By putting you in the literal point-of-view of its characters, the film becomes an empathy machine.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 1, 2025

Based on Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel, Ross’s adaptation is a poetical rendering of its subject matter.

| Feb 13, 2025

Just because the director has shot it in this way does not mean this was the best way to shoot it.

| Jan 17, 2025

Nickel Boys is a triumph.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 16, 2025

And yet for all the radical dazzle of Ross’s filmmaking, human drama is always the crux.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 15, 2025

“Nickel Boys” offers a different way to understand horrors based on true events not that far in the past by plunging viewers into its characters’ humanity.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 15, 2025

“Nickel Boys” is a life, made up of pieces; some of them lovely, some devastating. It’s a mesmerizing, uniquely told story — of memory, of injustice, of friendship, of survival.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 14, 2025

Even the detractors of "Nickel Boys" will have to concede that they haven't seen anything quite like it on the big screen in recent years.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 14, 2025

Nickel Boys gets you in the feels.

| Jan 14, 2025

This is an extraordinarily confident and provocative feature film debut from Ross, and deserves high critical praise. But... Nickel Boys offers more style than satisfaction.

| Jan 10, 2025

It seems like an injustice to call it, simply, a film. It’s a remarkable piece of art, even more impressive when you consider that it’s photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross’s debut feature film -- in fiction.

| Jan 10, 2025

An exceptional film driven by captivating performances.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 9, 2025

We’ll only be on day three of 2025 when this is released, but we might be witnessing the film of the year already. Nickel Boys is that extraordinary.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 9, 2025

This is story that should be remembered, and it is a movie that marks a remarkably original and at times daringly avant-garde feature debut for director and co-writer RaMell Ross.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jan 7, 2025

It’s clear-eyed and quietly urgent storytelling in every useful way, unconventionally imaginative in the unspooling.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 7, 2025

“Nickel Boys” is impressionistic, as attuned to the natural and human-made worlds as the people who inhabit them.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 7, 2025

A version that is true to the book, honouring both its spirit and its structure, while also managing to be a genuinely groundbreaking cinematic work. This is a sublime piece of film-making.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 6, 2025

It is Ellis-Taylor’s big-hearted performance as a grandmother with enormous reservoirs of love and compassion that deepens the soul of this beautiful groundbreaking work of art, an achievement that we’ll be talking about and referencing in years to come.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 6, 2025

While the movie’s perspective-switching narrative can feel somewhat disorienting at times, it does manage to underscore the profound connection between the boys, culminating in a finale that’s both shocking and deeply moving.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 3, 2025

Very occasionally a movie appears that understands the potential of cinema so deeply that it changes the medium for everyone.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 2, 2025