Ross, RaMell (1982- )

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    These Films See People the Way They See Themselves

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    RaMell Ross subverts our gaze, breaking the conventional frame in “Nickel Boys” as he did in his documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening.”It’s incredibly rare — in fact, I don’t think it’s ever happened before this year — for a filmmaker to get an Oscar-nomination for a documentary and then land a best picture nomination for their next feature film. (A few have come close, though, and Ava DuVernay pulled it off, but in the opposite order.) Part of the blame lies with the Academy, which has somehow never nominated a documentary for Best Picture. It’s also just difficult, though by no means impossible, to excel in both fiction and nonfiction in a way that captures voter attention.Yet with “Nickel Boys,” nominated this year for both best picture and best adapted screenplay, the photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross has done just that. His previous film, the groundbreaking, lyrical documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” was nominated for best documentary in 2019. “Hale County” may be less well-known than its fictional sibling, but it’s a vital companion piece. In fact, revisiting it now in the light of “Nickel Boys” illuminates Ross’s bigger project, and what makes his work so disruptive and his images so indelible.Much has been written — including here in The New York Times — about “Nickel Boys,” which topped my own list of 2024’s best movies. In reimagining Colson Whitehead’s novel, Ross and Joslyn Barnes shifted the book’s third-person narration to first person perspective, so we spend nearly the entire film looking through the eyes of two teenage boys, Elwood and Turner.That kind of perspective isn’t alien to storytelling. Movies have used it (including Steven Soderbergh’s recent thriller “Presence”), and it’s common in video games. But in “Nickel Boys” it feels fresh and radical. Ross, along with the cinematographer Jomo Fray and the camera operator Sam Ellison, positioned themselves and their equipment incredibly close to the actors so that their perspectives would follow their performances. The effect is remarkable: While Whitehead’s novel is about how we remember history, individually and collectively, Ross’s film is about how we see history.Wilson as Turner, left, and Ethan Herisse as Elwood. We spend nearly the entire film looking through the eyes of two teenage boys. Orion PicturesThat “we” includes the audience — in fact, it might be more accurate to say it implicates the audience. “Nickel Boys” insistently shakes the viewer out of the habits audiences have developed when watching fiction films. The action sometimes cuts away to documentary footage, historical images of Black Americans, without a narratively obvious motivation to do so. The camera acts like a person with their own subjective view in the scene, not the ostensibly impartial eye watching drama unfold that fiction films traditionally employ. Characters look straight into the lens, seemingly directly into our eyes, dragging us into the story.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Nickel Boys’ Review: Childhood’s Brutal End

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      This visually inventive adaptation of a Colson Whitehead novel follows two boys at an abusive school in Jim Crow-era Florida.The first time that you clearly and truly see the teenage heartbreaker in “Nickel Boys,” he is walking up to a new friend. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) has just arrived at the fictional reform school referenced in the title when he sits down opposite Turner (Brandon Wilson) at a communal table. They’re in a large dining room crowded with children of varying sizes, shapes and bearings, and while some seem to be on the cusp of manhood, many look too obscenely young to be here. Their chatter and laughter obscures the horrors of this place. You only need to look closer to see that some of these children are already ghosts.Different types of kids populate RaMell Ross’s painful, boldly expressionistic adaptation of the 2019 Colson Whitehead novel, “The Nickel Boys.” The children at the school are by turns determined, defeated and stunned, almost hollowed out. Ross cradles them all in a soft, beautiful light. With great sensitivity to the power of the cinematic image — and to the history of abject representations of Black humanity — he keeps on cradling them. Even when the story turns unbearably cruel, Ross insists on beauty as an imperative; it is, among other things, a rebuke to the annihilating ugliness of Nickel and to those who oblige its horrors.Elwood arrives at the Nickel Academy, as it’s called, after he’s unfairly caught up in an injustice. It’s 1962 when a sympathetic teacher Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails) taps Elwood — a sober, studious 16-year-old high-school student in Tallahassee, Fla. — to take a class at a local college. On his first day to the college, Elwood inadvertently hitches a ride with a car thief. Wrongly implicated in the crime, he is taken from the home he shares with his loving grandmother, Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who, with his parents long gone, is raising him on her own. He’s subsequently sent to Nickel, where his story begins in earnest.“A prison for children” is how a 1903 report referred to the Jim Crow-era emblem, the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, which had been founded just three years earlier and would inspire Whitehead’s novel. There, for decade after decade, hundreds of ostensibly troubled boys, most Black, were confined, worked, terrorized and killed. (Among their offenses: “incorrigibility.”) Some disappeared. About 100 children are known to have died at the school from fire, disease, blunt-force trauma and gunshot wounds. After Florida shut down the school in 2011 following several investigations, one by the Justice Department, the state ordered a separate inquiry that led to the excavation of 55 unmarked graves.The movie, written by Ross and Joslyn Barnes, adheres to the novel’s narrative arc even as it condenses the story. In vivid, dreamy visual bursts, Ross glides over Elwood’s early childhood and explores his growing interest in the civil rights movement, which he carries to Nickel. There, Elwood settles into the racially segregated quarters, surveys the scene — he notes the Black students’ tattered clothing — and meets Turner. He also experiences Nickel’s culture of violence when, after defending another kid from bullies, some adult employees take him to a building called the White House. Inside this hell, he is so brutally flogged by a white supervisor (Hamish Linklater as Spencer) that he ends up in the school hospital.Ross takes an oblique approach to this scene, using narrative ellipses to avoid making a spectacle out of sadistic white violence on Black bodies. To that end, as he does from the very beginning of the movie, he shows you only what Elwood sees, a strategy that pulls you to the character and which Ross sustains for an unusually long time for a commercial movie. Through Elwood’s darting eyes and keen ears, you see and hear what he does. In the White House, you hear the rhythm of the strap and the thunderous roar of a fan that never fully obscures the children’s cries. You see a light, a Bible, another boy’s hand clutching a frantically jittering leg. You also see blood on Spencer’s shirt but not how it got there.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gotham Awards Go to ‘A Different Man’ and ‘Sing Sing’

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      The kickoff to awards season has a mixed record but can help lift small films like the two surprise winners.“A Different Man,” a dark indie comedy starring Sebastian Stan, was the surprise best-feature winner at the 34th annual Gotham Awards, which took place Monday night at Cipriani Wall Street in New York.Directed by Aaron Schimberg, the film stars Stan as an actor with neurofibromatosis who undergoes an experimental surgery to remove tumors from his face, giving him a more conventional appearance. That makeover puts him in danger of losing a leading role to a local bon vivant (Adam Pearson) who also has neurofibromatosis but owns his appearance without shame.Though “A Different Man” is distributed by the hot studio A24, it was considered the lowest-profile contender in its category. Most pundits expected the Palme d’Or winner “Anora” to cruise to victory here and even Schimberg was caught off-guard by the win. “I think I’m not the only person in the room who’s totally stunned by this,” the director said onstage, admitting he had not prepared a speech in advance, fearing it would be “hubris” to do so.In a very fluid Oscar season, the Gotham win could raise the chances of Stan, who also stars in the Donald Trump biopic “The Apprentice,” and Pearson, a dark-horse supporting-actor candidate. Though the Gothams’ effectiveness as an Oscar bellwether can fluctuate, three of the four most recent films to triumph there — “Past Lives,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Nomadland” — also went on to be nominated for best picture at the Oscars.The Gothams are most valuable when it comes to helping smaller films like “A Different Man” that rely on an awards-season run to stay in the conversation. Though the ceremony recently lifted its $35 million budget cap for eligible contenders, its nominating juries, which are mostly made up of a handful of film journalists, still tend to favor movies that were made on a shoestring.That includes “Sing Sing,” a prison drama that won the night’s lead and supporting-performance honors for Colman Domingo and Clarence Maclin. (The Gothams are gender-neutral.) “Let’s keep doing work that really matters, that makes a difference,” Domingo, who starred in “The Color Purple” and “Rustin” last year, told the audience. “That’s what we can do right now. That can be a light in the darkness.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Festival Winners Crowd New York Film Festival Main Slate Lineup

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      Top titles from Cannes and Berlin, like Sean Baker’s “Anora” and Mati Diop’s “Dahomey,” join new work by Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen and RaMell Ross.This fall’s New York Film Festival will feature celebrated prizewinners from Cannes and the Berlinale, organizers announced Tuesday, unveiling a main slate that will join new works from the filmmakers Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen and RaMell Ross.The festival, which runs Sept. 27 to Oct. 14, will screen films from 24 countries and include two world premieres, five North American premieres and 17 American premieres.Ross’s film, “The Nickel Boys,” is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel about two Black teenagers in a Jim Crow-era Florida reform school. It’s the opening-night selection. Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door,” about a rekindled friendship between women played by Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, will be the centerpiece. And the festival will close with Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” starring Saoirse Ronan as a working-class single mother in London who gets separated from her 9-year-old son during World War II.Winners from Cannes and the Berlin Film Festival feature heavily in the festival’s main slate lineup.Cannes imports include the Palme d’Or winner “Anora,” from Sean Baker; the Grand Prix winner “All We Imagine as Light” from Payal Kapadia; best director winner Miguel Gomes’s “Grand Tour”; the two best-director winners from the Un Certain Regard section, Roberto Minervini with “The Damned” and Rungano Nyoni with “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”; and special prize winner “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” from Mohammad Rasoulof.Berlinale veterans playing in New York include the Golden Bear prizewinner “Dahomey,” a documentary from Mati Diop about the complicated postcolonial legacy of artifacts from the former African kingdom; Philippe Lesage’s Quebecois coming-of-age drama, “Who by Fire”; and the documentary “No Other Land,” about the destruction of West Bank villages by the Israeli military, made over five years by a Palestinian-Israeli collective.Two festival mainstays, the filmmakers Hong Sang-soo and Wang Bing, will each have two films playing this fall.Hong is bringing “By the Stream,” about a former film director, and “A Traveler’s Needs,” which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale and stars Isabelle Huppert as an inexperienced French teacher in a Seoul suburb. (Hong also showed two films last year.)The second and third parts of Wang’s observational nonfiction “Youth” trilogy, titled “Youth (Hard Times)” and “Youth (Homecoming)” and focused on migrant textile workers in the Chinese district of Zhili, will also screen at the festival. The first part of the trilogy, “Youth (Spring),” was included in last year’s lineup.“The most notable thing about the films in the main slate — and in the other sections that we will announce in the coming weeks — is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality,” the festival’s artistic director Dennis Lim said in a news release. “They are reminders that, in the hands of its most vital practitioners, film has the capacity to reckon with, intervene in and reimagine the world.” More