Nickel Boys is an unusual adaptation with some bold directorial decisions. Not all of them worked for me, but originality is hard to come by, and this film about an atypical subject—friendship between young boys—told in atypical fashion—via first-person camerawork, as usually reserved for the likes of Michael Myers—stands as a welcome curiosity among the Best Picture field. My appreciation for it has grown in the two days since I watched it. In one scene, for example, the protagonist readies to receive a vicious beating, but the movie, instead of depicting it, cuts to a series of old photos of beaten boys, emphasizing the shared rather than the personal nature of his experience. I didn’t like that choice while I was watching, but now, I see that it was correct: this isn’t a story about violence, like 12 Years a Slave; it’s a story about memories: how the traumatic ones hold us down, and how the good ones—the ones about the people we love—lift us up. The film leaves things out, yes, but only because we’ve forgotten them. Even poor Turner, excavating his damaged mind, can only uncover, when it comes to the worst horrors, those cold, clinical photographs.
–Jim Andersen