Best movies of 2024 in the US: No 2 – Nickel Boys

RaMell Ross’s artful and unconventional adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel offers a radically immersive route into a difficult story

• More on the best culture of 2024

Despite the necessity of filling in the gaps of Black American history, viewers could be forgiven for feeling a little fatigued, after a decade of highly worthy but often gruelling stories of slavery, civil rights abuses and institutional racism, from 12 Years a Slave to Till to The Hate U Give to Get Out, and many more besides.

Nickel Boys is something very different: rather than more “trauma porn”, it gives us direct emotion, poetic imagery and radical invention. It owes more to Terrence Malick and Gaspar Noé than Ava DuVernay.

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'Nickel Boys': Framing beauty in irreconcilable circumstances

'Nickel Boys' has an intimacy to its photography, immersing viewers into its story of two teens sent to a brutal reform school in the Jim Crow South.
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