Movie Reviews
Review: The best film of 2024 hits Bay Area theaters this week
Some films only need to be seen once to fully grasp the intentions and purpose of the filmmaker. “Nickel Boys,” RaMell Ross’ evocative adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is not one of those films.
The film, which opens Jan. 3 in Bay Area theaters, is like a prism, constantly revealing a new and different angle as it proceeds.
Ross’ novel approach tells Whitehead’s tale, based on true events, about two young Black men stuck in a wretched juvenile Florida reformatory school, the site of relentless and sometimes fatal abuse. What makes it a unique film about being Black in America is that it’s told from both teens’ perspective, literally changing its POV as the story evolves. It is revelatory to behold. It’s also initially off-putting and takes some getting used to since it goes against the grain of conventional narratives. The result is something far more soulful, truthful, tragic and joyous than what we would “see” in a linear fashion.
The daring approach (cinematographer Jomo Fray deserves a lot of credit for helping pull this off) creates a stirring string of inter-connected impressionistic coming-of-age sequences, all of which get edited with grace and fluidity by Nicholas Monsour. Each scene grants access to the mostly Jim Crow-era world seen from the eyes of Ellwood (Ethan Herisse) and Turner (Brandon Wilson) as each bear witness to brutal injustices and multi-storied racism.
One of the most indelible scenes features Ellwood staring at a truck with a KKK-ready cross in its bed. But Ross balances those with moments of sheer beauty – the look of unconditional love from a grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), an unexpected friendship that buds, blossoms and then goes on to haunt one of boys forever.
Ross’ film, like Whitehead’s novel, refuses to serve as a one-note cinematic treatise on Black trauma. One of the key narrative threads centers on the adult Ellwood (Daveed Diggs) who is forced to confront a wraith-like fallout from the past when numerous boys’ bodies get dug up the Nickel Academy grounds. (The real-life Floridan Dozier School for Boys served as the basis for the film and novel.)
Ross spares no anguish when depicting the young victims of the academy, but he also refuses to define them solely by their trauma. To that point, Ross also refrains from graphically depicting the horrible acts committed, so they don’t overwhelm his story.
He and production designer Nora Mendis further heighten what it’s like for Ellwood and Turner growing up during that volatile period through various visual cues (a collection of memorabilia magnetized to grandma Hattie’s refrigerator is rife with more defining detail and context). Ross uses visual metaphors – including alligators – to that purpose, adding another layer of symbolism you might want to explore in more viewings.
Ross’ storytelling approach does present a formidable challenge to actors: All in the cast must be willing to use the most of their limited in-front-of-the-camera screen time since we don’t see directly into Ellwood’s face until the perspective switches to Turner. Both Wilson and Herisse make the reveal of their faces seem like a natural conclusion, while Diggs conveys through body language the turmoil of what his character is undergoing. But it is Ellis-Taylor’s big-hearted performance as a grandmother with enormous reservoirs of love and compassion that deepens the soul of this beautiful groundbreaking work of art, an achievement that we’ll be talking about and referencing in years to come.
Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com
‘NICKEL BOYS’
4 stars out of 4
Rated: PG-13 (violence)
Cast: Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson, Daveed Diggs, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor
Director: RaMell Ross
Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes
When & where: Opens Jan. 3 in Bay Area theaters
Originally Published:
Movie Reviews
1986 Movie Reviews – Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit | The Nerdy
by | May 9, 2026May 9, 2026 10:30 am EDT
Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1986 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1986 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1986 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s May 9, 1986, and we’re off to see Dangerously Close, Fire with Fire, Last Resort, and Short Circuit.
Dangerously Close
I would love to tell you what the point of this film was, but I’m not sure it knew.
An elite school has turned into a magnet school, attracting some “undesirables,” so a group of students known as The Sentinels take up policing their school, but will they go too far?
The basic plot of the film is simple enough, but there is an oddball “twist” toward the end tht served no real purpose and somehow turns the whole thing into a murder-mystery. Mysteries only work when you know you’re supposed to be solving them, and not when you’re alerted to one existing with 15 minutes left.
Decent 80s music, some stylistic shots, absolutely no substance.
Fire with Fire
Oh wait… I may want to go back and watch Dangerously Close again over this one.
Joe Fisk (Craig Sheffer) is being held at a juvenile delinquent facility close a high-end all-girls Catholic school. One day while running through the forest as part of an exercise he spots Catholic schoolgirl Lisa Taylor (Virginia Madsen) and the two fall immediately in love because… reasons.
This film is just so incredibly lazy. The ‘love story’ really can just be chalked up to ‘hormones.’
Last Resort
Once again I am baffled how Charles Grodin kept getting work so much through out the 1980s.
George Lollar (Grodin) is a salesman in Chicago in need of a vacation. He loads up the family and takes them to Club Sand, which turns out to be a swingers resort as well as surrounded by barbed wire to keep rebels out.
There are a lot of talented people in this movie such as Phil Hartman and Megan Mullally, but the film lets them down at every turn with half-baked ideas of jokes. Supposedly, Grodin rewrote nearly the entire script and I think that explains a lot about how this film feels like unfinished ideas. It’s a Frankenstein monster of a script with half-complete ideas that feel like they are from completely different movies.
Short Circuit
Lets just get this out of the way: What in the world was Fisher Stevens doing?
NOVA Laboratory has come up with a new series of military robots called S.A.I.N.T. (Strategic Artificially Intelligent Nuclear Transport). Following a successful demonstration for the military, Five is struck by an electrical surge and finds itself needing ‘input.’ After inadvertently escaping the lab, it wands into the life of Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy), who cares for animals and takes Five in. Dr. Newton Crosby (Steve Guttenberg) is trying to get five back, while the security team wants to destroy it.
Overall, the film is thin, but harmless. The 80s did seem to love a ‘technology being used for the wrong reasons’ theme, and this falls into that camp. What is mind-blowing, however, is Stevens as Ben Jabituya, Crosby’s assistant. Not only is he wearing brown face, but he’s doing a horrible Indian accent and later reveals he was born and raised in the U.S.
His whole character is mystifying.
Honestly, a couple of decades ago I may have recommended this movie, but it’s a definite pass now just for being offensive.
1986 Movie Reviews will continue on May 16, 2026, with Sweet Liberty and Top Gun.
By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer
Posted: May 8th, 2026 / 08:34 PM
AFFECTION movie poster | ©2026 Brainstorm Media
Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Jessica Rothe, Joseph Cross, Julianna Layne
Writer: BT Meza
Director: BT Meza
Distributor: Brainstorm Media
Release Date: May 8, 2026
AFFECTION is an odd title for this tale. While it is about a number of topics and emotions, fondness isn’t one of them. Obsession, definitely. Love, possibly. The kind of general warm fellow feelings associated with “affection”? No.
There have been a lot of movies lately in which characters – mostly women – are grappling with false identities and/or false memories imposed upon them, mostly by men.
Let us stipulate that the protagonist (Jessica Rothe) in AFFECTION is not an android or in an artificial reality. However, we can tell something is way off from the opening sequence. A car is stalled on a tree-bordered highway. Rothe’s character is lying face down on the asphalt beside it, possibly dead.
But then the young woman rises, dragging a broken ankle. She experiences a full-body seizure. Fighting to recover, she sees oncoming headlights and tries to run, only to be hit by a car.
The woman wakes up in a bed she doesn’t recognize, next to a man (Joseph Cross) she likewise is sure she’s never seen before. One big confrontation later, the man says his name is Bruce – and that the woman is his wife, Ellie.
Ellie insists that her name is Sarah Thompson, and she is married to someone else, with a son. When she sees her reflection in a mirror, she doesn’t relate to the face looking back at her.
Bruce counters that Ellie has a rare neurological condition that causes her to block out her waking life and believe her dreams are real. This is why they agreed, together, to move to this isolated house, without the kinds of interruptions that can hinder Ellie’s recovery.
The set-up is presented in a way where we share Ellie’s skepticism. But Ellie and Bruce’s little daughter Alice (Julianna Layne) immediately identifies Ellie as “Mommy!” Alice appears to be too young to be in on any kind of deception, so what is going on here?
AFFECTION eventually explains this via a helpful videotape, though it’s so convoluted that viewers watching on streaming may want to replay the sequence to make sure they understand the exposition.
Writer/director BT Meza musters a sense of menace and lurking weirdness, as well as making great use of his location.
We still have a lot of questions, many of which are still unanswered by the film’s end. It may not matter to the points AFFECTION is trying to make, but a better sense of exactly how all this started might help our investment.
As it is, despite a heroically versatile performance by Rothe, a credible and anguished turn by Cross and appealing work from Layne, we’re so busy trying to piece together what’s important and what’s not and how we’re supposed to feel about all of it that it can be hard to keep track of the action as it unfolds.
Agree or not, Meza’s arguments are lucid and illustrated clearly by AFFECTION’s events. However, the movie is structured in a way that becomes more frustrating as it goes. We comprehend it intellectually but can’t engage viscerally.
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