The fall movie season is set to kick off next week at Venice and Telluride. Then you’ll have the other major fests coming into the equation, particularly TIFF, NYFF, San Sebastian and London.
These last few weeks, I’ve been asking around about potential breakout titles, and the two that keep on being mentioned are Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” and RaMell Ross’ “Nickel Boys.”
“Nickel Boys” just had a preview screening at London’s Curzon Soho. A few folks who attended the screening have chimed in on Letterboxd, and you can read their reactions near the tail end of this article. They’re all very positive.
This comes after Screen just published a festival piece where they claim that “Nickel Boys” is “ahead of the pack” in terms of buzzy fall titles. I would imagine they wrote that after hearing the same positive reactions from attendees at last night’s London screening.
Ross’ “Nickel Boys” will have its world premiere at Telluride and is set to open the 62nd New York Film Festival on September 27.
This adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel has been loaded with buzz for months. The film stars Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Hamish Linklater, Fred Hechinger, Daveed Diggs, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor.
Per NYFF’s announcement, “Rare is the film of a major book that maintains the power and precision of its source material while also generating its own singular aesthetic. Yet RaMell Ross’ extraordinary realization of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2019 novel, about two Black teenagers who become wards of a barbaric juvenile reformatory in Jim Crow–era Florida, achieves just this.”
The film follows two boys whose close friendship helps sustain their hope even as the horrors mount around them at the Nickel Academy, which becomes a microcosm of American racism in the mid-20th century.
This is RaMell Ross’ fiction debut. He previously hailed the poetic and visually stunning documentary ‘“Hale County This Morning.” Amazon MGM Studios’ Orion Pictures will release “Nickel Boys” in theaters on Friday, October 25.
