Entertainment
Review: 'Nickel Boys' is a priceless paean to the lives of victimized reform-school kids
The 2012 discovery of a mass unmarked grave on the grounds of the Florida School for Boys was the sort of headline that short-circuits the brain. Archeologists estimate that nearly 100 kids died from violence and neglect over the juvenile reformatory’s century in use. How can anyone process that scale of buried grief?
Author Colson Whitehead funneled that sorrow into “The Nickel Boys,” a 2019 novel about two Black friends at the lightly fictionalized Nickel Academy, and unearthed emotions so beautiful that he won a Pulitzer Prize. A straight adaption would pack power, but it’s even better that the book came into the hands of a true humanist like RaMell Ross. Making his feature debut, the director not only turns anonymous bones into people, he turns his people into the camera: The audience sees the world literally through the eyes of Elwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson). We couldn’t be hugged any tighter to their point of view.
Ross describes his visual style as a tribute to the “epic banal.” Small moments — a spaghetti dinner, a smiling girl, a scattering of Christmas tinsel — are shot by the cinematographer Jomo Fray with such grandeur that they become important. He’s already made a documentary with the technique, the Oscar-nominated “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” set in Alabama. The goal isn’t just to prove that the ordinary world is surrounded by beauty; it’s that his characters are active observers of it, too.
This shouldn’t seem like a radical act except that Ross uses the technique to immortalize the days of Black Americans in the South whose lives are more often looked at than through. Outsiders tend to cram people into a box, force them to fit a message that ranges from exploitative to tediously well-meaning. Ross sets them free. The message is simply that Elwood and Turner are human beings.
The script, co-written by Ross and producer Joslyn Barnes, scraps Whitehead’s opening prologue about the wretched cemetery to instead emphasize that this will be a bittersweet celebration of life. Elwood, growing up in racially riven Tallahassee during the 1960s, is introduced first. The glimpses of his world from a child (played by Ethan Cole Sharp) to a high school student flicker by with no sense of urgency, which is exactly how it should be for a boy who has no reason to suspect his freedom is about to be taken away. He’s smart — perhaps not as bright and sensitive and idealistic as he is in Whitehead’s novel, but making him more of an everyman seems to be on purpose. (Ross has even dropped the “The” from the title.)
It’s possible to read Whitehead’s book and think, “How could these horrors happen to such a good kid?” Ross instead wants us to ask, “How could this happen to anyone?” including the school’s bullies and white boys who live in a segregated part of the campus and seem to be getting preferential treatment. To be accurate, the white students were victims, too. Later on, both groups of students joined forces on a blog that gathered enough stories of abuse, a website that’s referenced when the film leaps a few decades into the future. But “Nickel Boys” is also kind to those who can’t confront their memories, even in its camerawork which refuses to record the cruelty — it’s implied, never shown. Sometimes, to endure, you swallow all the bad things and hold them inside.
Things go awry when Elwood, nearly 17, hitches a ride in the wrong car. He doesn’t know he’s getting into a stolen Plymouth and can’t fathom how this one choice will derail his future even if we could warn him what’s coming. But Ross knows that this road will lead Elwood straight to Nickel Academy, so he extends this moment into an agonizing gag in which the driver (the late Taraja Ramsess) fiddles with figuring out how to unlock the passenger door. It’s not something you’re aware of on the first watch. You spot it on the second. Like Elwood, we start naive and only later recognize the danger.
The idea that Nickel Academy is a school by any definition of the word is a bleak joke. The kids are essentially enslaved to work the fields or run illegal errands under the supervision of an employee named Harper (Fred Hechinger). It’s gut-wrenching that this tragedy is happening in the moment when Martin Luther King Jr. is leading a Civil Rights revolution not too far away. It’s worse that the school stayed open until 2011, when it was closed for “budgetary limitations.”
Elwood is written to be so watchful that it’s hard to feel like you know the character at all — he’s almost too universal. His individuality comes across best when we see him the way his classmate Turner does, chin-tucked, eyes learning to be wary. Elwood believes in MLK’s optimism for America. “It’s against the law!” he protests to Turner, the sly and funny cynic, who can’t imagine things ever improving. Elwood is convinced he can surmount obstacles; Turner is resigned to going around them. The two debate but don’t always seem to hear each other. As we take turns being inside of them, it’s up to you which one you trust.
Periodically, Ross and his editor Nicholas Monsour cut to old black and white TV images of NASA rockets attempting to beam data back to Earth. The motif doesn’t totally make sense. Is it a comment on the country’s priorities? An example of looking up rather than around? Is it just a neat way to take a breather from all the awful stuff happening under the trees? Eventually, I settled on imagining these transitions as an echo of Alex Somers and Scott Alario’s fantastic rough-hewn score with its fuzzy notes that sound as though they’re getting pinged back and forth between satellites, deteriorating as they travel through time, uncertain if their pleas will be heard.
Ross likes to feel, not tell. There are images of students teetering on stilts, of kids who look too small to be there playing with toy soldiers in a puddle of milk. After Elwood and Turner suffer permanent blows, the camera leaps out of their bodies and hovers behind their heads, particularly as the one we stay with as an adult, played by Daveed Diggs, attempts to grow into a full person. Disassociation never looked so lovely. At its most soul-stirring, the film becomes a mood piece. There’s a five-and-a-half minute montage set to “Tezeta,” a jazz track by the Ethiopian musician Mulatu Astatke, that would be mesmerizing at twice the length.
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor in the movie “Nickel Boys.”
(Orion Pictures)
As good as the movie is with its visuals, it’s just as skillful with sound. In the first shot, Elwood lies in the yard looking up and when he turns his head, you can hear blades of grass tickle the back of your neck. Later, there’s a buzz — a bee? A fly? — that, as the crimes multiply, shifts into a continual hum, a plague upon the brain.
The only ding on the film is that Ross is still learning to work with actors. He’s fine when his background characters are just palling around the lunchroom, but the POV approach is hard on his leads, even talents like Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor as Elwood’s grandmother. When there is dialogue — which, thankfully, isn’t all the time — it’s in the form of one person staring into the lens and waiting for their turn to speak. The really clunky moments come off like an audition tape in which the off-camera casting assistant running lines is late on their cues.
The one great conversation scene comes when Diggs sits across a bar from a fellow Nickel alumni, played by Craig Tate in a phenomenal cameo where his nervous twitches show us the broken boy inside the man. Now old, the two survivors are siloed in their grief — alive and lucky, sure, but still entombed. They’re so damaged that they can’t, or won’t, really connect about what they went through. It’s too hard to see past their own trauma, but Ross has shown us how they once simply saw themselves as teenagers, with the promise of a better future ahead. We remember. We saw it, too.
‘Nickel Boys’
Rated: PG-13, for thematic material involving racism, some strong language including racial slurs, violent content and smoking
Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes
Playing: In limited release Friday, Dec. 20
NEW YORK (OSV News) – As its title suggests, “Scream 7” (Paramount) is the latest extension of a long-lived horror franchise, one that’s currently approaching its 30th anniversary on screen. Since each chapter of this slasher saga has been a bloodsoaked mess, the series’ longevity will strike moviegoers of sense as inexplicable.
Yet the slog continues. While the previous film in the sequence shifted the action from California to New York, this second installment, following a 2022 quasi-reboot, settles on a Midwestern locale and reintroduces us to the series’ original protagonist, Sidney Evans, nee Prescott (Neve Campbell).
Having aged out of the adolescent demographic on whom the various murderers who have donned the Ghostface mask that serves as these films’ dubious trademark over the years seem to prefer to prey, Sidney comes equipped with a teen daughter, Tatum (Isabel May). Will Tatum prove as resourceful in evading the unwanted attentions of Ghostface as Mom has?
On the way to answering that question, a clutch of colorless minor characters fall victim to the killer, who sometimes gets — according to his or her lights — creative. Thus one is quite literally made to spill her guts, while another ends up skewered on a barroom’s pointy beer tap.
Through it all, director Kevin Williamson and his co-writer Guy Busick try to peddle a theme of female empowerment in the face of mortal danger. They also take a stab, as it were, at constructing a plotline about intergenerational family tensions. When not jarring viewers with grisly images, however, they’re only likely to lull them into a stupor.
The film contains excessive gory violence, including disembowelment and impaling, underage drinking, mature topics, a couple of profanities, several milder oaths, pervasive rough and considerable crude language and occasional crass expressions. The OSV News classification is O — morally offensive. The Motion Picture Association rating is R — restricted. Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian.
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Copyright © 2026 OSV News
Entertainment
His underground puppet shows draw massive crowds to L.A. street corner — and fans don’t even know his name
The artist known as Jeffrey’s Human Persona has remained anonymous for nearly 25 years — the same length of time that he has staged guerrilla-style musical puppet shows titled “almighty Opp” on a gritty street corner in Koreatown on the last Saturday of each month. He missed only three shows in the first 19 years of what he refers to as his “services.” However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced him online in 2020 and a family tragedy kept him away from the corner for another few years.
In December he returned live in front of the used car dealership at Western and Elmwood for the first time since the pandemic-induced shutdown, drawing a crowd of several hundred devoted fans. In February he staged his first ticketed event called “Secret Somewhere Services,” which drew close to 50 guests who paid $100 each for the pop-up show at a private residence in the San Fernando Valley where Willie Nelson’s youngest son, Micah, served as the opening act with his art rock project Particle Kid.
The view of the stage from the back of the crowd during January’s “almighty Opp” puppet show, which has returned to Koreatown after a nearly five-year break due to the COVID-19 pandemic and a family tragedy.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
“I missed funerals, I missed Christmases, I missed friends’ birthdays. I never took a vacation,” Jeffrey says of his devotion to his monthly performances during a recent phone interview after his late January show, which also drew a large, excitable crowd of supporters. “I treated it like a knife to my heart.”
“Almighty Opp” is truly about Jeffrey’s heart. Services take place in a specially designed black stage populated with a variety of custom fabricated puppets. These creations are not from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood of Make-Believe. At a recent show the ringleader wore a red dirndl with gray knee socks and black ankle boots. His angular head topped with a green felt crown; his toothy mouth a sinister, grimacing gash; his eyes blackened with what looks like charcoal. Other puppets cavorted around him: A tubby, clownish, snowman-like creature that spits water at the crowd; a tall, spindly clown that uses a miniature pump; a weird sock puppet made out of adhesive bandages; a discarded, disheveled baby doll on strings.
One of the main marionettes used in the “almighty Opp” street show. The puppets sing songs written by the show’s creator, an artist who goes by the name of Jeffrey’s Human Persona.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Music is the focal point of each service, with Jeffrey playing guitar and keyboards behind the curtain, singing in a wavering voice reminiscent of Jeff Mangum about the subjects, ideas and feelings that have occupied his mind at various stages of his life. To date, “almighty Opp” has put out 33 albums on Bandcamp featuring songs from services over the years with titles including “Every Day’s the Worst Day,” “Misbegotten Human Beings” and “Bubble Burster.”
“Pretending I had a choice, just as long as we said we did, but now it’s much worse than it seems five years later,” sings a puppet that looks like a bizarro Humpty Dumpty with a huge egg head on a body of red pants during January’s show. “Supporting someone else’s dreams because your good nature’s being used.”
“Almighty Opp” employs a variety of richly detailed, hand-crafted puppets. The show’s creator once worked as an assistant to sculptor Chris Burden.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
A common refrain, which almost everyone gathered on the gum-stained sidewalk sings in unison, is, “It’s OK to not be OK.”
Jeffrey loves the spontaneous possibilities of the street corner and what he calls the “stumble upon” nature of the services, but the core audience is a returning one. The nearly 200 people gathered on this January evening just past 9 p.m. stand on stools and chairs in the back and loll on the sidewalk on their elbows in the front. They scream and chant and sing along. They turn and hug one another or shake hands when Jeffrey encourages them to meet their neighbors at different points in the show.
Lars Adams attends an “almighty Opp” show on the last Saturday in January. During the show the crowd is encouraged to turn and greet their neighbors.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
“Even though I’m performing, I don’t really consider myself a performer,” Jeffrey says. He also isn’t a busker, although his shows are free community events. And even though there are puppets, he doesn’t call “almighty Opp” a puppet show. He is, he says, “an obsessive maker.” The audience is “just coming along for the ride with me — life’s ride — of how I’m feeling at that time. It’s kind of like a Catholic Church service, where the sermon changes, but the structure of it remains the same.”
Unlike a church service, shows are rowdy and a bit untethered. A bus whooshes by, an unhoused man screams as he walks by with a shopping cart. Jeffrey’s wife, known as Shambles, operates the puppets from behind the curtain, while wearing their 5-year-old daughter, known as Crumbo, in a sling. Two other assistants, called DingDing and Cylo, can also be seen behind the black curtain — their faces hidden in knitted clown masks or shielded by makeup. Jeffrey comes before the crowd toward the end of the show — wearing a white mask and a red hoodie — and asks audience members to give testimonials. People stand up and talk about having been changed by the show over the years.
That’s what happened with Micah Nelson. He came when Jeffrey used to hold mirrors in front of people’s faces and have them watch themselves while the crowd watched them. The sessions were uncomfortably long. Nelson later contacted Jeffrey to say he was covering some of his songs, and that his experience with the mirror had a profound effect on him.
When Nelson introduced Jeffrey at the recent “Secret Somewhere” show, the things he said about Jeffrey made the performer blush. Life, Jeffrey said, has a funny way of coming full circle.
Jeffrey’s Human Persona, who created “almighty Opp” in the early aughts, asks audience members gathered on a Koreatown street corner to give testimonials about the show, which he calls a “service.”
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
Jeffrey moved to L.A. from Pittsburgh in 1995 when he was 19. His father bought him the plane ticket after Jeffrey found himself in a bit of a boredom rut with friends and getting into the wrong kind of trouble. He wanted to work in the film industry — he thought L.A. would be like a 1970s Jim Morrison fever dream, but found it not as inspiring. The film business, in which he worked making fantasy art and other fabrications, was not a creative haven, but rather a soul-sucking void.
“I’m tired of making other people’s puppets,” he told a friend one day, and “almighty Opp” was born.
“If you just show up for a paycheck, what are you really doing?” asked Jeffrey during our interview. “I’d rather be a flop and believe in it.”
Children gather at the very front of the stage during January’s “almighty Opp” show, which features original songs on guitar and keyboard. A total of 33 “almighty Opp” albums are available on Bandcamp.
(Carlin Stiehl / For The Times)
He made the original puppets and wrote the first “almighty Opp” album in the second-floor apartment where he lived, just a stone’s throw from the corner where he still performs — the corner where he would propose to his wife during a particularly difficult period of his life. During all those years he worked in a variety of creative roles to support himself: for the toy industry; briefly for the Disney Imagineers; and for about eight years as an assistant to sculptor Chris Burden for whom he helped fabricate the whizzing future land “Metropolis II,” which resides in Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s permanent collection.
Now that “almighty Opp” is live again, Jeffrey is benefiting from the therapeutic aspects of writing down his emotions and experiences. The “Secret Somewhere Services” will continue once a month, or maybe every two months. Guests can check Instagram for tips on how to score a coveted ticket, which comes with its own handcrafted entrance token and map to the ever-changing private venue. Jeffrey is making big puppets for these performances — one is 7 feet tall — and experimenting with the form of the event.
Still, the street corner will remain the soul of his operation — and the music at the heart of it all.
“It’s all about honesty, and the people who understand it and keep coming, they know that it’s something absolutely real,” he says.
Almighty Opp
Where: Corner of Western and Elmwood avenues, in Koreatown
When: The last Saturday of every month, 9 p.m.
Tickets: Free
Running time: Varies, but usually about an hour.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: March 8th, 2026 / 08:00 PM
THE BRIDE movie poster | ©2026 Warner Bros.
Rating: R
Stars: Jessie Buckley, Christian Bale, Annette Bening, Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Penelope Cruz, Jeannie Berlin, Zlatko Burić
Writer: Maggie Gyllenhaal, based on characters created by Mary Shelley and William Hurlbut and John Balderston
Director: Maggie Gyllenhaal
Distributor: Warner Bros.
Release Date: March 6, 2026
“THE BRIDE!” (as with the recent “WUTHERING HEIGHTS,” the quotation marks are part of the title) is awash in homages, and not just the ones we might reasonably expect in a movie that takes its most obvious inspiration from 1935’s BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN.
There’s that, of course, plus its source, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel FRANKENSTEIN; OR THE MODERN PROMETHEUS, and its sober 1931 film adaptation FRANKENSTEIN. But there are also big nods to wilder takes on the legend, including YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN and THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW and even movies that have nothing to do with FRANKENSTEIN, like BONNIE AND CLYDE.
Writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal casts a wide net in metaphors and ideas and looks. Sometimes “THE BRIDE!” is a comedy, sometimes it’s a crime drama, sometimes it’s a love story, occasionally, it’s even a musical.
Mary Shelley (Jessie Buckley) narrates the tale to us from beyond the grave. She is haughty and naughty, intoxicated by verbiage and her own literary genius. She is going to tell us a story, she says, that she didn’t even dare imagine while alive.
We’re in 1930s Chicago, where a young escort (also Buckley) is having a really awful evening out at a fancy restaurant with some of her peers and a bunch of crass gangsters. Shelley dubs the woman “Ida” and takes possession of her, causing her to speak and act in ways that get her escorted outside. There she stumbles and takes a fatal fall.
The two goons who were with Ida are happy to describe her tumble as the result of their intentional actions to their horrible gangster boss (Zlatko Burić). Ida was suspected of talking to the cops.
Around the same time, Frankenstein’s creation (Christian Bale) – let’s just call him “Frank,” like everybody else does – comes to Chicago to seek out the groundbreaking scientist Dr. Euphronious (Annette Bening), whose published works he has read.
Frank wants the doctor to create a companion for him. His appearance is unusual, but the most alarming injuries are covered by clothing, so he’s not as extreme-looking as, say, Boris Karloff in the role. This isn’t about sex, Frank explains when Euphronious asks why he doesn’t just hire a prostitute. After over a century of loneliness, he seeks a soulmate, and he is sure this can only be achieved by reviving a corpse.
So, Euphronious and Frank dig up the grave that turns out to belong to Ida (we never do learn how they know it belongs to a soulmate candidate as opposed to a shot-and-dumped male gangster). Euphronius revives her. Ida remembers how to walk and talk, but not who she is or what happened, so Frank and the doc tell her she’s been in an accident.
Even without Ida’s beauty, Frank is already devoted to the very notion of her. A more accommodating suitor would be hard to find. Frank has another passion, the musical films of Ronnie Reed (Jake Gyllenhaal, the filmmaker’s brother), a Fred Astaire-like star. Frank imagines himself in the midst of those dance routines, and we get some more within “THE BRIDE!”’s “real” action.
One thing leads to another, Frank and Ida go on the run, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. They are pursued all over the country. Among those seeking them are sad-eyed police detective Jake Wiles (Peter Sarsgaard) and his secretary Myrna Mallow (Penélope Cruz), who’s better at this whole crime-solving business than he is.
It’s all very kaleidoscopic and energetic, occasionally impressive and sometimes very funny. Bening as the frazzled, worldly Euphronious has some great moments. Buckley, currently and justifiably Oscar-nominated leading performance in HAMNET, juggles the very unalike personas of Mary and Ida with impact.
Oddly, Bale underplays Frank. We get that he is trying his hardest not to spook Ida (or anyone else), but it seems like he should have a bit more spark. Cruz, going for a snappy ‘30s working woman, has her own style that works.
But in addition to being entertaining and eye-catching, Gyllenhaal has a message that gets very muddled. This is less because it’s so familiar by now that it feels a little redundant, and more because a crucial part of the set-up collides head-on with the feminist slant.
Ida seeks to be her own person, but she is literally bodily controlled by Mary Shelley, who puts her creation in danger with her outbursts. This may help get Ida out of the clutches of the mob, but it is possession, the aftereffects of which the character understandably finds confusing and upsetting.
If Gyllenhaal wanted to discuss or dramatize the clash between what Mary, as a woman, is doing to this other woman, that would make sense, but it seems we’re just meant to somehow overlook this while being immersed in how men control women. The resulting cognitive dissonance adds another layer to a movie that already has more than it can comfortably service.
Additionally, when Mary has one of her outbursts while inhabiting Ida, the plot comes to a screeching halt until she’s finished. Many viewers will wish Mary would stop declaiming and just let Ida be herself.
“THE BRIDE!” succeeds in being trippy and some of it is memorable. By the end, though, it is more disjointed than even a movie about experiments and a character made up of multiple people’s body parts ought to be.
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