Hash Import 2026 05 18 12 34

Nickel Boys (2024)

★★★½ — Nickel Boys (2024)

RaMell Ross came to this project as a documentary filmmaker first, his debut feature Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018) having won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and earned an Oscar nomination, so Nickel Boys marks a considerable leap into narrative fiction. The film adapts Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel of the same name, which itself drew on the real history of the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, an institution where abuse was systematic and the deaths of dozens of young inmates went uninvestigated for decades. Plan B Entertainment, Brad Pitt's production company, backed the picture alongside Louverture Films. The film's modest theatrical gross reflects a specialised release rather than a mainstream rollout, arriving during a period of renewed public reckoning with institutional racism in American history.

It's absolutely heartbreaking that the events here are based on history. And the saddest part about all this is that this is LIVING history. That means people are alive today who had to bear the brunt of this barbaric school. The acting, scripting and soundtrack are all top notch but the cinematography is absolutely stunning. It's a hard watch, in the sense that it takes It's toll on the viewer but the harrowing thought is that the people depicted in this film would have lived this daily and that's almost unbearable to even consider.

Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2025-05-17

View on Letterboxd →

Where to watch (UK)

Stream: MUBI · MUBI Amazon Channel
Physical: Amazon UK

Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.

Related on Movies With Macca

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) arrived at a strange crossroads in American cinema: too modest to be a prestige picture, too unsettling to be a forgettable B-movie. Adapted from Jack Finney’s serialised novel The Body Snatchers and shot at Allied Artists on a budget barely

Fantastic Planet (1973)

René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet (1973) is one of those films that doesn’t really fit anywhere: too cerebral for kids, too odd for animation festivals, too steeped in European political theory for the Saturday-morning slot, and too visually fearless to ignore. A 72-minute French–Czech co-production designed by the

Viy (1967)

Viy (1967) is a strange and almost solitary object in Soviet cinema: a horror film, an actual horror film with monsters and demons and supernatural set-pieces, in a national cinema that mostly didn’t make horror at all. Officially endorsed by Mosfilm and based on a Nikolai Gogol folktale, it

Alice in Wonderland (1951)

Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951) is the studio’s middle-period work par excellence: technically polished, commercially tested, narratively cautious, and just slightly off. Made between two of Disney’s commercial successes (Cinderella in 1950, which had rescued the studio from one of its periodic financial near-misses, and Peter Pan

Read more

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Fantastic Planet (1973)

Viy (1967)

Alice in Wonderland (1951)