Nickel Boys (2024) review

Soft-spoken Elwood (played at different ages by Ethan Herisse, Ethan Cole Sharp and Daveed Diggs), who is raised in Florida by his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), gets arrested as a teenager for being an accomplice in stealing a car and sent to the notorious Nickel Academy (which was based on the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys) to be "rehabilitated," and when he's there he finds a loyal confidante in Turner (Brandon Wilson) and they try to escape from the abuse and corruption.  Writer-director Ross decided to shoot Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel using only first person perspective and it's a perplexing decision that undermines the source, allowing him to engage in some entry level art class wankery, like staring at hands (which happens a lot) and various inanimate objects and freely inserting news footage and clips from other movies (including The Defiant Ones).  While this approach has been attempted before (mostly with experimental works), this never loses that sense of artificiality ... so the moment grown-up (and moderately successful) business owner Elwood starts reading articles on the Internet about bodies discovered near the Academy, it does not nearly have the power it thinks it does.