state-sponsored sanitarium for AIDS patients. The film is based on true events that many in America have likely never heard of, but it feels incredibly necessary nevertheless.

For an independent production, Los Frikis is actually a very strong movie from a technical standpoint. The cinematography and set design are very impressive, making...

Cap's back — and this time he's seeing red! Red Hulk, that is. Yes, Anthony Mackie's Sam Wilson and Harrison Ford's Hulked out President Thaddeus Ross form the word-exclusive cover of our stacked Captain America: Brave New World issue — which has us diving deep into the McU's 35th film, looking back on 2024's cinematic highlights, and talking to the stars and filmmakers behind your next must-see movies.

This month's issue hits newsstands on Thursday 19 December — and you can pre-order your copy online here. But for now, read on for a look inside its pages.

Captain America: Brave New World

On your left! After four years away, Anthony Mackie's Sam Wilson is bringing his take on Marvel's star-spangled man to the big screen in Captain America: Brave New World. Here, Empire heads undercover to talk to Mackie, co-star Harrison Ford, director Julius Onah, and more about Red Hulks, returning Leaders,...

Illustrations by Zoé Maghamès Peters.Artists think about it all the time. What is in me? How am I going to get it out? And what is it going to be once I get it out there? These thoughts are not just the precursor to a practice, but fuel for the creative act. When you think this way, nearly everything in life becomes admissible as evidence of some great work to come: that object, those gestures, her voice, this taste, these words in that order. The resulting practice might merely represent these observations, or it might transform them into new language. When I first speak with the artist and filmmaker RaMell Ross this fall, on a rainy morning in a small and busy PR office in midtown Manhattan, our conversation winds through combinations of questions, prompts, declarations, and answers. Ross’s way of talking, like his filmmaking style, is discursive yet harmonic.

The Toronto Film Critics Association has named RaMell Ross’s narrative debut Nickel Boys as its best movie of 2024, adding to the film’s award season prominence.

In voting on Sunday, Toronto film reviewers also gave the drama about a friendship between two young African American men navigating a reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida the best director prize for Ross, who also shared the best adapted screenplay honor with Joslyn Barnes.

The best picture runner-ups were Sean Baker’s Anora and Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist. Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel, debuted at Telluride and stars Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.

In the acting categories, the best lead performance crown was shared by Marianne Jean-Baptiste for her role in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths and Mikey Madison for Anora. And the best supporting performance honor was split...

It’s been a big year for first-person cinema, even if only one of its three films shot from a character’s point of view will actually be released in 2024. Presence is a new formal genre exercise for Steven Soderbergh, a haunted house movie seen from the eyes of the...

Awards kudos, critics’ lists, varied nominations and wins are boosting indie film standouts this weekend. The market is crowded as indies vie with each other, studio tentpoles and fare from Pusha: The Rule – Part 2 and the remastered Daft Punk & Leiji Matsumoto: Interstella 5555. But many specialty distributors are more upbeat now than at any point this year.

The Last Showgirl from Roadside Attractions debuted at $50.3k on one screen. It’s a one-week Academy-qualifying run for the contender by Gia Coppola and starring Pamela Anderson, now a Golden Globe nominee. Both showed up for Q&As at LA’s AMC Century City, helping push the story of a fading Vegas showgirl to the fifth best per-screen opening of the year.

The three-day number also marks Roadside’s second-highest opening PSA in its 20-year history. The distributor said the run featured sellout screenings on both Friday and Saturday across select...

RaMell Ross’ newest film Nickel Boys tells the story of the friendship of Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson) as the two navigate a harsh Florida reform school in the 1960s. Based on the 2019 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, the film has been praised by critics for its artful adaptation of Whitehead’s book, and how it uses a masterful combination of aspect ratio and Pov camera shots to make viewers feel like they’re looking out through the eyes of the boys; Rolling Stone’s film...

So much of how director RaMell Ross adapted Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel “The Nickel Boys” grew out of his first nonfiction feature film “Hale County This Morning, This Evening.” With that film, Ross, an established photographer, wrestled with how to adapt his still image practice into a single moving image, but also the complexity of the Black experience juxtaposed to the history of the Black image in the South.

While on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Ross talked about how adapting Colson’s novel presented an opportunity to expand on what he accomplished with his groundbreaking “Hale County.”

“One idea Joss [producer Joslyn Barnes] and I had talked about early in the writing process was, what if Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson) had their own cameras to document their own lives at that time?,” said Ross on the podcast. “There’s not much visual poetry from Black folks perspectives that exist in the ’50s,...

“Nickel Boys” hits theaters this week after winning three of the eight honorary awards announced by the African-American Film Critics Association last month.

The film is a dramatic adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s bestselling novel, “The Nickel Boys,” and is centered on two Black teens as they journey through a brutal reform school in Florida.

The “Nickel Boys” movie was written by Joslyn Barnes and RaMell Ross, who also directed the film in his narrative feature film debut. Serving as producers are Barnes, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner and David Levine, while Brad Pitt, Gabby Shepard, Emily Wolfe, Kenneth Yu and Chadwick Prichard are executive producers.

Excited fans can watch the film this week, and TheWrap is here to tell you how. Check out all the details, below:

When does “Nickel Boys” come out?

“Nickel Boys” opens in select New York theaters on Dec. 14, expands to more New York and Los Angeles theaters on Dec.

With just a few weeks left in 2024, notable films continue to land with Nickel Boys and The Last Showgirl officially jumping into awards season — the former already a two-time winner at the first stop, the Gotham Awards. A few big indie stories are yet to be told, with Babygirl and A Complete Unknown hitting for Christmas, making it possible to opine definitively on the year’s improving indie film market. The Brutalist, also being widely recognized this season, opens next week.

Nickel Boys by RaMell Ross from Amazon MGM Studios’ Orion Pictures is the much-nominated film based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. It opens at two NYC theaters with an LA expansion Dec. 20, adding other markets into January.

The gripping film is writer/director Ross’s narrative debut after his acclaimed 2018 documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening. It world-premiered at Telluride...

“Nickel Boys” writer/director RaMell Ross has already been toasted as a filmmaker to watch this awards season for his acclaimed adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Now, ahead of the film’s premiere, a new trailer is giving more details about the elusive plotline that plays with perspective.

The official synopsis reads: “Elwood Curtis’ 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,...

"It's now or never." MGM + Orion have unveiled the second & final trailer for the film Nickel Boys, which has started playing in select US theaters now. This film is a modern masterpiece and will be on my Top 10 of the year, along with many others. Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel from Colson Whitehead, Nickel Boys chronicles the powerful friendship between two African American men navigating the harrowing trials of reform school together in Florida. Nickel Boys stars Ethan Herisse as Elwood, Brandon Wilson as Turner, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, & Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. It's presented mainly from the Pov of the two main characters, which gives it an especially distinct look and feel. Reviews add: "By the time the credits roll, Ross will have made a lasting & unique impression of heartbreak on the souls of all who watch his film—precisely the cinematic treatment that Whitehead's novel required.

Fred Hechinger’s dedication to acting all but hinges on his dedication to auteurs. And according to the breakout star of “Nickel Boys,” “Gladiator II,” and “Kraven the Hunter” this holiday season, the line between indies and blockbusters is only really defined by who’s directing.

“I just really believe in movies. I love them so much, and it’s always a kind of trick of timing when two projects that were made in very different contexts in different times come out near one another,” Hechinger told IndieWire of working with RaMell Ross and Ridley Scott for “Nickel Boys” and “Gladiator II,” respectively. “But I think it’s especially exciting when, formally, they’re so opposite. Both of these directors’ work are inspiring, but they’re completely different.”

Hechinger added, “There’s no one way to direct a movie, other than it has to be personal, and it has to...

Editor’s Note: This review was originally published during the 2024 Telluride Film Festival. “Nickel Boys” opens December 13.

A leaf twirls through a pair of Black fingers. A deck of playing cards is bridged together in extreme close-up. A dry-cleaned suit hangs out the window of a parked car like it’s waiting for its body to come back. A boy named Elwood studies his reflection in his grandmother’s steaming iron, and later in the window display of the local Tallahassee electronic shop whose TVs are broadcasting a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. The year is 1962, Jim Crow laws are still in full effect across the South, and young Elwood Curtis (Ethan Herisse) can’t help but see himself in the world around him — he can’t help but think he can change it.

In the news, Elwood sees men shooting themselves into outer space. At home, Elwood sees...

A title card at the start of RaMell Ross’s debut feature, Hale County, This Morning This Evening, seemed to serve as a vision statement for his work: “using time to figure out how we’ve come to be seen.” The filmmaker’s impressionistic documentary portrait, which followed the ordinary lives of two men in the Black Belt of the American South, heralded a filmmaker immediately comfortable interrogating how viewers perceive images.

With his first foray into fiction filmmaking, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys, Ross pushes that language to new heights in interrogating historical narratives and invoking the audience’s empathy. The horrors of a Florida reform school—inspired by the real-life Dozier School for Boys—in the 1960s are felt, not shown, through Jomo Fray’s first-person camerawork in Nickel Boys. Inverting the long history of image-making that largely treats Black bodies as objects of surveillance,...

That movies are capable of being machines of empathy, as Roger Ebert once said, is taken as a given — it’s just a matter of how that empathy is generated. You might have heard that Nickel Boys, director RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel, takes a bold and highly unusual approach to translating its source material to the screen. Before the first of our two tour guides takes us through the Jim Crow South circa the early 1960s — and into the Nickel Academy, a reformatory-slash-racist hellhole based on...

A groundbreaking adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel from 2019, RaMell Ross’ poetic and visionary Nickel Boys finds its resilient spirit and lyrical temperament in the details. The opening of the film—shot (like the rest of it) in a boxed 4:3 aspect ratio that amplifies its intimately searching feel...

Hyperbole can be an issue when writing about films. For the most part, I don't think those who traffic in gushing, pull-quote ready words of praise do so inauthentically. I simply think it's very easy to get excited about a movie, especially when that movie is good. Still, it's necessary to be realistic, just as it is to be honest. Yet every now and then, a movie comes along that warrants the most effusive praise possible. I'm telling you all of this so you understand where I'm coming from when I say that RaMell Ross' "Nickel Boys" is unlike any movie you've ever seen before. Ross has somehow invented a distinct, unique, and fresh cinematic language for his adaptation of Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Nickel Boys," creating a film that feels like an actual memory plucked straight from someone's mind. Dream-like, harrowing, beautiful, stunning; all these words...

Star power was strong at the Critics Choice Association’s 7th annual Celebration of Black Cinema and Television, where some 14 awards were presented to actors, producers, directors and composers, including Tyler Perry, Cynthia Erivo, Regina King and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.

The ceremony, held at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles on Monday, was hosted by comedian Jay Pharoah, who brought levity to the room as the night’s honorees spoke about the impact of their awards and the work for which they were garnered.

Perry addressed the death of Steve Mensch, the president of Tyler Perry Studios who died in a plane crash Friday night, while acknowledging the 15th anniversary of his mother’s death just the day before while accepting the Icon Award presented to him by Kelly Rowland.

“This life is but a moment, it’s so precious, and we need to lean into spreading love one to another; I’m 55 years old,...

Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson are the stars of Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross’ bold and brilliant adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel that tells the story, cinematically, almost entirely in a first-person Pov-style. Herisse and Wilson talk about the challenge of acting to the camera, their saga of navigating auditions, the “freedom” and “openness” they both felt from Ross, how the trust they built with the crew played a big part in performing in this process, and much more. Nickel Boys opens in select theaters on December 14th. Back To One can be found wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple […]

The post Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson on the Unique Challenge of Performing in Nickel Boys— Back To One, Episode 321 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson are the stars of Nickel Boys, RaMell Ross’ bold and brilliant adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel that tells the story, cinematically, almost entirely in a first-person Pov-style. Herisse and Wilson talk about the challenge of acting to the camera, their saga of navigating auditions, the “freedom” and “openness” they both felt from Ross, how the trust they built with the crew played a big part in performing in this process, and much more. Nickel Boys opens in select theaters on December 14th. Back To One can be found wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple […]

The post Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson on the Unique Challenge of Performing in Nickel Boys— Back To One, Episode 321 first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.